Please read the attached and let me know if you have any questions. Get started! its due in 5 hours and I still need to submit! Thank you!

You may assume that your emperor lives at a time after the major historical figures we have studied, so any primary source would count. You are concerned purely with the city of Rome and have the following venues available to you: the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus (chariot racing and other large-scale displays), the Tiber, the Theater of Pompey, and temporary stages in any other venue you can think of (e.g., the Forum). Because of the short length of the paper, if you are proposing to put on Games, I recommend that you concentrate on what you would do with one event/one venue.

Your assignment can either take the form of a “Dear Emperor” letter or an “If I were in this situation, I would recommend [x]” paper. First person statements are unavoidable and this is not quite a conventional paper. Feel free to adopt a more casual style to go with that (keeping in mind that you are advising an emperor!). Nevertheless, the assignment shares a lot of the elements of a traditional paper, most notably:

1. You need to make a clear recommendation. In traditional paper terms, this is your thesis.

2. Your recommendation needs to be rhetorically effective, which means that your paper should have a discernable introduction, body, and conclusion.

3. There needs to be explicit engagement with two or more Roman primary sources studied in this class. In other words, your understanding of how this emperor should best deal with the pressure to put on spectacles should be clearly based in the material that you have studied in this course.

Please note: There is a provision in the grading guidelines that any proposal that you make needs to be somewhat realistic. If you have questions about whether a certain technology (or animal or such) crucial to your plans is available in Rome, please ask! Likewise, if you are uncertain of what counts as a primary source (most texts and images that we have looked at do), ask!

In terms of grading, there are a total of 20 points available for this assignment, divided up as follows:

Basic parameters of the assignment (4 points)

Your advice to the emperor (12 points)

Mechanics (4 points)

Tips:

· As with the first paper, this assignment has a pretty rigid prescribed structure: an introduction that clearly states your recommendation, a body (consisting of a suitable number of paragraphs—this will vary from paper to paper) that shows how you came to your recommendation, and a clear conclusion. Again, the reason for this rigid structure is found in the need for consistent grading. In addition, despite the somewhat creative prompt, this format gives you another opportunity to practice the most foundational template for a humanities paper.

· Be very careful to show clearly how your chosen primary sources support your argument (and that your chosen sources are actually primary sources). As with the first paper, you do not need to be comprehensive and explain absolutely everything that could be relevant about your source. One or two strong points per source will do very well.

· If it disrupts the flow of your argument to say things like “As is clear from Suetonius’ Life of Caligula…” in the body of your paper, just put a footnote referencing the source that you are using and then go something like “Caligula did [X] and that was a bad idea because [Y]” in the body of your paper. Don’t worry about a citation format (there is a guide for how to cite ancient sources in the “Resources” folder on Canvas, but that is a “would be nice” not a “required” for a course like this), but be clear what your source is.

· The assignment asks for at least two primary sources. It is perfectly possible to write an excellent paper with two, so more is not necessarily better. Make sure you give yourself enough room to refer to specific details in your source and to analyze it (i.e., show how it supports your argument). It is therefore unlikely that most people will have more than two or three sources.

· As you look for primary sources, don’t forget the stuff from relatively early on in the course: the riot in the amphitheater at Pompeii (Recitation 1), Spartacus (Recitation 3), and the big handout on entertainment and morals (Recitation 5) may all prove useful to you. And that is just scratching the surface.

· If you find yourself a few lines onto the third page, do not worry about it. If you are well above and cannot figure out what to cut, please talk to your recitation section leader for advice.

· If you have any questions/problems, please talk to your recitation section leader or your professor. Because of the size of the class, we will not be able to read drafts, but we are happy to discuss your ideas or help with any specific problems that you have. Please note that these conversations will be optimally productive if they happen well in advance of the deadline.