In making up your outline, first review the Background Notes and Study Guides for the works in question. Then go over your class notes and peruse the texts.

As you review, write down topics that occur to you to discuss and make note of passages that you think are particularly significant.

For example, if you are writing on the marriage and adulthood topic, you might choose to think about the role of love in marriage: for the characters Andromache, Helen, Demeter, Clytemnestra, Penelope, and Medea (Pindar, Euripides), does love appear as a factor in prompting the character to marriage? Does it develop afterwards? Does it fade or grow after the wedding? Is it a factor at all? Does the character come to hate her husband? If so, why? How does love compare with passion? How does each of the women love or not love her child/children? Does the love for children compete with or complement that of love for husband?

These are just some of the questions that might occur to you to think about. In class discussion, we'll treat the issues of how many of them (or others) could be incorporated into one paper, and how subsidiary and complementary topics could be developed.

If you are writing on the topic of young adulthood, try to think of similar kinds of questions that would apply for Nausicaa, the maidens of the lyric poems, Electra (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), and Antigone.

In all cases, develop questions, issues, and topics that take you across the boundaries of the texts: don't make your issue so specific that it can only be discussed with reference to one work. Rape, for example, is not a good topic, since it applies to only one major character (Persephone), but negativity toward marriage might be a topic which would apply across the genres: it could be construed as unwillingness to get married and leave the company of girlfriends, reluctance to acknowledge desire for marriage, or a desire to maintain virginity.

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