Two major axes of social and political conflict in the archaic city state operate across classes and between members of the same class. Describe these two axes, and describe how one or both axes of conflict leads to one of the following outcomes: social change, colonisation, tyranny, or a historical phenomenon of your choice.
Imagine that a new poem has been discovered which gives us definitive information on culture and society of Dark Age Greece. Describe two ways in which it must differ from the Homeric poems in order to give us this definitive information, which the Homeric poems cannot. You should consider the history and nature of the Homeric poems in answering this question.
The expectations as to length and other technicalities are the same as for the first set of written questions. Some further notes:
– For question 1, you should demonstrate that you can connect specific historical phenomena (i.e., things that actually happened like tyranny, colonisation, etc.) to the forces and conflicts that drove them. Show us those connections.
– For question 2, you are demonstrating that you understand how and why the Homeric poems are difficult to use as sources of information on the “dark age,” and you are doing this by contrasting them with a hypothetical, newly discovered poem. So, what you describe about this hypothetical poem should aim at illuminating some aspect of the Homeric poems.
