VCE Classical Studies case studies
VCE Classical Studies · Put your knowledge to work in context.
VCE Classical Studies is a Victorian Certificate of Education study in which students examine the societies of ancient Greece and Rome through their literature, art, archaeology, religion and political life, and consider how those civilisations continue to shape the modern world. It suits students who enjoy close reading, interpreting visual and material evidence, and building sustained arguments about contested questions rather than memorising a single narrative. The VCE Classical Studies case studies are 5 cases and about 2,864 words.
1The Ekklesia Quorum and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy
A student reads two sources side by side. Thucydides (8.66–69) describes the oligarchic coup: the Four Hundred were installed after the assembly was packed with men from the Piraeus, and the democracy was dissolved under threat.
541 words, about 3 min2Aeneas' Shield: Prophecy, Genre, and the Problem of the Reader
A student comparing Virgil, Aeneid 8.626–731 with Homer, Iliad 18.478–608 writes: 'Both shields show a whole world. Homer shows ordinary life - farming, dancing, a wedding, a siege - while Virgil shows Roman history, so Virgil's shield is propaganda and Homer's is art.' The teacher asks the student to look again at the Homeric shield's two cities: one at peace, one under siege, with Strife and Confusion in the streets, and at the Virgilian shield's centre, where Actium is placed, with Cleopatra and Antony on one side and Augustus on the other.
609 words, about 3 min3The Villa Faun: Dating by Style Against Dating by Stratigraphy
A student is given a site report for a rural villa. The mosaic in room 4 is a black-and-white geometric floor with a figural panel of a hunting scene.
571 words, about 3 min4Cleon and the Mytilenean Debate: Judging a Source's Judgement
A student is analysing Thucydides 3.36–49, the Mytilenean debate. Thucydides reports two speeches: Cleon's, urging the execution of all adult male Mytileneans, and Diodotus', urging execution only of the guilty.
555 words, about 3 min5Reception in a Modern Memorial: Whose Classics?
A local council commissions a memorial to soldiers killed in a twentieth-century war. The design proposes a wall inscribed with a line adapted from Simonides' epitaph for the Spartans at Thermopylae ('Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie'), translated into the local language and set above a list of the dead from several ethnic communities.
588 words, about 3 min