Myth of Greeks

Hi there,

the following guidelines and instructions are given by the instructor.

Write a referenced essay addressing one of the following topics.The sources to be used are Hesiod’s Theogony, Apollodorus’ Library, Hyginus’ Fabulae, and/or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as appropriate for the topic. If you would like to use Euripides’ Medea, a perfectly fine translation by C.A.E. Luschnig is available at http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/medea.trans.shtml. The line numbers are on the right-hand side of the screen. Direct quotations are not allowed in this paper. The purpose of this assignment is to gain practice in using and accurately documenting sources without resorting to the “quote-quilt” approach. You are to extract information and express it in your own words, while at the same time accurately directing the reader to the underlying source of information. Citations will follow the system used for ancient sources explained in the syllabus and used in the last essay. The “works cited” list may use MLA, APA, or Hesperia format. If you use the APA style for the list, you do NOT need to include an abstract page

The essay should be 1200-1500 words in length; it must be typed and double-spaced. Margins should be 1.5 inches on the left and 1 inch on the others. Use a 12-point font and black ink/toner only; do not use a cursive font. Be sure to include a separate “Works Cited” page with the title of the work in the appropriate format for the documentation style that you selected. In addition to the hard copy you will turn in to me, upload a copy to Turnitin.com and to Livetext.com, using the course information provided in the syllabus. Submission of the assignment is not complete until you have turned in a hard copy to me AND performed the necessary uploads.

After submitting the assignment, I will return it to you with corrections, suggestions, and comments. You must then revise the paper and re-submit it within a week of its return. Both draft and final paper will be graded on a 100-point scale, and the two grades averaged for the recorded grade.

The topics:

1) What do the myths we have examined so far indicate about Greek cultural attitudes toward women? Be careful that you do NOT turn this into an essay about goddesses: deal with the different character types of human women we have encountered. To your mind, is the representation of women positive or negative, or can we even make such a generalization?

2) An aphorism inscribed on the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was mēden agan “nothing too much.” The philosopher Aristotle developed the idea of the “Golden Mean,” the idea that many virtues were an intermediate state between two extremes, e.g., courage is a mean between cowardice and extreme rashness.

Using the idea of the Golden Mean, analyze the lives of 5-6 major characters whom we have encountered in this section of the course. Can the idea of them straying from the “Golden Mean” account for the bad ends some of them come to? Can the idea of adhering to the mean explain good fate or happiness? Are there some characters to whom this idea does not seem to apply in terms of explaining their fates?

3) Consider to what degree the mythical world of the Greeks is structured to be just. By “just,” here, I mean a universe in which “good” people who act virtuously are either helped or rewarded, and “bad” people who commit evil are hindered or punished. Be sure to employ specific examples.

The following is the the system used for ancient Greek or Roman sources explained in the syllabus

Citing ancient sources in papers:

Part of the goal in “Writing Across the Curriculum” classes is to learn disciplinary conventions, and learning how Classical Greek and Roman works are cited is a course objective. Many ancient authors’ works are available in scores of original-language editions and translations into a variety of modern languages. Most academic works about Greek and Roman literature and history have usually assumed, rightly or not, that the reader can read the texts in the original languages or at least find a translation after being provided with a reference to a passage. Standardized ways of referencing the basic original-language text have been developed over time. These are far more useful in practice than citing the page number of a translation that may not be readily available. Hesperia uses the system described below as its standard, so whether you are employing it, MLA, or APA for your documentation system, you will need to read the section below and follow it.

Greek and Latin texts are usually cited in an abbreviated form, with the name of the author first, the name of the work second, followed by some information that sends the reader to the correct place in the text. Some lengthy texts were divided in antiquity into “books”; long poems and plays also are able to use the natural divisions of lines. Collections of short poems generally organize them into a certain order, with a number assigned to each of the poems. At some point in the Middle Ages, divisions of books into chapters and/or sections were made for non-poetic works. Exactly who made these divisions is generally not known, but they are always indicated in an original-language text and often in a translation. One usually finds these divisions on the outer side of the page. Major divisions into chapters have sometimes been given with Roman numerals and minor ones with Arabic numerals. It is standard now to indicate all book/chapter/section/line in Arabic numerals. Line numbers may be on the inner sides of the page. If these re-start the numbering at the top of each page, they are generally not part of the standard divisions, but only there for the convenience of the reader.

Some Greek authors have special systems. Works of Plato and Plutarch typically are referenced by their so-called “Stephanus pagination.” An early publisher of some complete works in printed book form was Henri Estienne, a French scholar; his Latinized name was “Henricus Stephanus.” Stephanus divided his single printed pages of Plato into five sections, a-e, although some had fewer than five. If you see a reference to a Platonic work that resembles “Pl., Phd, 58b,” you are looking at a Stephanus page reference (Plato, Phaedo, p. 58, section b). For Aristotle, “Bekker pagination” (named after the German scholar Immanuel Bekker) is used. Bekker divided each of his pages into two columns, “a” and “b.” A Bekker reference has the page number in his edition, column, and line, e.g., “1254b7.”

