CLST 277: The World of Late Antiquity Spring Semester 2017 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Study Guide for Exam I

Format

• cut-and-dried questions about basic factual information, including dates (small credit per item, and a small component of the exam)
• primary-source selections: given an image or short passage from a late-antique documentary or literary text we have studied, explain what knowledge and understanding of late antique history and culture this passage helps you to arrive at, and how - include pertinent facts about the source's context and nature, but focus on the passage itself, the information it contains, and your critical analysis: how you can best use the image or passage to pursue historical inquiry (each item will yield a medium-sized quantum of credit, but the items together add up to a major component of the exam)
• essay: explore a historical problem, setting forth relevant, specific, concrete evidence from late antique sources, explaining how to derive knowledge and understanding from the evidence, and showing how the knowledge and understanding inform your answer to the problem (the largest single item of credit; a major component of the exam)

Things to study

Terms and items you should be able to identify, to comment upon, or to refer to in a historical essay include, for example:

• geographical locations of important events and centers of significant communities and activities: e.g., Rome, Carthage, the Danube frontier, Gaul, Milan, Nicomedia, Palmyra, Persia
• institutions of the Roman state and concepts and practices relating to them: e.g., citizenship, state cults, the Senate, provincial governors, coinage, public works
• different kinds of communities within the Roman state and distinctive concepts and practices relating to them: e.g., the Roman army, cities, social classes, families, groups connected by shared religious activity, groups connected by shared work-occupation, groups connected by shared ethnic backgrounds
• important titles, terms, and concepts connected with Roman emperors: e.g., Augustus, Caesar, divus/divinization, dynasty, felix/felicitas ("fortune/fortunate"), pius/pietas (religious and social "devout/devoutness" or "dutiful/duty"), pontifex maximus, Tetrarchy
• important terms and concepts in traditional religions of the Roman empire and important dissident religions within the later Roman empire: e.g., bishop, catechumen, confessor, deacon, libation, martyr, passion, public priesthood, sacrifice, state cult, supplication (as a technical term), synagogue
• literary texts we have used as sources and information that helps assess them: e.g., The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, Lactantius, On the Manner in which the Persecutors Died
• documentary and material sources we have used and information that helps assess them: e.g., the religious calendar from Dura-Europus, sacrifice-certificates of the Decian Persecution, the Preamble of the Edict on Maximum Prices
• major historical forces and actors we have traced: e.g., administrative reform, commerce, inflation, taxation, war, and individual emperors, officials, Jews, Christians (as you review your notes from the readings and from class, make a list)

Recommended strategy: when you are thinking of big historical trends and developments, think of specific facts that illustrate them, and when you are thinking of specific facts and figures and pieces of evidence, think where they fit in to big historical developments. Be able to explain how the big picture and the particular item connect to one another. Reflect on how you know what you know, so that you can always explain your historical inquiry clearly.

Moments and developments to follow - see also daily Study Questions relating to individual assignments):

• evolution of the Roman state, from origins to Republic to Principate and later Roman empire (greater detail as we get into our period, of course, but also dominant features of the individual periods and what continued into our period, and especially understanding of how our period developed out of earlier ones)
• constitutional understandings of the Roman state and Roman government, and how they changed over time
• geographical growth of Roman political dominance, including attention to what peoples and cultures the Romans politically dominated
• military concerns of the Roman state: what happened where, and how did these concerns drive Roman governments' responses?
• capital cities of the Roman empire
• "Roman identity" and Roman cultural ideals
• forces tending to break down the functioning of the Roman state during the third century
• endeavors to restore the functioning of the Roman state during the third and early fourth centuries
• common forms of belief and ritual practice of traditional pagan religions, including cults of the Roman state and of local communities, private worship for practical and for spiritual purposes, magic
• religious groups, identities, and practices divergent from traditional pagan religions: e.g., Neoplatonic philosophy, Judaism, Christianity
• Roman efforts at religious enforcement or compulsion: policies, how the policies were carried out, what responses the policies and actions met, what consequences ensued
• money and the economy of the Roman empire
• ideals and objectives for Roman emperors - their own and other people's or groups'

