JC Classics cheat sheet

The twelve Olympians conventionally include Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Hestia (Dionysus replaces Hestia in some lists).

Hesiod's Theogony traces succession through three generations: Ouranos, then Kronos, then Zeus; each transition is a violent overthrow.

The Trojan War cycle spans the Judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the Iliad (a few weeks in year ten), and the Nostoi (returns), including Odysseus's decade-long journey in the Odyssey.

Heracles' twelve labours include the Nemean lion, Lernaean Hydra, Ceryneian hind, Erymanthian boar, Augean stables, Stymphalian birds, Cretan bull, Mares of Diomedes, Girdle of Hippolyta, Cattle of Geryon, Apples of the Hesperides, and Cerberus.

Roman myth absorbs Greek material through interpretatio Romana: Zeus becomes Jupiter, Hera Juno, Athena Minerva, Aphrodite Venus, Ares Mars, and Hermes Mercury.

Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 CE) is the principal Latin source for many myths; its unifying theme is transformation, often as punishment, reward, or escape.

Founding legends of Rome: Aeneas flees Troy, his descendants Romulus and Remus are suckled by a she-wolf, and Romulus kills Remus and founds Rome in 753 BCE (traditional date).

Mythological genealogies often serve political ends: Virgil's Aeneid links Augustus's Julian clan to Aeneas and Venus through Iulus (Ascanius).

Distinguish aetiological myth (explains a custom, place, or ritual) from charter myth (validates an institution) and from allegorical readings (e.g., Stoic interpretation of gods as natural forces).

The Homeric poems are composed in dactylic hexameter; the Iliad has 24 books and covers roughly 51 days in the tenth year of the Trojan War, beginning with the wrath of Achilles.

The Odyssey's 24 books cover ten years of travel compressed into about 40 days of narrative; the poem opens in medias res with the Telemachy.

Homeric epithets (e.g., 'swift-footed Achilles', 'grey-eyed Athena') are formulaic units supporting oral composition; Parry and Lord's fieldwork established the oral-formulaic theory.

The Epic Cycle (including the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, Telegony) survives only in fragments and summaries, notably Proclus's Chrestomathy.

Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica (3rd century BCE) in four books treats Jason and Medea; Book 3 is famous for Medea's love and the influence of tragedy and Hellenistic learned style.

Virgil's Aeneid (12 books, dactylic hexameter) imitates Homer in structure (Books 1-6 Odyssean wanderings, 7-12 Iliadic war) and engages Roman ideology, pietas, and fatum.

Lucan's Bellum Civile (Pharsalia), 10 books, is an anti-epic with no divine machinery, treating the Caesar-Pompey civil war; it was left unfinished at Lucan's death in 65 CE.

Ennius's Annales, in 18 books, established hexameter as the Latin epic metre and adapted Greek models; it survives mainly in fragments.

Later Latin epics include Statius's Thebaid and Achilleid, Silius Italicus's Punica (Second Punic War), and Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica.

Attic tragedy was performed at the City Dionysia in sets of three tragedies plus a satyr play; the Great Dionysia also included dithyrambic choruses and comedy.

The three canonical tragedians: Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE, seven extant plays), Sophocles (c. 496-406 BCE, seven extant), Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE, eighteen or nineteen extant).

Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BCE) is the sole surviving Old Comedy poet; eleven plays survive, including Clouds, Wasps, Birds, Lysistrata, and Frogs.

Menander (c. 342-291 BCE) represents New Comedy; Dyskolos is his only substantially complete surviving play, recovered on papyrus.

Aristotle's Poetics defines tragedy by mimesis of action, with plot (mythos) primary, and analyses peripeteia, anagnorisis, and hamartia; catharsis is mentioned briefly and remains contested.

The chorus in tragedy is a collective character that sings stasima between episodes; the parodos is its entrance song and the exodos its exit.

Tragic conventions include the messenger speech reporting offstage violence, the deus ex machina, stichomythia (line-for-line exchange), and the three-actor rule attributed to Sophocles.

Roman comedy: Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE) wrote farces with song and Plautine humour; Terence (c. 195-159 BCE) adapted Greek New Comedy with smoother, more restrained style.

Structural terms: prologos, parodos, epeisodia, stasima, exodos for tragedy; for Old Comedy, parabasis (chorus addresses audience) is a defining feature.

Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE) wrote the Histories in nine books on the Persian Wars, framed as inquiry (historia); he is called the 'father of history' by Cicero.

Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War in eight books, aiming at ktema es aiei (a possession for all time) and using speeches and stated methodology (1.22).

Xenophon continued Thucydides in the Hellenica and wrote the Anabasis, an eyewitness account of the March of the Ten Thousand (401-399 BCE).

Polybius (c. 200-118 BCE) wrote a universal history in 40 books covering 220-146 BCE, emphasising causation and the cycle of constitutions (anacyclosis).

Livy (59 BCE-17 CE) wrote Ab Urbe Condita in 142 books from Rome's founding; only 35 survive (Books 1-10 and 21-45).

Tacitus wrote the Histories (69-96 CE, partly extant), Annals (14-68 CE, partly extant), Agricola, Germania, and Dialogus; his style is dense and pointed.

