Adolescence EphAdolescence - Ephebeia - and - Athenian - Drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and

Around Greek Tragedy
Alan H. Sommerstein
Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780199568314
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.001.0001

Alan H. Sommerstein (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.003.0004
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines critically the widespread belief that many 5th-century Athenian
dramas reflect in various ways institutionalized practices or rituals connected with the
young male's transition to adulthood. It argues that there is no good evidence that any
such institutions existed in 5th-century Athens. However, the education and socialization
of the adolescent male was a major theme of Athenian drama between about 430 and 400
BC; some deal with youths whose education has left them ill-equipped for adult life,
others with youths who have been corrupted by their teachers. This is known to have
been a time of educational crisis, with traditional education seeming inadequate and
sophistic education deeply suspected, but no effective reform was found until the twoyear, full-time ephebeia was introduced in 334.
Keywords: drama, Athens, adolescence, ephebeia, ritual, transition, socialization, education, sophistic
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For nearly three decades now, it has been increasingly difficult, in studies of Athenian
drama, to avoid the words initiation and ephebeia. Almost every play in which an
adolescent male appears, from Aeschylus' Choephoroi1 to Euripides' Bacchae,2 has at
one time or another been declared to reflect an initiation rite or an ephebic ritual. The late
John Winkler has argued,3 bringing some highly persuasive artistic evidence, that the
choruses of tragedy were themselves composed of ephebes, and that the very word
tragedy means etymologically the ephebes' song; while in one of the best books on
Aristophanes in the last twenty yearsAngus Bowie's Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and
Comedythree of Aristophanes' plays (Knights, Clouds, and Wasps) are analysed as
comedies of ephebeia, but in two of them it turns out to be a reversed ephebeia, the
initiation not of an adolescent but of an old man (Strepsiades and Philokleon).4 I cannot
recall having seen it suggestednot yetthat some plays may present (what shall we call
it?) the transgressive ephebeia of a woman, but doubtless that is only a matter of time. I
suggest that Oedipus at Kolonos might be a fruitful subject for this type of investigation.*
(p.48) Those who have not yet been, shall we say, initiated into these discussions may
be somewhat surprised at the apparent ubiquity of initiation and ephebeia in fifthcentury
drama. In one respect their bewilderment will soon disappear, as they discover that
initiation is being used in two different senses. In one it refers to the rites of mystery
cults like that of Eleusis; this is the sense in which the term is used, for example, in the
admirable discussion of Aristophanes' Frogs by Ismene LadaRichards which <was
presented at the 1996 Classical Association conference>.* There is also, however,
another sense of initiation which has not till recently been part of the vocabulary of
classical scholars but is familiar to anthropologists, referring to rituals associated with the
transition from childhood to adult membership of the community. And in this sense, in an
ancient Greek context, initiation and ephebeia mean, at least for males, much the same
thing. From now on, to avoid confusion, I will use only the terms ephebeia, ephebe,
and ephebic in relation to rituals of this kind applying to adolescent males in ancient
Greece. I will use them whether or not there is evidence that these specific terms were
applied to the rituals in question by contemporaries.
But having cleared that mildly red herring out of the way, some simple folk may still find
themselves wondering about other things. In particular, if sufficiently long in the tooth,
they may recall that when they were students no one ever mentioned ephebes or
ephebeia in connection with fifthcentury Athens, and wonder whether someone has
uncovered new evidence, inscriptional or artistic or both, that the system of ritual and
training for 1820yearolds, described in the 320s, in elaborate detail, by the author of
the Ath.Pol.,5 and attested in changing forms by massive epigraphic, artistic, and literary
evidence from his time almost to the end of antiquity (to be precise, from 334/3 BC until
AD 265/6),6 was already in existence a hundred years or so earlier.
