Myth Exam & Essay: some tips
The aim of this course is to give as full an introduction as possible to the informed reading of Ancient Greek & Roman Mythology. While you are strongly advised to make breadth of personal education & intellectual discovery your priority while you are at university (and throughout your life, of course), to attend all lectures and read and think for all topics, you would do well to specialize in certain topics. The final section of this course, for example, if it is thematically one, that is a discussion of the political content of certain myths, is divided into four topics:
Theseus founder of Athens
Aeneas, first founder of Rome & Dido, founder of Carthage
Romulus, next legendary founder of Rome
Rape as a motif in Roman Myth
Your responsibility is to be familiar with each topic and to have a developed undertsanding of myth as a political tool and a reflection of historical world view. Clearly though, there remains the space for you to specialize since in the exam, as in the essay questions, you are asked to choose a topic, show a familiarity with the content of the myth or myths and discuss, to a level of some sophistication, what that myth reveals and how it may be seen to operate as historical, rhetorical, propagandistic discourse. Be warned however that you should specialize in at least two topics. You may very well have fewer than four questions per section in the exam.
Essay writing for Classics:
1. Formulate your essay in precisely the same terms as the question.
2. Show a close familiarity with the pertinent ancient text or texts.
3. If you are unsure of a date or fact, check it or leave it out; an absurd error is far more conspicuous and abrasive than a detail passed over. Approach your response to an essay or exam question as you would the formulation of a legal brief, that is with lucidity and analytical precision.
4. Draw parallels from other topics and even other sections: display the breadth of your knowledge, while remaining to the point.
5. Design your discussion as simply as possible, in as straightforward a language as you can muster.
Fundamental then is that you read the works of ancient literature and that you be able to talk someone through the significance of a myth’s shape and details. Next you should be informed in your reading by an awareness of two or three secondary texts of modern scholarship, some exemplary manners of critical interpretation of the myth, (this perhaps less important in the exam, therefore all the more impressive there) and obviously the contemporary historical circumstances that might explain the character and features, or, even, the point of the myth. The most important point to remember in Classics is that the text is always the focus of discussion. Be familiar with your myth, then show what it reveals of its own context and make some further relevant points that you may have gleaned about that historical, political context. Finally, be warned: you will not receive the text in the exam, you must remember its substance.
