MATSEC IM Classical Studies cheat sheet

Greek chronology anchors: 776 BC first Olympiad; 508/7 BC Cleisthenes' reforms at Athens; 490 BC Marathon; 480 BC Thermopylae and Salamis; 431–404 BC Peloponnesian War; 338 BC Chaeronea; 336–323 BC reign of Alexander the Great.

Roman chronology anchors: 509 BC expulsion of the kings; 264–146 BC Punic Wars; 133 BC tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus; 44 BC assassination of Caesar; 31 BC Actium; 27 BC the Augustan settlement.

Athenian institutions: the ekklesia (assembly) met on the Pnyx with a quorum of 6,000 for major decisions; the boule of 500 was chosen by lot, 50 per tribe, and each tribe's 50 served as prytaneis for one prytany (about 36 days).

Ostracism: an annual vote by potsherds, first used in 487 BC, requiring a quorum of 6,000; the exiled man left Attica for ten years but kept his property and citizen status.

Roman cursus honorum sequence: quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul; under Sulla minimum ages were roughly 30, 36, 39 and 42. The tribunate of the plebs was not part of the sequence and was open only to plebeians.

Spartan mixed constitution: two hereditary kings (military and religious roles), a gerousia of 28 elders plus the two kings, five ephors elected annually with wide judicial and executive power, and the apella assembly of adult male citizens.

Status categories in the Roman world: cives Romani (full citizens with conubium and commercium), Latini (Latin rights), peregrini (free non-citizens), plus freedmen and slaves; the Constitutio Antoniniana of AD 212 extended citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants.

Decision rule: statements about 'Greek democracy' apply to classical Athens specifically; Sparta, Corinth and Thebes ran oligarchic or mixed systems, so do not generalise the Athenian case to Greece as a whole.

Key narrative sources: Herodotus and Thucydides for Greek affairs, Polybius, Livy and Tacitus for Rome; always record the author's social position, date of writing and distance from the events described.

Epic metre is dactylic hexameter; Homeric epithets ('swift-footed Achilles', 'grey-eyed Athena') are formulaic units that fit the metre and recur across contexts.

The Iliad covers roughly fifty days in the tenth year of the Trojan War and ends with Hector's funeral, not with the fall of Troy; the Odyssey covers about forty days of Odysseus' return, with extensive flashback narration.

Virgil's Aeneid has twelve books: books 1–6 are Odyssean (wandering, storm, underworld descent), books 7–12 are Iliadic (war in Latium), a deliberate fusion of both Homeric models.

Tragedy structure terms: prologos, parodos, epeisodia (episodes) separated by stasima (choral odes), and exodos; after Sophocles three actors (protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist) could share the speaking roles.

Aeschylus' Oresteia (458 BC) is the only complete surviving tragic trilogy: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, followed by the satyr play Proteus (lost).

Old Comedy (Aristophanes, fifth century BC) uses parabasis, agon and direct political satire; New Comedy (Menander, late fourth century BC) concentrates on domestic plots of love and recognition.

Historiographic markers: Herodotus frames his work as historie (enquiry) into causes; Thucydides claims a ktema es aei ('possession for all time') and states his method of eyewitness verification.

Livy's Ab Urbe Condita ran to 142 books from 753 BC; only books 1–10 and 21–45 survive. The speeches are the historian's own rhetorical compositions, not verbatim records.

Standard Twelve Olympians: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and either Hestia or Dionysus depending on the source.

Hesiod's Theogony traces succession: Chaos, then Uranus and Gaia, then Cronus who castrates Uranus, then Zeus who overthrows Cronus; trickery and the acquisition of rule are the poem's organising themes.

Greek thysia (blood sacrifice): procession, purification, prayer, killing of the animal, burning of thigh bones and fat for the god, and a shared feast of the meat by the participants.

Mystery cults were initiatory and secret: Eleusis (Demeter and Persephone), Samothrace (the Kabeiroi), Bacchic mysteries, and later Mithras, popular in the Roman army.