• The point of an exam is to demonstrate your knowledge of our course-material.
• One important consequence of exams' purpose is that exam answers need to be specific enough to be informative in the context of what we're studying in the course. Part of the understanding of the material the exam is seeking to verify is your understanding what constitutes an informative answer. For an example, in the realm of dates (a particular focus of some short-answer questions about factual information, and part of the context supplied for the passage-essays):
  • The exact day on which Lactantius completed writing On the Manner in which the Persecutors Died doesn't matter, because we don't know enough about the early circulation of this text to be able to tell what difference a couple of days, or even a year or so, might in fact have made. A super-precise date would constitute overkill. And in fact, the precise date is unrecoverable to us: to give one would clearly be to have made it up.
  • On the other hand, to say that Lactantius wrote "in the period of late antiquity," in a course devoted entirely to the world of late antiquity, is to display almost no knowledge at all.
  • To say Lactantius wrote "around 300" would be better, but it's still pretty vague: all the events of Lactantius's focal narrative, the Tetrarchic persecution of Christians and the deaths of that particular set of persecutors, happened after 300.
  • The really useful knowledge about when Lactantius wrote this text is that it was after Licinius defeated Maximin Daia in 313 (the latest specifically datable event described), but before Licinius and Constantine started fighting civil wars against one another in 314 and 321-324 (during the course of which Constantine started accusing Licinius of persecuting Christians - whereas Lactantius portrays the two of them as parallel heroes of the Christian religion's vindication against persecution by Roman emperors).
• The passages for passage-essays come to you with specific questions in order to guide your answer into the focus I've judged the passage contributes most importantly to historical understanding in our period, at least within the realm of what we've studied thus far. Use the guidance! Performing a memory-dump of everything you have ever known about the author, the text, and topics discussed anywhere in the text (not necessarily in the passage helpfully provided on the test) at best is going to take way too much time out of the exam period and leave you disadvantaged to answer everything else. At worst, it gets in the way of your showing what's really important, in the context of the study we're conducting together this term: it can actually make your answer less effective if you say too much about things that aren't relevant.
• At the same time, the exam is open to your taking control of the question, on both the passage-essays and the historical problem, and showing how the immediate focus relates to bigger, more important concerns. In order to take control effectively, you need to show that you are climbing up a ladder of knowledge and understanding: you don't want your answer to look like you prepared a couple of ideas and don't know anything else and are determined to answer your questions whether or not they're on the exam. Here's how:
  • Succinctly but completely answer the question the exam asks, first: demonstrate that you do command the knowledge the exam is asking you to verify.
  • Then build from your answer to the bigger concerns you see looming importantly beyond it, showing connections as you go. For example, having explained what the passage quoted from the preamble to the Edict on Maximum Prices says about the delay the emperors have let pass before enacting this measure to try to control price-inflation in the marketplace (and it was very literally the marketplace, where real people bought and sold real stuff, that occupied their concern), the measure itself, and how well it did or didn't work, you could compare the price-inflation of the Tetrarchic period to other periods discussed by Cameron and discuss how the overall structure of the late-Roman economy made one or another method of control different emperors tried to use at different periods, effective or not.
  • But don't get so excited piling on the icing of extra understanding onto one question that you miss displaying full knowledge and understanding of the other questions on the exam, too. The question that doesn't get answered is a question to which not even partial credit can be assigned. Budget your time and efforts!
• Display knowledge and understanding efficiently. State briefly what relevant information is conveyed by the specific piece of evidence you're talking about. If the one piece of evidence doesn't convey all the information by itself, demonstrate how you connect its information to other pieces of evidence; also explain the logic you use to draw understanding from the evidence you bring together. Jumping from information to conclusion, however brilliant the conclusion, fails to demonstrate your mastery of reasoning and the process of your learning.

Revised 12 February 2017 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/depts/classics/