Rise of Athens Final Paper

Course: HI-203 Rise of Athens (Fall 2024)

Core Literacy:

• Information

Learning Goals:

• Read critically and analyze closely literary texts and modern scholarship
• Present orally and in written form an argument supported by primary and secondary sources

In the course, Rise of Athens, which I completed in Fall 2024, we covered the history of Ancient Greece from the Late Bronze Age through the Hellenistic Period. My final paper for this course was titled “The Economic and Cultural Impacts of Slavery in Classical Athens,” and it covered the societal implications of slavery in Classical Athens and the Greek perceptions of slavery. To supplement our evidence, we were required to use artifacts from this time period and analyze them in the context of argument. Additionally, I included primary textual evidence from Aristotle’s Economics and Politics, as well as Xenophon’s Economics as a viewpoint for their perception of slavery in Ancient Greece.

Looking back on this course as a whole, I found it to be an important step in my Classics journey, as it was the first course I took that allowed me to dive deeper into reading Classical texts and history. In the spring, I was extremely grateful I took this course in the fall, as it gave me the necessary background for the coursework I was enrolled in at College Year in Athens. If I could redo this assignment, I would have more clear argumentation for the evidence I provided, which is based on both feedback I received from Professor Abbott and even how I felt while writing the paper. While this was not my first time including primary sources in an argumentative essay, it was the first time I had to analyze and relate Classical texts into a paper, which felt somewhat foreign to me at first.