HSC Classical Greek Extension case studies
HSC Classical Greek Extension · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The HSC Classical Greek Extension is a New South Wales senior-secondary credential for students who have already built a solid base in Classical Greek and want to work with real Greek texts at a serious level. It suits candidates who can read continuous Greek with a lexicon and are ready to move from sentence-level parsing to whole-passage interpretation. The HSC Classical Greek Extension case studies are 5 cases and about 2,635 words.
1The Particle That Will Not Sit Still
ἀλλὰ καί' as a serious error but notes that every individual word has been correctly identified. The passage continues with two more instances of 'οὐχ ὅπως', one followed by 'ἀλλ' οὐδέ' and one standing alone before an infinitive.
534 words, about 3 min2Whose Anger Is It? Subject Change in a Run of Participles
An unseen narrative passage contains a long periodic sentence in which four participles precede a single finite verb. The student, working quickly, attaches all four participles to the subject of the finite verb, producing a translation in which the same person performs every action.
571 words, about 3 min3Metre Versus Meaning in a Choral Ode
A student analysing a prescribed choral passage argues that the poet's use of a rare compound adjective in the antistrophe is 'purely decorative', because the same idea could be expressed in simpler words. The student supports this by noting that the compound occupies a long metrical position and that removing it would break the responsion between strophe and antistrophe.
533 words, about 3 min4Which Values Are the Text's, and Which Are the Audience's?
A student writing on a prescribed prose text argues that because a character in the text praises a certain kind of behaviour, the text 'endorses' that value. The teacher objects that the character is a speaker within a narrative frame, and that the author has given the audience reasons to distrust him.
509 words, about 3 min5The Argument That Rests on One Word
A student writing on the historical and social context of a prescribed text claims that a particular institution mentioned once in the text proves that the author was writing for a specific audience at a specific festival. The claim rests on a single noun, whose meaning the student has taken from a dictionary's first gloss.
488 words, about 2 min