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NO MORE EXAMS EVER!!!!!!!
(Sorry H, and anyone else who sees this and still has things to do.)
Nine hours, nigh on sixty pages of scrawl later, and I'm done!! Whooop! I had a feeling at about 10.20 this morning that the exam was never going to end, but luckily (as I thought it might do) time started going quite quickly by the time I got to starting my third essay at 11. And then I went to the pub for lunch, and had a Desperados (tequila-flavoured beer), which I didn't think they even did over here (it was brewed in France, so I wonder if it was imported) and a burger. Then I went to shops, which were a bit rubbish, but I was saved from the potential travesty of not buying anything from Fopp the record shop by an advert on the way out that said Crystal Castles had a new album! I'm listening to it now, and it's great - still very CC-like, but with a touch more clubbiness and even(!) listenability. I also bought some jelly beans, on which I'm gorging.
For posterity's sake, before I forget (though it's almost certainly of no interest to anyone else), I'm putting below the cut the diss title + nine questions that will decide my degree. Dubious amusement may be found, though, alas, I didn't do the question where we were asked to discuss a quote from Billie Piper... ('We've only been exposed to the drug-fuelled, sex traffic side - but the fact is, there are middle-class, cultured, well-read women who take part in this job.' (Billie Piper on Belle de Jour). Is this remark helpful for understanding prostitution in antiquity?)
Thesis: Seneca's Medea and Deviant Uses of the Argo: Beyond the Golden Age
Did this ages ago now, but, yes, I fully intended the Empire Strikes Back vibe! This was (sort of) fun. I have to chat to people about it a week on Tuesday for twenty minutes, and I'm a bit worried reading it again that my argument isn't as clear as it should be, but it had Cicero being conniving! And Phaedrus taking the piss out of everyone! And Medea taking on the world!!
The Odyssey (and the Aeneid, technically, but I like practically everyone else just picked one half of the paper to concentrate on): Comment on any two of the following passages, translating wherever translation will help clarify your argument.
Athena asking Zeus to help Odysseus (1.80-105) + Melanthius massively insulting Odysseus and failing to realise he'd already come home (17.240-263). I did lots of chatting about the gods' distance from mortals and the unreliability of speech, especially from gods and in interpretation of their signs... I read the second passage a bit wrong, though, so hopefully most of what I said still makes sense.
Is Odysseus a virtuous hero?
I think they were aiming at his tricksiness, but I decided to be a bit literal-minded and read 'virtuous' as meaning 'manly' and did a thing about gender and the recovery of being feminised in Calypso's cave. Decided the Penelope testing bit was about how much Odysseus' bought into the ideology of the oikos and therefore his own position as the man of the house, thus making him virtuous by the end.
Why does eating play such a prominent role in the Odyssey?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Had not prepared for this really at all, but the other questions were even dodgier, so I argued that the suitors and their transgression was more important than all the other eating scenes (which I think I tried to rattle off in the first line, just to prove I knew they existed), and then I went on about the gods and my theory on Odysseus' journey being about accepting the arbitrariness of the divine, rather than a perfect rejection of the wacky non-mundane world.
Prostitutes and Saints: Do prostitutes in comedy tell us anything about behaviour in ancient society?
This paper was sort of enjoyable, but at the same time I felt a bit too much in control of my answers, so I don't know if I said anything that would tick me off on the buzzwords 'flair and originality'. Hope so! :/ I argued here basically that comedy can only show ideology, but that ideology (ie. the fear of women's rise in status vs. the fear of men's fall), seen also in rhetoric, can be seen reflected in religious practices (the rules for priestesses vs. priests and the allowances for female prostitutes vs. male).
Are these [there was a picture] numbered sex scenes at the suburban baths in Pompeii, painted on the wall of the ante-room [changing room, more like] after 62 and before 79 AD, advertisements for prostitutes?
This is born on the back of a long legacy of archaeologists in Pompeii deciding that every naked woman depicted in the town had to be a prostitute, which is bollocks. I basically said that they didn't work as advertisements, because their wasn't any information about where to get your sex if you wanted it (you can't even place the scenes in any sort of location, because they're just on couches against a white background), though if you analyse them in respect to Seneca's description of what 'pleasure' is like (vs. 'virtue'), they're a very good representation of that, and you could see them as product placement for sex, basically, because they're still sex-scenes at the end of the day, so they might make someone decide to go and find a prostitute (which a pretty obvious point, I know, but it seemed worth making - and, personally, I think it's better than John Clarke's daft idea that they're apotropaic...).