Roman priestly colleges: pontifices led by the pontifex maximus, augures (augury), flamines including the flamen Dialis, six Vestal Virgins serving thirty years, and Etruscan haruspices consulted on prodigies.

Roman domestic religion: lares guarded the household and its boundaries, penates protected the storeroom, and the genius of the paterfamilias was honoured at the lararium shrine in the atrium.

Hero cult was offered at a tomb or bothros rather than a temple; recipients included Achilles, Theseus, local founders and Heracles, who also received full divine honours.

Imperial cult: deified emperors (divi) were voted by the senate, worshipped in provincial temples and festivals; under some emperors refusal to participate could be treated as treason.

Decision rule for myth variants: attribute each version to its source (Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Apollodorus, vase painting) instead of treating 'the myth' as a single fixed narrative.

Greek orders: Doric has no base, a plain capital and a frieze of alternating triglyphs and metopes; Ionic has a base, volute capital and continuous frieze; Corinthian has an acanthus-leaf capital, heavily used by Roman builders.

Temple plan vocabulary: naos or cella (housing the cult image), pronaos, opisthodomos, peripteros (single surrounding colonnade), dipteros (double); the altar stood outside, normally east of the entrance.

Parthenon: 447–432 BC, Pentelic marble, 8 by 17 columns, architects Ictinus and Callicrates, sculpture supervised by Phidias, who made the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos; the frieze depicts the Panathenaic procession.

Sculpture chronology: Archaic kouroi and korai (c. 600–480 BC, frontal stance, Archaic smile), Severe style (c. 480–450), Classical contrapposto (Polykleitos' Doryphoros, his Canon), then Hellenistic drama and genre realism.

Roman construction: opus caementicium (concrete) made possible the barrel vault, groin vault and dome; the Pantheon (AD 118–125) spans 43.3 m and the Colosseum (AD 80) uses engaged orders and a velarium awning.

Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in AD 79, preserve wall painting in the Four Styles, domestic spatial organisation, graffiti and wax tablets, making them central evidence for Roman daily life.

Pottery dating: black-figure (Corinthian origin, Attic c. 630–530 BC) has incised details on black slip; red-figure (from c. 530 BC) leaves figures in reserved red clay with painted detail; shape and workshop style assist dating.

Excavation rule: record deposits by context and stratigraphy; a sealed deposit gives a terminus post quem for the material within it, not an exact date for the whole site.

Decision rule: distinguish a Greek original from a Roman marble copy of a lost Greek bronze before using the object as evidence for Greek sculpture of a named artist.

Source categories: literary (history, epic, drama, oratory), documentary (inscriptions, papyri, coins, wooden tablets) and material/archaeological; each carries different bias and different survival chances.

Standard analysis checklist for any source: who produced it, when, for which audience, in what genre, and what it omits or takes for granted.

Bias examples: Thucydides writes from an Athenian elite viewpoint; Caesar's Commentarii justify his own campaigns; Augustus' Res Gestae offers a carefully selective self-portrait.

Inscriptions are valued because they are contemporaneous and often public: the Athenian tribute lists, Diocletian's Price Edict and the Res Gestae copies all supplement or correct literary accounts.

Oral tradition: Parry and Lord's comparative work on living oral epic showed formulaic composition; writing down a poem fixes one version of a fluid tradition at a particular moment.

The Oxyrhynchus papyri preserve lost Greek literature alongside contracts and private letters; the dry Egyptian climate explains why organic writing material survives there.

Reception landmarks: Renaissance rediscovery and printing of classical texts, Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764), nineteenth-century classical education, and twentieth-century film and political appropriations of Greece and Rome.

Translation pitfalls: false friends, culturally loaded terms (archaic 'tyrant' was not necessarily pejorative) and importing modern concepts such as 'nation' or 'human rights' into ancient contexts.

Decision rule: corroborate any claim with at least two independent sources; a single late author such as Plutarch (writing around AD 100) cannot by itself establish a fifth-century BC fact.