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NZ Scholarship Classical Studies study materials
NZ Scholarship Classical Studies study resources

NZ Scholarship Classical Studies: Classical Studies

NZ Scholarship Classical Studies · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Classical Studies

Classical Studies

The Scholarship Classical Studies paper tests whether you can think like a historian of the ancient world: read primary evidence closely, place it in context, weigh it against other sources, and build an argued case. It rewards analysis and evaluation over recall - candidates who simply narrate the Persian Wars or describe the Parthenon frieze will fall below the Scholarship cut.

What the paper demands

  • Part A: unfamiliar source material - a translated passage, an image of a vase, sculpture or building, or an inscription. You identify what it shows, what genre or convention governs it, and what it can and cannot prove.
  • Part B: essays on prescribed topics. The list changes yearly; recent papers have drawn on Athenian democracy, Sparta, Alexander, the Julio-Claudians, Greek tragedy, and Roman art and architecture.
  • Assessment is holistic against descriptors. Scholarship requires perceptive analysis, integration of primary and secondary evidence, and a coherent argument; Outstanding Scholarship requires sustained critical judgement and independent insight.

Worked example

Question: "To what extent does Pericles' Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.35–46) give a reliable picture of Athenian democracy?"

Reasoning: (1) Frame the genre - a funeral speech delivered in 431 BC, written up by Thucydides under his own stated method; it is normative, not descriptive. (2) Extract its claims: equality before the law, merit-based office, openness to foreigners, citizen self-sufficiency. (3) Test with other evidence: the Old Oligarch concedes that the demos rules but calls it mob-rule; Aristotle's Politics distinguishes varieties of democracy; the franchise excluded women, metics and enslaved people, so "equality" is bounded. (4) Evaluate: the speech reveals the ideology that made democracy work and the limits of that ideology, but it is not a constitutional description. (5) Conclude with a qualified judgement - reliable as evidence of ideology, not of practice.

Traps

  • Retelling the source's content instead of interrogating it.
  • Treating one literary text as a transparent window on reality.
  • Ignoring genre, audience, date and bias.
  • Ducking "to what extent" with a one-sided answer.
  • Failing to bring the Part A source directly into your argument.