'There were whores before Christianity, whores after Christianity. Nothing changed.' Do you agree?
I pretty much avoided the saints questions, but for this I did a brief foray into Pelagia and Mary of Egypt, comparing them (as prostitutes-turned-saint) to Hellenistic prostitutes (who got shrines in the name Aphrodite Bilistiche - or whatever their name was) and prostitutes in Roman religion, where they got their own festival, segregated from the wives who had another, but were still part of the business. But then I said that this was essentially a reflection of the political system of the time, so, really, not much changed because the 'whore' as the pejorative idea of a prostitute remained a pawn of ideological negotiation - the ideology just shifted around it.
Neo-Latin (which has a long subtitle I can't be bothered to type): Choose two of the following passages and comment in detail on them, discussing points of literary and historical interest raised by the passages in the light of your knowledge of the period.
Bèze Epigrams 44 (De Ioanne Secundo, Hagiensi, poeta eximio) vs. Buchanan Miscellaneorum liber [they missed the number out] (Ad Camillam Morelliam). Neither of these were really poems I wanted to do, but I wanted to do these authors, so I compared them as praise poems for people of different genders. A lot less assumption of virtue for women, and the manifestations of their cleverness get praised, rather than their actual cleverness.
'The poetry of the Hymni naturales is not anti-Christian., It is simply written as though Christianity had never appeared in the world or had been long forgotten.' Discuss.
Yeah, Marullus wrote these poems that seem pretty damn pagan, but, so I argued, you can't ignore that he was writing for a Christian audience and was quite blatantly Christian himself (he has this whole thing about reclaiming Constantinople from the Turks, which I think is fair to say is a fairly Christian agenda, even if it's an issue of his Greek identity as well). The poems read much better if you consider them in tension with Christian theology and negotiating with Neoplatonism and all that.
'Renaissance Latin poetry registers as much the loss of the literary culture of antiquity as its recovery. Discuss with reference to one or more poets.
Bèze and Buchanan again, with Bèze essentially treating the past as a metaphor and thus pretty much confirming its loss, as Buchanan seems to be in a very current debate with classical models and ideas. The thing is, the dynamics of celebrating the past pretty much confirm its loss, so I said, so naturally you can't do one without the other.
.
Beer festival this evening! :D
(Oh, wow, I am suddenly so tired...)
Nine hours, nigh on sixty pages of scrawl later, and I'm done!! Whooop! I had a feeling at about 10.20 this morning that the exam was never going to end, but luckily (as I thought it might do) time started going quite quickly by the time I got to starting my third essay at 11. And then I went to the pub for lunch, and had a Desperados (tequila-flavoured beer), which I didn't think they even did over here (it was brewed in France, so I wonder if it was imported) and a burger. Then I went to shops, which were a bit rubbish, but I was saved from the potential travesty of not buying anything from Fopp the record shop by an advert on the way out that said Crystal Castles had a new album! I'm listening to it now, and it's great - still very CC-like, but with a touch more clubbiness and even(!) listenability. I also bought some jelly beans, on which I'm gorging.
For posterity's sake, before I forget (though it's almost certainly of no interest to anyone else), I'm putting below the cut the diss title + nine questions that will decide my degree. Dubious amusement may be found, though, alas, I didn't do the question where we were asked to discuss a quote from Billie Piper... ('We've only been exposed to the drug-fuelled, sex traffic side - but the fact is, there are middle-class, cultured, well-read women who take part in this job.' (Billie Piper on Belle de Jour). Is this remark helpful for understanding prostitution in antiquity?)
Thesis: Seneca's Medea and Deviant Uses of the Argo: Beyond the Golden Age
Did this ages ago now, but, yes, I fully intended the Empire Strikes Back vibe! This was (sort of) fun. I have to chat to people about it a week on Tuesday for twenty minutes, and I'm a bit worried reading it again that my argument isn't as clear as it should be, but it had Cicero being conniving! And Phaedrus taking the piss out of everyone! And Medea taking on the world!!
The Odyssey (and the Aeneid, technically, but I like practically everyone else just picked one half of the paper to concentrate on): Comment on any two of the following passages, translating wherever translation will help clarify your argument.
Athena asking Zeus to help Odysseus (1.80-105) + Melanthius massively insulting Odysseus and failing to realise he'd already come home (17.240-263). I did lots of chatting about the gods' distance from mortals and the unreliability of speech, especially from gods and in interpretation of their signs... I read the second passage a bit wrong, though, so hopefully most of what I said still makes sense.
