Study Guide for Exam I

Format

• cut-and-dried identifications: basic factual information (small credit per item, and a small component of the exam)
• passages from the plays we’ve read: identify context, and discuss briefly what the passage shows about Aeschylus’s, Sophocles’, or Euripides’ tragedies in particular, or Athenian tragedy in general (each a medium-small quantum of credit, but adding up to a major component of the exam)
• essay: discuss a thematic question, drawing for support of your contentions on specific, concrete evidence from several plays (the largest single item of credit; a major component of the exam)

Things to study

• major characters in each play we’ve read
• the identity of the chorus in each play we’ve read
• the playwrights of the plays we've read (including a rough bead on their dates, and their distinctive techniques and thematic preoccupations as dramatists, as well as who-wrote-what)
• important moments and figures in the development of tragedy as a dramatic form: dithyramb, Thespis, Dionysus, Aeschylus, Sophocles; rough chronology for the institution of festivals (City Dionysia, Lenaia) and decisive innovations in the form of tragedy
• important parts of an ancient Greek theatre: theatron, orchestra, stage, skene, ekkyklema
• elements of the civic production of Athenian tragedy: democracy, liturgy, choregia/choregos, prize-voting, monuments

Strategy: think of specific passages that illustrate important points, so you can back up your arguments with concrete evidence on the test. Be sure you explain clearly how the passage helps demonstrate your point.

• the function of tragedy in Athenian civic life
• qualities and predilections of the principal characters of Athenian tragedy
• how the principal characters relate to one another
  • humans and gods
  • men and women
  • rulers and ruled
  • slave and free
  • native and foreign
  • rich and poor
• how tragic Choruses relate to the principal characters and vice versa
• how both principal characters and Chorus relate to the audience and Athens
• competition between tragedies as part of a public religious festival
• how traditional religion and myth relate to fifth-century Athenian tragedies
• how the "new learning" of fifth-century Greece (the Sophistic movement) related to cultural traditions, and how it was reflected in tragedies:
  • language and knowing
  • the natural world and humans’ relationships to nature
  • cosmic order and humans’ relationship to gods
  • social order and humans’ relationships to one another individually, to other groups within human communities, and to their communities as a whole
• public versus private
• rational versus irrational
• individual versus collective
• traditional versus new
• male versus female
• powerful versus powerless
• socially-constructed versus organic or "natural"
• divine versus human versus animal

This file last updated 10 February 2002 by jlong1@orion.it.luc.edu.
http://www.luc.edu/depts/classics/