In case there are some who are worried that they may have missed this exciting new
evidence, I should reassure them at once. There isn't any. The nearest thing to it was an
inscription published in 1965 (SEG xxiii. 78), recording two honorary decrees of the tribe
(p.49) Akamantis. The first decree (honorand and subject unknown) was passed in
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361/0 (archon Nikophemos). The second was in honour of a man named Autolykos who
had been superintendent (kosmts) of the ephebes; the archon's name is lost, and the
first publisher restored it as Nikophemos also, but David Lewis showed in 1973 that this
was epigraphically untenable.7 There is still a complete absence of inscriptional references
to the ephebeia before the year 334/3; from that moment there is an absolute flood of
them. A hundred years, and thousands of inscriptions, after Wilamowitz's Aristoteles und
Athen, his basic conclusion remains sound:8 the middle 330s saw a revolutionary
innovation in the way Athens inducted its young men into the citizen body.
There certainly were Greek communities in the classical periodin Sparta, Arcadia,
Crete, to name a fewwhich did have elaborate, highly structured, wholly or partly ritual
patterns of transition to adulthood for boys and sometimes for girls also; in Sparta it took
not less than twentythree years, from the age of 7 to the age of 30, for a male to
complete this transition. For Athens, there has been much valuable recent study of
transition rituals for girls and especially of the bear ritual (arkteia) of Artemis at
Brauron.9 But if there was at Athens a ritual, or series of rituals, for boys at all
comparable to these or to the later ephebeia, our sources, of all kinds, for the fifth
century (and indeed most of the fourth as well) are completely silent about them.10 All
they speak of is intermittent military training and guard and patrol duties, later
supplemented by gymnastic training. There is no evidence whatever that young males in
the fifth century (or indeed in the first half of the fourth) were perceived as passing
through a transitional, liminal, ephebic stage of life between the ages of 18 and 20;
indeed there is positive evidence that they were not so perceived but were regarded as
having the full rights and responsibilities of adult citizens as soon as they underwent
dokimasia and were registered in their demes at the age of 18. Those who (p.50)
doubt this may care to ask themselves a simple question: what is the fifthcentury Attic
Greek word for an ephebe?
I ought at this point to give a brief sketch of what I do believe to be the history of the
institution that was transformed, in the 330s, into the twoyear ephebeia. From the time
of Kleisthenes, if not earlier, an Athenian male attained adulthood at the age of 18 and
became liable for military service. He must always have needed training before he
became capable of serving as a hoplite in battle. It could well have been in Kleisthenes'
own time, or very soon after, that the practice was established whereby, after
registration in their demes, the new citizens, in military dress and equipment, swore what
was later called the ephebic oath11 and then, during some part of the next two years,
underwent hoplite training and served in the frontier guard (or, in emergencies,
anywhere). This system continued without substantial change throughout the fifth
century. When not actually performing military duties the young men lived where they
would and did what they wanted, with the right to speak in the Assembly, to bring
prosecutions in the courts, to get married, and so on.12
Some time in the first half of the fourth century there was a change. Aischines clearly
regarded his time in the youth corps, in the late 370s, as an important epoch in his life; he
refers to it in two of his three surviving speeches, and uses it to demonstrate that one of
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his then companions, Misgolas, is not as young as he looks.13 Then from Xenophon's
Poroi (4.512) we discover that by 355 the time of training was divided into two periods,
the first in gymnasia, the second on light military duties, and that when engaged in
training activities the young men were supposed to receive a maintenance allowance from
the state, but that recently (doubtless owing to the Social War) they had not been
receiving the allowances regularly and as a result attendance at training had fallen off.
Even in 355, however, Xenophon has no name available by which he can designate the
trainees, and has to speak, clumsily, of those who are designated (p.51) for gymnastic
trainingthose who are designated for fortress garrison duties. The word ephebe
therefore became established in Attic between 355 and 346/5, when Aischines uses it,
retrospectively, as though it was familiar to everyone.14 Finally in 335 came the major
reorganization15 whereby ephebic training became a virtually fulltime activity and the
ephebes lived a semisegregated life for two years, under specially chosen supervisors
and trainers, wearing a distinctive uniform, taking their meals in common, taking part
collectively in various festivals, exempt from all normal civic duties, and forbidden to
engage in litigation except regarding inheritances. There is no evidence that any of these
six features of the Aristotelian ephebeia existed before 335; and if we take them away we
are left with something that Oscar Reinmuth16 had good reason to call a purely military
organization, and one that, to judge from the extreme scantiness of references to it in
sources such as comedy and Plato, was not considered by most Athenians to be of any
great social or civic significance.
