The Classics Department are delighted that Matilda Jackson-Long’s entry to the Newnham College Essay Competition has been highly commended. The judges praised the high quality of her essay among an extremely strong field of entries. Matilda’s essay about Troy and what we can really know about it was very well researched and interesting. Her arguments were expressed in a clear and articulate way, backed up with a range of facts. Matilda should be very proud of this achievement, which is well deserved. We are all very pleased for her.
Matilda (Lower 6) tells us more about her essay here.
As part of a Classics essay prize for Newnham College Cambridge I wrote an essay titled ‘“We know both a lot more and a lot less about Pompeii than we think” (Mary Beard). Can the same be said about Troy?’, for which I was awarded Highly Commended. This title really interested me as I had been studying the Iliad but didn’t know anything about the archaeological site of Troy itself.
While researching, I considered both Troy’s mythological and archaeological identity, and how much we knew about both. Although we know a lot about mythological Troy thanks to Homer’s epics and other sources, there are still holes in our knowledge due to the loss of the six other poems that made up the Epic Cycle that told the whole story of the Trojan War. Our knowledge of archaeological Troy is equally complicated as the first excavators who worked there destroyed a lot of evidence as they cut through the upper layers of the site in an attempt to find the Homeric city.
So while the literary and archaeological evidence we have tells more than we might think about Troy’s legendary and historical past, we also know a lot less than we think due to the loss of the other epics and artifacts.
I highly recommend taking part in essay competitions as they allow you to explore areas of subjects you may not have considered before in a lot of depth, and they are incredibly rewarding.
