Fall 2021 — Delahoyde
Washington State University
ANCIENT WORLD HUMANITIES END-OF-SEMESTER EXAM
BIG DAY: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1st, 1:00-2:15pm.
Your last significant obligations to this course will be an exam and an essay, similar to the midterm. Exam questions and answers will concern only the works covered from after the midterm exam through the end of the semester: remind yourself by reviewing the syllabus, but that means Medea, the early philosophers, Sappho, Aesop, New Testament materials (synoptic and apocryphal), and our most recent wisdom text excerpts. We will review, but so can you with my web notes on most of these materials. Here is the plan for the last exam.
I. IDENTIFICATIONS. [Total 30 points = 15 questions, 2 points each.]
On the designated day for this second exam — Wednesday, December 1st, at 1:00pm — you will receive from me an e-mail containing identification questions similar to those on the midterm exam: e.g., “Who wrote ‘The Allegory of the Cave’?”. Attached will be a Word document with the same questions, so that you can type the answers in whichever mode is safest and preferable to you.
II. QUOTATIONS. [Total 40 points = 8 questions, 5 points each.]
The same e-mail/document will contain bigger questions, mostly (but not all) quotation-based: combinations of identification and, more importantly, significance questions based on literary quotations, images, or any other class materials. You should plan to e-mail your completed
exam back to me by 2:15pm. You may work in coordinated cooperation with another member or two of the class, in which case only one of you should e-mail back to me with other name designated.
III. ESSAY. [Total 30 points.]
This essay is due by Thursday, December 2nd, by 12:00 noon, as a separate Word document to a designated space on Canvas in Discussions. The essay should be an original and virtuoso piece of brilliance manifested in impressive eloquence, perhaps with facile reference to concepts or even specifics from the class materials (themes, character names, literary moments, even quotations or paraphrases), and amounting to a minimum of three (3) pages, double-spaced.
What good is studying humanities in the ancient world?
[Beware inauthentic, fake answers. If you assert that we get a better sense of the ancient times and its people, then in turn the new subsequent question is simply what good is that?]
BIG DAY: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1st, 1:00-2:15pm.
SAMPLE QUESTIONS
I. Identifications.
• “You, as you deserve, / Shall die an unheroic death, your head shattered / By a timber from the Argo’s hull.”
• Of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the one not considered to be a “synoptic” gospel.
• He is credited with having told of “The Grasshopper and the Ants.”
• “Though being considered clever I have suffered much.”
• The literal meaning of “deus ex machina.”
II. Short Answer.
1) “And every day I look forward to when the Lord’s Cross that I beheld here on earth will fetch me from this short life and bring me then where joy is great, delight in the heavens, where the Lord’s folk are seated at the feast, where bliss is eternal.”
Identify the poem. How are the poet’s cultural values blended here with a clashing religious system?
2) “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.”
Identify the author and explain why this sort of statement is not characteristically “western” in nature.