This is not to deny that some of the plots of fifthcentury drama, especially tragedy, may
be ultimately based upon rituals that were ephebic in the broad sense I have indicated.
Indeed some of them almost certainly were. We know that many Greek communities had
elaborate ephebic rituals in the classical period; it is highly likely that many more did in
early times; and it is virtually certain that most of these rituals had myths associated with
them.17 Indeed I well remember listening with pleasure, thirteen years ago, <at (p.52)
another Classical Association conference at Nottingham>, to Richard Buxton's masterly
demonstration of this, apropos of wolves and werewolves, principally in Arcadia.18 We can
be confident, then, that the corpus of myths exploited by tragic poets in the fifth century
included many that were of ephebic origin. That is not at all the same thing as saying that
either the tragic dramatists or their audiences were aware of that fact.
What they must have been aware ofand what one can hardly help being aware of today
is the acute interest that Athenian drama displays, especially in the last three decades of
the fifth century, in the adolescent male, his education, and his socialization. I stress the
chronological point. There survive complete thirty fifthcentury Athenian tragedies (I omit
Rhesos and Iphigeneia at Aulis). Of these, eleven were almost certainly produced before
the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, eighteen thereafter, and about one (Oedipus
Tyrannos) the matter is doubtful. If we ask which of these thirty show a major concern
with the adolescent male, his education, and his socialization, for the war period the list
runs as follows:
Sophocles, Electra (Orestes), Philoctetes (Neoptolemos)
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Euripides, Hippolytos, Suppliants (the Seven), Ion, Orestes (Orestes and Pylades),
Bacchae (Pentheus)
What would a corresponding list look like for the prewar period? It is doubtful whether
there are any surviving plays at all from that period in which the problem is addressed in
anything like the way it is in the seven plays I have just mentioned. It is instructive to
compare the role of Orestes in Aeschylus' Oresteia, in Sophocles' Electra, and in
Euripides' Orestes. In Aeschylus, Orestes is presumably more or less of ephebic age,
but this is of virtually no dramatic consequence: if he had been twenty years older his
dilemma and his sufferings would hardly have been different; they arise, not because he
is new to adult life and illacquainted with its demands and difficulties (as is that greatest of
all dramatic ephebes, Hamlet),19 (p.53) but because he finds himself compelled, by
Apollo and by the situation, to kill his mother. In Sophocles, we find ourselves forced to
consider the issue of Orestes' upbringing because the man who educated him and who
still largely controls him, his slave paidagogos, accompanies and instructs him in two
crucial scenes,20 and is always obeyed without question; while in Euripides we confront
the terrifying picture of two young men and one young woman who are radically asocial
whose appealing loyalty to each other is accompanied by a total lack of scruples of any
sort in relation to anyone else.
Another possibly significant comparison, though more difficult because it is of a play that
survives with one that does not, is that between Euripides' two Hippolytos plays.* In the
first play, if Phaidra was anything like the shameless wanton that contemporaries who had
seen the play, and ancient scholars who had read it, agree in describing, Hippolytos must
have been essentially a victim. If he is not experienced enough to fight back effectively in
the way Bellerophon apparently did in Euripides' contemporary and partly parallel play
Stheneboia, that can hardly be put down to faulty education. In the surviving Hippolytos,
on the other hand, Hippolytos' upbringing in the traditional and muchpraised pursuits of
aristocratic adolescents, hunting and chariotdriving, has left him thoroughly illprepared
for his future roles as husband and responsible citizen, with a contempt and loathing for
those of different background (including all women) that do much to bring about his ruin.
