Study Guide for Final Exam

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 and devices of an ancient Greek theatre: theatron, orchestra, stage, skene, mechane, ekkyklema
• elements of the civic production of Athenian tragedy: trilogy, satyr-play, democracy, liturgy, choregia/choregos, prize-voting, monuments
• formal divisions of an ancient tragedy: prologue, parodos, episode, choral ode a.k.a. stasimon (in divisions strophe, antistrophe, epode), exodos
• ancient theorists about tragedy: Plato, Aristotle
• contemporary responses to fifth-century Athenian tragedy: Aristophanes and the Frogs
• important concepts in ancient theory of tragedy: mimesis ("imitation" / "representation"; including the different emphases of Plato and Aristotle), catharsis ("purification"), hamartia ("error"), peripeteia ("reversal"), techne ("art", "craft", and "handbook of rules for a craft")

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 and religion
• the function of tragedy in its audiences' emotions
• tragedies' interpretations of traditional myths (and revisions)
• qualities and predilections of the principal characters of Athenian tragedy
• how the principal characters relate to one another and to the Chorus
  • family (including blood-relatives and slaves) and non-family (including philia, xenia, and supplication)
  • humans and gods
  • men and women
  • ruling-family and general populace
  • slave and free
  • powerful and disempowered
  • victors and the defeated
  • home-community and alien
• how the principal characters relate to themselves
  • moral choice, action, and personal responsibility
  • destiny and will
  • acting, not acting, and refusing to act
  • knowledge and identity
  • truth and deception
  • responsibility to others (individuals or community) and responsibility to the self
• contemporary popular estimations of fifth-century tragedians, and how they compare with more thoughtful evaluations (Plato's, Aristotle's, Aristophanes', and ours)
  • supposed character of the playwright himself, and how it relates to his playwrighting
  • dramatic construction
  • character-types
  • use of language
  • attitude to traditional religious ideas
  • attitude to traditional social ideas
  • patriotism
• broad thematic concerns of Athenian tragedy
  • traditional versus new
  • public versus private
  • rational versus irrational
  • mature versus immature
  • Greek versus non-Greek
  • male versus female
  • powerful versus powerless
  • socially-constructed versus organic or "natural"
  • divine versus human versus animal
  • individual versus collective
  • "reality" versus "representation"

This file last updated 26 April 2002 by jlong1@orion.it.luc.edu.
http://www.luc.edu/depts/classics/