ESSAY QUESTION 40 marks in total. One third for clarity (including legibility of
handwriting!), one third for content (amount, accuracy and relevance of) and one third for
synthesis (how unified, compelling and well-organized your thesis/argument is).)
Question: How did war form and inform the identity of the ancient Greeks?
[There is a lot of material that you can use for this question if you think through all the different
wars both among the Greeks (Eg. Peloponnesian War) and with the Persians (Eg. Invasion under
Xerxes), as well as the various ways military practices like the development of hoplite warfare or
the rise of the navy (especially in Athens) influenced social and political developments among
the Greeks as a whole and within the individual city-states. In saying “form and inform” in the
question I am thinking of two kind of distinct things: “form” refers to the way aspects of war
actually affected the reality of the Greeks, and “inform” refers to the way the Greeks used ideas
related to war to form their own self identity (a self identity which may or may not have been
entirely true or realistic). You can focus on the “form” part of the question OR the “inform” part
of the question OR you can do a combination of the two, but strive to give your essay a unity,
which usually arises out of a clear and specific thesis.]
Please ONLY use this resource that provided.
S.B. Pomeroy, S.M. Burstein, W. Donlan and J. Tolbert Roberts, 2008. Ancient Greece. A Political, Social and Cultural History. New York: OUP
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