His father may be absurdly wrong to suppose him an Orphic and a vegetarian,21 but he
certainly does see himself as one of a small circle of the elect set against, and superior to,
the vulgar mobin which he includes his father.22
The ephebic and educational features of the other tragedies I have mentioned will be
sufficiently obvious:* the selfdiscovery of Neoptolemos as he wavers between the
influence of two, or maybe rather three, rival preceptorsthe tempting, corrupting
Odysseus, the (p.54) honest, pathetic Philoktetes, and the image of a father he has
never met; Adrastos' funeral oration on the Seven against Thebes,23 with its concluding
claim that virtue depends vitally on education; the sudden exposure of the sheltered,
naive Ion to shocking facts and actions that make him ready to violate the sanctity of the
same temple whose pious servant he has been all his life; and a Pentheus bearing the
responsibilities of kingship when too young to exercise them prudently, with catastrophic
consequences for himself and Thebes. During the same period education is also a major
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concern in several of the comedies of Aristophanes. The education of the young is central
in Clouds, as it was in the very first of Aristophanes' plays, the lost Banqueters; and by
comic inversion, as Bowie in particular has seen, the education of the old (Demos,
Strepsiades, Philokleon) is a theme of Knights, Clouds (again), and Wasps.24 These plays
all belong to the 420s, but a decade or so later, in Birds, two scenes late in the play 25
introduce young men whose upbringing has gone wrong (leading one of them to
contemplate murdering his father, and the other to make a living as a sykophant); the
former (this being comedy) proves redeemable, the latter is whipped off the stage.
Why were both tragedy and comedy in this period so much concerned with the
socialization of the adolescent male? I wish to suggest that, rather than reflecting the
pattern of an existing Athenian ephebic transitionscheme, what they reflect is
contemporary anxieties arising precisely from the fact that such a scheme did not exist.
If one tries to generalize the relevant themes of the plays we have described, most of
them tend to fall into two groups. One is that of the youth whose education, often of a
traditional type, has left him unable to cope satisfactorily with the realities of adult life:
such are Hippolytos, Ion, Pentheus. The other is that of the youth whose education has
led him to cast aside all normal social duties and loyalties: sometimes, like Orestes in the
play of that name, he lives only for himself and a few of those like him; sometimes there is
a (p.55) corrupting teacher who for loyalty to gods, parents, and polis has substituted
loyalty to him, the teacher, as in Clouds, Philoktetes, and Sophocles' Electra. In at least
two plays known to us, the two patterns were combined. One was Aristophanes'
Banqueters with its two contrasted youths, products of traditional and sophistic training,
the virtuous boy and the buggered boy, the latter (who absconded from the school to
which his father sent him) running rings round the former in argument.26 In the other,
Sophocles' Philoktetes, the two schemata are both focused on the same character:
Neoptolemos is taken from his sequestered home on Skyros (which in the end he wishes
he had never left)27 to become a hero and a leader of men when hardly out of boyhood
and also to become, willynilly, the pupil of the amoral Odysseus.
These patterns can be seen to correspond to wellmarked and acute anxieties which are
known from other sources to have been present in the Athens of this period, anxieties
which have more than once been summed up in the phrase generation gap28 and which
arose precisely from the fact that the inherited Athenian educational system had ceased
to meet the needs of society. That system of paideusis was designed primarily for
paidesthose under 18. Its musical component prepared the young to perform their
religious functions as members of choruses and to play their part in the social rituals of
the symposium, and taught them their ethical duties through the medium of archaic
poetry; its gymnastic component trained their bodies, directly for athletic competition
and indirectly for war. It offered, however, no preparation at all (except basic literacy)
that would train a boy for his future role as citizen of a democratic community, and none
that would protect him against seductive creedsnew philosophies or alien religions
which might lead him away from the proper performance of that role. The result was that
boys who had been very well educated for life in the Athens of the midsixth century
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were being pitchforked at 18 into the Athens of the late fifth, with the right to marry, to
speak in the Assembly, to squander their property, and to do all other acts and things
which free and independent Athenians might of right do.
