Timed Essay: Choosing a Defensible Thesis on Divine Morality
Timed essay. You have 45 minutes to write 600–800 words on the statement: 'In the Greek texts you have studied, the gods are less moral than the humans they judge.' Your class has studied two prescribed passages: a Homeric scene in which a god intervenes to deceive a mortal, and a Platonic passage in which Socrates argues that the gods cannot be the source of evil. You have one page of notes, no texts, and a choice of three plans: (A) defend the statement using both passages; (B) qualify it by distinguishing divine power from divine morality; (C) reject it by arguing that the texts judge humans, not gods. The mark scheme rewards a clear thesis, precise textual reference, and a personal response that is argued, not merely asserted. You must choose a plan in the first three minutes and stick to it.
1. Which plan is the most defensible in 45 minutes, and why? In your answer, state the thesis you would use and one risk of each rejected plan.
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Plan B is the most defensible because it can accommodate both passages without flattening either. Thesis: 'The texts do not simply show immoral gods; they expose a gap between divine power and human moral judgement, and that gap is itself the subject.' Plan A risks overstating 'less moral': it can use the Homeric deception, but Plato's Socrates argues for a morally perfect god, so A must explain away a counterexample. Plan C risks ignoring the Homeric scene, where a god's action is morally troubling by any ordinary standard; rejecting the statement too quickly can look like refusing the question. Plan B lets you concede the force of the Homeric evidence, then use Plato to refine what 'moral' means. In 45 minutes, a qualified thesis with two textual anchors is stronger than a sweeping answer that cannot cover both texts.
2. Your teacher says: 'A personal response is not a confession of feelings; it is a reasoned position that shows why the question matters.' Show how you would integrate one personal response sentence into a paragraph on the Homeric scene without losing textual precision.
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After a precise point - for example, that the god's deception is described with a purpose clause and a disguised mortal - I would add: 'What I find most unsettling is not that the god deceives, but that the poem makes the deception intelligible as a response to human folly; that discomfort is itself evidence that the text asks us to judge divine action by human standards while refusing to let us do so comfortably.' The sentence follows the textual detail, names the effect ('unsettling'), and explains why it matters; it does not replace the quotation or the analysis. A weak personal response would be 'I think the gods are unfair', which asserts a feeling without connecting it to the text. The strong version turns the feeling into an argument about the text's double perspective.
3. You have 45 minutes. Give a time plan for the essay (planning, writing, checking) and explain which part you would sacrifice first if you ran out of time.
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Use 5 minutes to choose the plan, write the thesis and select one anchor per paragraph; 7 minutes to outline three paragraphs (Homeric evidence, Platonic counterevidence, synthesis); 25 minutes to write; 5 minutes to check quotations, topic sentences and the thesis; 3 minutes to conclude. If time runs short, sacrifice the extended conclusion or a second example in the weakest paragraph, not the thesis or the textual anchors. The mark scheme rewards a clear argument and precise reference; a rushed extra example adds less than a controlled thesis. Do not spend the last minutes polishing style if a quotation is inaccurate or a paragraph has no topic sentence.