In English scholarship, the abbreviations for authors and works provided by the Oxford Classical Dictionary are the standard ones, although some particular journals specify the abbreviations used by the bibliographical reference L’Année Philologique. References to authors who only have a single preserved text, such as Herodotus or Thucydides, usually omit the name of the work. Other kinds of historical evidence (such as inscriptions, papyrus fragments, or compilations of material quoted by ancient authors from sources that are no longer extant) are usually cited using the name of the corpus within which they appear, with whatever number they have been assigned. I will put a copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionaryabbreviations in the “Information” section of the Blackboard site for this course.

Examples:

Hom. Il .2.100 = Homer, Iliad, Book 2, line 100.

Myth of Greeks Paper (1200-1500 words) c

Verg. Aen. 3.110-156 = Vergil, Aeneid, Book 3, lines 110-156.

Hdt. 2.91.3 = Herodotus, Histories, Book 2, Chapter 91, Section 3.

Xen. An. 1.10.6 = Xenophon, Anabasis, Book 1, Chapter 10, Section 6.

Plaut. Mil. 2.3 = Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, Act 2, Scene 3.

Plut. Vit.Flam. 2.3 = Plutarch, Life of Flaminius, Chapter 2, Section 3.

Suet. Vesp. 19 = Suetonius, Life of Vespasian, Chapter 19.

Callim. Hymn 2.50 = Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, line 50.

Tac. Ann.4.38 = Tacitus, Annals, Book 4, Chapter 38.

Even in a footnote-style documentation system like that of Hesperia, citations to ancient primary sources are placed inside parentheses within the text, rather than the footnotes. The author’s name is spelled out in full when it is part of the actual sentence and not inside parentheses.

Some translations omit any divisions except ones into books. For the great majority of sources, you can find the standard divisions by consulting the work in the Loeb Classical Library series, which we have in the UE library. These editions give the ancient text on one side of the page, indicating the divisions, and an English translation on the other.

Note on the texts we are using:

Hesiod’s Theogony is a Greek poem divided into lines. The Theogony, along with Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey are the earliest extant pieces of Greek literature, dating to the 8th century BC.

Apollodorus’ Library is a Greek prose work divided into books and sections. The sections are given by numerals in bold type within the text. There are three regular books in which all or most of the original text has been preserved. The section on Phineus and the Harpies, for example, would be cited as 1.120 (i.e., Book 1, section 120). There is an also an epitome(summary) of sections that are incomplete or lost. Readings from the epitome are prefaced with a capital “E.” The section on the Judgment of Paris would be cited as E3.2 (i.e., Epitome, section 3.2). Virtually nothing is known about Apollodorus himself, and the date of the work is uncertain but probably falls within the 1st or 2nd century AD.

Hyginus’ Fabulae is a Latin prose work that starts with a theogony (origin of the gods) at the beginning, and then each story is numbered sequentially. Heracles’ labors, for example, are listed in Hyginus 30. As with Apollodorus, practically nothing is known about Hyginus for certain and the date of the work is the 1st or 2nd century AD.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a long Latin poem divided into books and lines. Ovid lived in the 2nd half of the 1st century BC and was a contemporary of the Roman emperor Augustus. Numerous poems of Ovid survive, but the Metamorphoses is by far the best known and was the primary source of Classical mythology for people living in the Middle Ages.

Sophocles’ Theban Plays are three separate Greek plays performed at different dramatic festivals. Each play is divided into lines. These works were written and performed somewhere between 440-401 BC, with the last play Oedipus at Colonus actually finished in 406 BC, the year of Sophocles’ death, but not performed until several years later.

Aeschylus’ Oresteia is a Greek trilogy of plays (Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides) performed at the same dramatic festival in 458 BC. Each play is divided into lines.

Greek and Latin poetry does not work on the basis of rhyme or sequences of stressed syllables, as English poetry does. Rather, it works by sequences of long and short syllables. Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are written in a meter called dactylic hexameter. The plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles use a base meter called iambic trimeter for dialogue, and a great variety of other meters for the parts sung by the chorus.

one month ago

36 mins ago

REQUIREMENTS

Greeks Myth of Greeks description 5 pages, Double Spacing

Answer preview………..

Myths help people understand their origin and how certain events ended up being in a particular way. They allow people to have a sense of belonging, to understand where they came from and how their forefathers approached different situations. A myth can be represented in any form, either through poetry, a form of a story or, ancient painting, among others (West, 1997, 10). The myths of Greeks covers their different gods who engaged in different scenarios, which either proved to be just or unjust by analyzing instances in Hesiod’s Theogony and Apollodorus’ Library. This essay will explain the degree to which the mythical world of the Greeks was structured to be just or unjust in both accounts. The idea of comparing gods to man and animals makes it rather interesting when talking about justice and the actions of the gods and man before and during the reign of Zeus gives a deeper understanding about the reward and punishment system at the time……….

APA 1802 words