MidTerm Exam Study Questions

Part I:  short identification: in two or three sentences, identify the following names or terms and say what is most important about them.  (I will narrow the list to ten or twelve for the midterm.) I expect your answers to reflect what you learned from Last of the Wine and what I said in class as well as the History texts.

Part II: write a half hour essay on one of the following questions (I will narrow the choices to two or three.)  Legibility, intelligibility, organization, and use of examples to support your points will play a large role in your grade, so spend a few minutes thinking about what you want to say.  Better yet, spend some study time outlining what you would write and what examples you would use for each of these questions.

 1. Describe the workings of the Athenian democracy in some detail. What are the implications for someone ambitious to attain political power? In what ways was it more, and less, democratic than our own government?

 2. How and why did the Athenians lose the Peloponnesian War?   Was it a failure of democracy? What difference did it make to them to have lost it? What can we learn from this?

 3. Explain, in some detail, how the decisions the Spartans made after the conquest of Messenia, determined their social, cultural, political, and military future.

 4. What can we learn from the success of Philip and Alexander against the Greeks and the Persians, and from the final results of Alexander's conquests?

 5. Would you have wanted to live in Alexias’s world? How was it different from ours, and how was it the same? How was it better, in your opinion, and how was it worse? (I expect something more substantial here than a discussion of modern technology, obviously!)

6. Why did Mary Renault call her novel Last of the Wine?  How does this reflect something important that was happening in those years?