K-Agon, Round 2

K-Agon - Preliminary Round 2

Moderator says: “I will read one test question for no points. This question is not necessarily reflective of the difficulty of the round or tournament. Topics in test questions may appear later in the tournament.”

0. What man supposedly ran uphill, stood before a mirror, and held pebbles in his mouth while declaiming in order to tame an indistinctness in speaking, which he clearly had done when he attacked a Macedonian ruler in the Philippics?

DEMOSTHENES

B1: Which orator taught Demosthenes?

ISAEUS

B2: What type of factory did Demosthenes’ father own?

SWORD (FACTORY)

Moderator says: “Subsequent questions will count for points. Good luck and have fun!”

1. What city sacrificed the four daughters of Hyacinthus while unsuccessfully trying to atone for Androgeus’ death, leading to a peace settlement where it consistently sent seven youths and seven maidens for the Minotaur to consume?

ATHENS

B1: Previously, Minos had conquered Megara from what man, who had argued with Sceiron over the city’s rule?

NISUS

B2: What name was both the name of Minos’ foster father and the name of the Minotaur?

ASTERIUS / ASTERION

2. “Bad in winter, wretched in summer, good at no time” was what poet’s disparaging description of his native Ascra, near which the Muses taught him song, at least according to his Theogony?

HESIOD(OS)

B1: Hesiod’s other best-known poem, Works and Days, is addressed to what man, his brother?

PERSES

B2: The Works and Days was in later times artificially connected to what Hesiodic work, which describes the genealogies that arose from the female characters in Greek mythology?

CATALOGUE OF WOMEN // EHOIAI [DO NOT ACCEPT OR PROMPT
ON “MEGALAI EHOIAI” or “GREAT EHOIAI”]

3. Say in the best Attic Greek: They ransom the Athenians.

λύονται {τοὺς ἀθηναίους // τοὺς ἀθηναίους ἄνδρας / ἀνθρώπους // τοὺς ἀθηναίους τοὺς ἄνδρας / ἀνθρώπους}

B1: Say in the best Attic Greek: He obeys his master’s words.

πείθεται {τοις λόγοις / ἔπεσι(ν) τοῦ δεσπότου // τοις τοῦ δεσπότου λόγοις / ἔπεσι(ν)}

B2: Say in the best Attic Greek: He indicted the soldier for theft.

{ἐγράψατο / γέγραπται} τὸν στρατιώτην κλοπῆς

4. The Pythia predicted the death of a “king descended from Heracles” prior to what battle, where Hydarnes followed a goat-path revealed by Ephialtes to flank a Spartan rearguard under Leonidas?

THERMOPYLAE

B1: What naval battle, a narrow defeat for the Greeks, is traditionally said to have taken place simultaneously with the battle at Thermopylae?

(BATTLE OF) ARTEMISIUM / ARTEMISION

B2: When Xerxes demanded that the Spartans surrender their weapons prior to the battle at Thermopylae, Leonidas is said to have responded with what two-word Greek phrase, often translated as “come and take [them]?” Alt-right supporters have recently appropriated this phrase, such as when a rioter carried a flag displaying this phrase during the storming of the Capitol building.

μολὼν λαβέ

5. Although no versions of them exist in his dialect, what man is credited with the quotations “δός μοί ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν,” “μὴ μοῦ τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε,” and “εὕρηκα”?

ARCHIMEDES

B1: Translate the quotation “μὴ μοῦ τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε” into English.

DO NOT DISTURB MY CIRCLES! [ACCEPT EQUIVALENTS]

B2: Translate the quotation “δός μοί ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν” into English.

GIVE ME A PLACE {TO STAND // WHERE I MAY STAND} AND (I WILL) MOVE THE EARTH [ACCEPT EQUIVALENTS]

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6. What animals, who star in a comic epic by Pigres battling against a group of mice, title a comedy where Dionysus descends to the Underworld to retrieve Athens’ greatest tragedian and faces their chorus of Βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ?

FROGS

B1: Which playwright does Dionysus ultimately choose to bring back to life so that he can revive the genre of tragedy?

AESCHYLUS

B2: In a sort of deus ex machina, what animals does Zeus send to end the fighting between the frogs and the mice?