(p.56) Meanwhile those who could afford it were looking for teachers who could
prepare their sons for life in the real civic world; and those who claimed to provide such
preparation were numerous. But there was little agreement among them on principles or
methods, and in general they were deeply suspect, especially to the majority who could
not afford their fees. We need not perhaps blame the teachers as much as
contemporaries did. Fathers no doubt wanted their sons to be good at looking after the
interests of the community, but it was even more imperative that they should be good, in
a world full of rivals and of sykophants, at looking after themselves. Unfortunately the
latter objective sometimes got in the way of the former; and that this is no mere
prejudice of crusty contemporaries is proved by the events of 411 and 404/3. Twice the
political system was overthrown by members of that section of the community which had
gone in most enthusiastically for the new educational trends; and on both occasions, if the
leaders of the revolutions tended to be middleaged, there were plenty of the younger
generation who were willing and eager to serve as its stormtroops. In 411 they
provided the deathsquads which removed from circulation those who expressed
strongly democratic views in public, and the hundred and twenty young men whom [the
Four Hundred] employed if there was any physical work needing to be done; 29 in 404/3
they supplied the guards who scared the council into silent acquiescence in the murder
of Theramenes,30 as well as the cavalry who came to be so much reviled that, in the 390s,
even to be suspected of having served among them31 was the kiss of death to a political
career, while (as Socrates found) to be suspected of having taught some of them was the
kiss of death, full stop.
In the late fifth century both the old and the new education appeared to be deeply
flawed. The products of the old system were ill prepared to resist predators and
parasites; the products of the new were only too well prepared to be predators and
parasites, if they were that way inclined; and if the former had an uncritical attitude
towards traditional wisdom, the latter might have an equally (p.57) uncritical attitude
towards the thoughts of their particular guru.32 The drama of the period duly reflects
these uncertainties. It does not itself offer any escape from them. Some form of training
for civic life is clearly a necessity if one is not to meet the fate of Hippolytos or Pentheus
or indeed of the Seven against Thebes, men of high virtue (as Adrastos describes them)
who nevertheless, when among the leading figures in Argos, not only failed to prevent
but actually incited the launching of an impious and doomed expedition. (They may have
had a good upbringing, but none is described as having had any kind of intellectual
education.) On the other hand, the wrong kind of training can be even more disastrous,
as Orestes and Pheidippides demonstrate. Is there a right kind of training? In extant
drama only Philoktetes seems to offer some degree of hope, as personal association with
an older man of high character,33 without any formal teaching, leads Neoptolemos to
(re)discover his true self; but it is by no means clear that this happy outcome would have
ensued had not Neoptolemos had in addition both the inherited endowments and the
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inspiring example of Achilles to help him find the right road. Some of those who associated
with Socrates notoriously failed to find it.
What was needed was to create a new system. But what form could that system take?
Sparta was, or seemed to be, the current model of a successful polis, and some eyes
were turned in that direction; but its whole social system was so radically different from
the Athenian as to make the transplantation of the Spartan agoge to Athens utterly
impracticable, though some Athenians in the fourth century did send their sons to
undergo it at Sparta,34 and some intellectuals sketched out model educational systems
with a Spartan tinge. Xenophon's Persians, in the Cyropaedia, have a 10year ephebeia
(from 17 to 27), during which they live as if in camp, practise archery, (p.58)
spearmanship, and (of course) hunting, and carry out light military and police duties when
ordered.35 Plato in the Laws36 creates a sort of Young Pioneer Corps carrying out what
would now be called defence and civil infrastructure projects in the countryside for two
years between the ages of 25 and 30; some features in the description of their activities
and lifestyle hark back to Sparta (they are even at one point called by the Spartan term
kryptoi) and/or foreshadow aspects of the Athenian ephebeia as it was remodelled twelve
years after Plato's death (this is especially true of the five agronomoi, who very much
resemble the later sphronistai). But these remained paper schemes. Meanwhile
teachers of rhetoric, and of elementary political science, were multiplying; but they still
charged high fees, and their work, valuable though it was in training a political class, was
no solution to the problem of educating a citizen body; nor indeed did even the most
eloquent of these teachers, Isokrates, claim that it was.