Key dates: 490 BCE Marathon, 480 Salamis and Thermopylae, 431-404 BCE Peloponnesian War, 338 BCE Chaeronea, 323 BCE death of Alexander, 146 BCE destruction of Carthage and Corinth, 44 BCE assassination of Caesar, 27 BCE Augustan settlement.

Roman constitution: consuls, praetors, tribunes of the plebs (from 494/493 BCE), Senate, and comitia; the cursus honorum formalised offices in ascending order.

Sallust wrote Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum, emphasising moral decline and using speeches and character sketches; Suetonius wrote biographical Lives of the Caesars.

Presocratics: Thales posited water as arche; Anaximander the apeiron; Heraclitus flux and logos; Parmenides being and the rejection of change; Democritus and Leucippus atomism.

Socrates wrote nothing; sources are Plato's dialogues, Xenophon's Memorabilia, and Aristophanes' Clouds; the Socratic method proceeds by elenchus, exposing inconsistency.

Plato's theory of Forms separates intelligible Forms from sensible particulars; the allegory of the cave (Republic 7) illustrates education and the Form of the Good.

Aristotle distinguishes four causes (material, efficient, formal, final), places virtue in a mean (Nicomachean Ethics), and defines the syllogism in the Prior Analytics.

Hellenistic schools: Stoicism (virtue as the only good, living according to nature, logos), Epicureanism (pleasure as absence of pain, atomism, no afterlife), and Skepticism (epoché, suspension of judgement).

Rhetoric's five canons: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio; the three genres are judicial, deliberative, and epideictic (Aristotle, Rhetoric).

Cicero's rhetorical works include De Oratore, Brutus, and Orator; Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (12 books) sets out the education of the ideal orator.

The three modes of persuasion in Aristotle are ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (argument).

Key terms: arete (excellence), eudaimonia (flourishing), phronesis (practical wisdom), aporia (impasse), sophrosyne (self-control), and ataraxia (tranquillity).

Greek vase painting periods: Geometric (c. 900-700 BCE, meander patterns), Orientalising (c. 700-600), Black-figure (c. 600-480, developed at Athens; Exekias, Amasis Painter), Red-figure (c. 530 onward; Euphronios, Douris).

Sculpture chronology: Archaic kouros and kore (frontal, archaic smile), Severe style (c. 480-450), High Classical (Polykleitos's Doryphoros, canon of proportions; Parthenon sculptures 447-432 BCE), Hellenistic (Laocoon, Pergamene altar, dramatic motion).

The Parthenon (447-432 BCE, architects Iktinos and Kallikrates, sculptor Pheidias) is Doric peripteral, 8 x 17 columns, with Ionic frieze and Athena Parthenos chryselephantine statue.

Greek architectural orders: Doric (no base, simple capital, triglyphs and metopes), Ionic (base, volute capital, continuous frieze), Corinthian (acanthus capital); Roman added the Tuscan and composite.

Roman building materials and forms: opus caementicium (concrete), the arch, vault, and dome; the Pantheon (c. 118-125 CE) has a 43.3 m dome with an oculus, and the Colosseum (70-80 CE) seated about 50,000.

Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE; Pompeian wall painting is divided into four styles, from First Style (masonry) to Fourth Style (illusionistic fantasy).

Greek pottery shapes and functions: amphora (storage/transport), kylix (drinking cup), krater (mixing wine and water), hydria (water), lekythos (oil, often funerary).

Key archaeological methods: stratigraphy (law of superposition), seriation, typology, and provenance analysis; coins, inscriptions, and papyri are primary evidence for dating and administration.

Major sites: Athens Agora and Acropolis, Delphi, Olympia, Vergina (royal tombs, possibly Philip II), Knossos (Minoan, Evans), Mycenae (Schliemann), and Ostia.

Greek is Indo-European, with dialects including Ionic, Attic, Doric, Aeolic, and Arcado-Cypriot; Koine Greek emerged in the Hellenistic period as the common written standard.

Latin is Indo-European and Italic; its cases are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative; Greek has five cases (no ablative, vestigial locative).

Greek definite article declines through all cases and genders; Latin has no definite article, and word order is relatively free because case endings carry grammatical function.

Transmission: texts survive through medieval manuscripts copied in scriptoria; the codex replaced the roll (volumen) from roughly the 1st-4th centuries CE.

Palaeography distinguishes majuscule (uncial) from minuscule scripts; key hands include Alexandrian majuscule and the Byzantine minuscule of the 9th-century renaissance.

Papyrology: Oxyrhynchus finds (Grenfell and Hunt from 1896) yielded thousands of papyri, including Menander, Sappho, and gospel fragments.

Stemmatics (recension) reconstructs a family tree of manuscripts to identify archetypes; Lachmann's method is the classical model, supplemented by contamination and conjecture (emendatio).

The Renaissance recovery of texts: Petrarch and Boccaccio collected manuscripts; Byzantine scholars such as Manuel Chrysoloras brought Greek to Italy; printing from c. 1450 standardised editions.

Key critical tools: apparatus criticus records variants, sigla identify manuscripts, and editions principes are first printed editions; the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and Packard Humanities Index are digital corpora.