Is Odysseus a virtuous hero?
I think they were aiming at his tricksiness, but I decided to be a bit literal-minded and read 'virtuous' as meaning 'manly' and did a thing about gender and the recovery of being feminised in Calypso's cave. Decided the Penelope testing bit was about how much Odysseus' bought into the ideology of the oikos and therefore his own position as the man of the house, thus making him virtuous by the end.
Why does eating play such a prominent role in the Odyssey?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Had not prepared for this really at all, but the other questions were even dodgier, so I argued that the suitors and their transgression was more important than all the other eating scenes (which I think I tried to rattle off in the first line, just to prove I knew they existed), and then I went on about the gods and my theory on Odysseus' journey being about accepting the arbitrariness of the divine, rather than a perfect rejection of the wacky non-mundane world.
Prostitutes and Saints: Do prostitutes in comedy tell us anything about behaviour in ancient society?
This paper was sort of enjoyable, but at the same time I felt a bit too much in control of my answers, so I don't know if I said anything that would tick me off on the buzzwords 'flair and originality'. Hope so! :/ I argued here basically that comedy can only show ideology, but that ideology (ie. the fear of women's rise in status vs. the fear of men's fall), seen also in rhetoric, can be seen reflected in religious practices (the rules for priestesses vs. priests and the allowances for female prostitutes vs. male).
Are these [there was a picture] numbered sex scenes at the suburban baths in Pompeii, painted on the wall of the ante-room [changing room, more like] after 62 and before 79 AD, advertisements for prostitutes?
This is born on the back of a long legacy of archaeologists in Pompeii deciding that every naked woman depicted in the town had to be a prostitute, which is bollocks. I basically said that they didn't work as advertisements, because their wasn't any information about where to get your sex if you wanted it (you can't even place the scenes in any sort of location, because they're just on couches against a white background), though if you analyse them in respect to Seneca's description of what 'pleasure' is like (vs. 'virtue'), they're a very good representation of that, and you could see them as product placement for sex, basically, because they're still sex-scenes at the end of the day, so they might make someone decide to go and find a prostitute (which a pretty obvious point, I know, but it seemed worth making - and, personally, I think it's better than John Clarke's daft idea that they're apotropaic...).
'There were whores before Christianity, whores after Christianity. Nothing changed.' Do you agree?
I pretty much avoided the saints questions, but for this I did a brief foray into Pelagia and Mary of Egypt, comparing them (as prostitutes-turned-saint) to Hellenistic prostitutes (who got shrines in the name Aphrodite Bilistiche - or whatever their name was) and prostitutes in Roman religion, where they got their own festival, segregated from the wives who had another, but were still part of the business. But then I said that this was essentially a reflection of the political system of the time, so, really, not much changed because the 'whore' as the pejorative idea of a prostitute remained a pawn of ideological negotiation - the ideology just shifted around it.
Neo-Latin (which has a long subtitle I can't be bothered to type): Choose two of the following passages and comment in detail on them, discussing points of literary and historical interest raised by the passages in the light of your knowledge of the period.
Bèze Epigrams 44 (De Ioanne Secundo, Hagiensi, poeta eximio) vs. Buchanan Miscellaneorum liber [they missed the number out] (Ad Camillam Morelliam). Neither of these were really poems I wanted to do, but I wanted to do these authors, so I compared them as praise poems for people of different genders. A lot less assumption of virtue for women, and the manifestations of their cleverness get praised, rather than their actual cleverness.
'The poetry of the Hymni naturales is not anti-Christian., It is simply written as though Christianity had never appeared in the world or had been long forgotten.' Discuss.
Yeah, Marullus wrote these poems that seem pretty damn pagan, but, so I argued, you can't ignore that he was writing for a Christian audience and was quite blatantly Christian himself (he has this whole thing about reclaiming Constantinople from the Turks, which I think is fair to say is a fairly Christian agenda, even if it's an issue of his Greek identity as well). The poems read much better if you consider them in tension with Christian theology and negotiating with Neoplatonism and all that.
'Renaissance Latin poetry registers as much the loss of the literary culture of antiquity as its recovery. Discuss with reference to one or more poets.
Bèze and Buchanan again, with Bèze essentially treating the past as a metaphor and thus pretty much confirming its loss, as Buchanan seems to be in a very current debate with classical models and ideas. The thing is, the dynamics of celebrating the past pretty much confirm its loss, so I said, so naturally you can't do one without the other.
.
Beer festival this evening! :D
(Oh, wow, I am suddenly so tired...)