CRABS

7. Which of Heracles’ labors, during which the Parians gave him Alcaeüs and Sthenelus as hostages, involved sailing up the Thermodon to reach the city of Themiscyra and meet the queen of the Amazons?

GIRDLE OF HIPPOLYTE [PROMPT ON “NINTH”]

B1: On the way back from Themiscyra, Heracles stopped at Troy. Which king of Salamis was the first to breach the Trojan walls during their sack of the city?

TELAMON

B2: During the journey to Themiscyra, which king of the Mariandyni entertained Heracles in Mysia, prompting Heracles to help him in his war against the Bebryces and kill Mygdon?

LYCUS

8. What general meaning is shared by the verbs λαλέω, ἀγορεύω, φωνέω, and λέγω?

(I / TO) SAY / SPEAK / TALK / BABBLE

B1: What form is generally used as the 1^st-person singular, aorist active of the verb stem that includes ἐρῶ?

εἶπον

B2: Give all six principal parts of λαλέω. You have 30 seconds.

λαλέω, λαλήσω, ἐλάλησα, λελάληκα, λελάλημαι, ἐλαλήθην

9. What people were the primary subject of research by Carl Blegen, owed allegiance to a lāwāgetas and a wanax, and employed the Linear B script, unlike the neighboring Minoans?

MYCENAEANS

B1: Later Greeks thought that what group had built the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns, because the stones seemed too large for men to have lifted them?

CYCLOPES

B2: Carl Blegen is best known for discovering thousands of clay tablets inscribed with Linear B writing at what city in southwestern Greece, where the “Griffin Warrior Tomb” was recently discovered?

PYLOS

10. What English word, coined in British university slang as a direct transliteration of a Homeric word for “renown” or “glory,” literally means “praise and honor received for an achievement“?

KUDOS

B1: What four-letter English word, coined in British university slang as a direct transliteration of an Attic word that can mean “perception” or “sense,” literally means “practical intelligence”?

NOUS

B2: What English word—a direct transliteration of Greek coined by British writer Alexander Pope in the satirical essay “Peri [this word], Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry”—refers to “an anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous”?

BATHOS / BATHOUS

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11. What author, who largely derived his literary interests from his uncle Alexis, described the failed marriage of Charisius and Pamphila in Epitrepontes and a “bad-tempered” misanthrope in his play Dyskolos?

MENANDER

B1: What specific name is typically assigned to the period of literature in which Menander wrote?

NEW COMEDY

B2: What man’s death typically marks the end of New Comedy? He, Menander, and Diphilus were the period’s three greatest writers.

PHILEMON

12. After it had so long borne them in its womb as their proverbial “mother,” what object was repaid by being carried for nine days to the shores of Lake Tritonis by its crew, which included Orpheus and Jason?

ARGO

B1: Which Argonaut, who was so swift that he could run over waves without wetting his feet, received a strange clod of earth from Triton on Lake Tritonis?

EUPHEMUS

B2: Euphemus eventually threw the clod of earth into the sea, where it later became what island, which Battus left to colonize Cyrene?

THERA / SANTORINI / CALLISTE

13. Translate the following sentence, which has been adapted from Plato, into English: εἰσὶν ἐμοί πολλοὶ καὶ ἀγαθοὶ φίλοι.

I HAVE MANY GOOD FRIENDS // THERE ARE MANY GOOD FRIENDS TO ME [ACCEPT EQUIVALENTS]

B1: Now translate this sentence from Thucydides into English: ἄλλοις μὲν χρήματά ἐστι πολλὰ καὶ ἵπποι, ἡμῖν δὲ ξύμμαχοι ἀγαθοί.

OTHERS HAVE MUCH MONEY AND (MANY) HORSES, BUT WE HAVE GOOD ALLIES
[ACCEPT EQUIVALENTS]

B2: Now translate this sentence from Plato into English: εἰ τιμωρήσεις Πατρόκλῳ τῷ ἑταίρῳ τὸν φόνον καὶ Ἕκτορα ἀποκτενεῖς, αὐτὸς ἀποθανῇ.

