Choose one of the following two topics:
A. Gender crossings. When you read the stories that focused on love and sexuality, you saw that gender
boundaries were not as fixed as one might expect in the ancient imagination: stories often challenge gender
stereotypes and characters with their behavior or sometimes even changing to the other sex. For your essay,
find a feminine mythical character (or a set of them within a story/work) who shows masculine traits or a
masculine character who shows feminine traits (in general or at a particular moment of the story). Especially
focus on what you think the story wanted to say about gender by crossing these boundaries. You may pick one
from outside the readings, so long as they are from ancient Greek, Roman, or Near Eastern mythologies and
you refer to the text in which they appear (e.g. Achilles at Skyros, in GHM 5.20 in p. 449 on, or scenes in
Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, or Greek tragedies, etc.).
B. Modern media and ideas of the afterlife.
Choose a piece of modern media (a movie, a song, a video-clip, a painting, a novel, an opera, a comic book,
etc.) that deals with the afterlife. In your brief essay, explain how the story you chose deals with the afterlife
and how it compares with the ancient narratives studied in this course.