IF YOU WILL AVENGE THE MURDER OF PATROCLUS YOUR COMRADE
AND KILL HECTOR, YOU YOURSELF WILL DIE [ACCEPT EQUIVALENTS]

14. What type of person possessed παιγνία, would undergo the ἀμφιδρόμια if Athenian, and could be the subject of ἔκθεσις if the πατήρ deemed him or her unworthy of being raised to adulthood?

BABIES / INFANTS / CHILDREN [ACEPT EQUIVALENTS]

B1: What body of Spartan elders may have had the power to determine if an infant should be exposed?

GEROUSIA

B2: What was the central part of the ἀμφιδρόμια ceremony and the origin of its name?

CHILD / INFANT / BABY WAS CARRIED AROUND THE FIRE / HEARTH (BY THE NURSE)

15. Note to players: The following question will roughly equivalent to a “Dēscrībāmus nunc proprietātēs dictiōnum”
question. In it, I will read a Greek sentence, followed by a question in Greek, followed by the same question translated
into English. The sentence: “πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστίν ἄνθρωπος.” τί ὄνομα ἐν τῇ γενικῇ πτώσει ἐστίν? Which noun is in the genitive case?

χρημάτων

B1: τίς τοῦτο εἶπεν?

(ὁ) Πρωταγόρας

B2: τί ἔπος ἐστίν ἐπίθετον?

πάντων

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16. What modern-day country, where Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found fragments of Menander in an old trash dump, was home to a trilingual inscription uncovered by Napoleonic forces that enabled translation of hieroglyphics?

EGYPT

B1: At what site, whose name means “sharp-nosed,” did Grenfell and Hunt discover the fragments of Menander and many other ancient papyri?

OXYRHYNCHUS

B2: What ancient Egyptian script appears on the trilingual Rosetta Stone alongside hieroglyphs and Ancient Greek?

DEMOTIC

17. In what work do the nobleman Phaedrus, the legal expert Pausanias, the physician Eryximachus, the host Agathon, a drunk Alcibiades, and Socrates take turns giving speeches on the nature of love?

(PLATO’S) SYMPOSIUM

B1: What prevents the seventh speaker, Aristophanes, from delivering his speech in his proper turn? A description is fine.

(BOUT OF) HICCUPS

B2: In the Symposium, Socrates delivers a speech detailing a theory of love that he claims to have learned from what wise woman?

DIOTIMA (OF MANTINEA)

18. Give the Attic dative plural for the Greek phrase that means “the large islands,” keeping in mind that the word for “island” is feminine and is νῆσος.

ταῖς μακραῖς (ταῖς) νήσοις

B1: Give the Attic dative plural for the Greek phrase that means “the just cities.”

ταῖς δικαίαις (ταῖς) πόλεσι(ν) // τοῖς δικαίοις (ταῖς) ἄστεσιν

B2: Give the Attic dative plural for the Greek phrase that means “the three goats.”

τοῖς / ταῖς τρισί(ν) (τοῖς / ταῖς) αἰξί(ν)

19. By declaring that “Athens is the school of Hellas” and that “the whole earth is the tomb of famous men,” what statesman eulogizes both the city and her war dead in a funeral oration in Book 2 of Thucydides’ Histories?

PERICLES

B1: Plato’s Menexenus replaces Pericles as the deliverer of a funeral oration for Athens’ dead with what woman, Pericles’ mistress and the mother of his son?

ASPASIA

B2: In what area of Athens did Pericles deliver his funeral oration? This area, which was the site of a substantial cemetery, primarily served as the city’s potters’ quarter.

KERAMEIKOS / CERAMICUS

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20. What substance was placed by Eidothea in Menelaüs’ nostrils to stop the stench of seal-skins, was used by Apollo to anoint the corpse of a Lycian chieftain named Sarpedon, and was stolen by Tantalus along with nectar?

AMBROSIA

B1: In the Odyssey, Circe tells Odysseus that what type of bird brought ambrosia to Olympus? Three sisters who could provide wine, wheat, and oil were transformed into this type of bird in another story.

DOVE(S)

B2: In Book 5 of the Iliad, the god of what river, which joined the Scamander outside the Trojan walls, causes ambrosia to sprout up to pasture Hera’s horses?

SIMO(E)IS

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