As late as the 350s, as we have seen, all that Athens could offer its 18yearolds was a
course of training extending intermittently over two years, of an entirely gymnastic and
military character, ill funded and ill attended. It speaks eloquently for the inadequacy of
this system that Phokion, one of the most prominent men in Athens, about this time sent
his son Phokos to undergo the last two years or so of the Spartan agoge in the hope of
curing his drunken and extravagant habits. It is possible that about 350 there was a
financial and administrative reorganization of the training programme, and that it was in
connection with this that the trainees were first recognized as a distinct group within the
citizen body, given the name ephebes, and perhaps (though we cannot be certain of
this) given exemption from certain civic duties, say from festival liturgies with their
temptation to reckless expenditure. But we hear of no reform to the training itself until
after the shock of defeat at Chaironeia and vassalage to Philip and Alexander. The pivot of
the new system was the sphronists or corrector who took charge of all the ephebes
of his own tribe. He was a civilian, and not directly responsible for (p.59) gymnastic or
military training, which were in the hands of specialist trainers. He was elected, not
chosen by lot, and by a most unusual method: chosen by the Assembly from a short list
of three drawn up by a meeting of parents (or rather fathers) who had taken an oath to
vote on the basis of the candidates' character and suitability for having charge of
ephebes. He took the boys on a tour of the city sanctuaries before the training proper
began; he held the common purse into which all their pay was put; he looked after them
in all other respects; and presumably it was expected that he would train them in
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sphrosyn, that quality in which Pentheus was so disastrously lacking37 and whose
nature Hippolytos so disastrously misunderstood.38 If he blatantly failed, doubtless the
usual procedures of magisterial audit could be applied against him. Here we see an
attempt to translate into reality the idea of personal association with an older man of high
character, and to teach by experience the virtues and benefits of cooperation. The
educational gap perceived by tragedians and others nearly a century earlier had at last
been filled. It was, of course, too late. The first newstyle ephebes, 18 years old at the
beginning of the Athenian year 335/4, became eligible to hold office at the beginning of the
year following their thirtieth birthdays. That year was 323/2, the year when the classical
Athenian democracy perished.39
Addenda
p. 47on transgressive ephebeia: this prophecy does not appear to have been fulfilled.
p. 48on Ismene LadaRichards' paper: the substance of this paper was incorporated in
LadaRichards (1999).
p. 49 n. 9see now also Giuman (1999); Gentili and Perusino (2002); and Parker (2005:
23249).
(p.60) p. 50 n. 11this inscription is now best read in Rhodes and Osborne (2003) no.
88.
p. 53Thomas Talboy and I have discussed the Hippolytus plays, together with
Sophocles' Phaedra, in detail in Sommerstein, Fitzpatrick, and Talboy (2006: 24889); our
analysis of the lost Hippolytos Kalyptomenos (pp. 25566) confirms that in this play
Hippolytus was essentially a victim. We also argue (pp. 26672) in support of the
traditional view, taken for granted in the text above, that the lost Hippolytus was
produced earlier than the extant play, against the proposal of Gibert (1997) that it was
the later of the two, and we tentatively date it to the period 436433 inclusive.
p. 53on Philoctetes see now especially LadaRichards (1998).
p. 55 n. 28it appears that the vogue of the phrase generation gap in classical studies
itself lasted just one generation; Handley's paper is the last one recorded by L'Anne
philologique whose title contains this phrase (the first appeared in 1970).
Notes:
(1) VidalNaquet (1969/1990: 1546); Zeitlin (1978: 1601 = 1996: 98100).
(2) Especially by Richard Seaford; see Seaford (1981) and (1996), where references to
relevant commentary notes are collected on p. 42 n. 70.
(3) Winkler (1990).
(4) Bowie (1993: 45112).
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(5) [Arist.] Ath.Pol. 42.25.
(6) See Reinmuth (1967).
(7) Lewis (1973: 254).
(8) WilamowitzMoellendorff (1893: i. 192).
(9) See especially SourvinouInwood (1988).*
(10) See Sommerstein (1996d: 539) <= Sommerstein (2009: 1927)>, where the
statements made in this and the next two sentences are documented.
(11) This oath survives in three versions, one inscriptional (Tod ii. 204,* from Acharnai)
and two quasiliterary (Pollux 8.105, Stobaios 4.1.8). There is an excellent discussion of it
by Siewert (1977), who inter alia demonstrates its archaic, predemocratic origins.
(12) See Sommerstein (1996d).
(13) Aischines 1.49 (Misgolas), 2.167.
(14) A comedy by Ephippos, entitled Epheboi, probably dates from about the same time;
Nesselrath (1990: 1967) reviews the evidence on Ephippos' career and concludes that
it lasted from c.375 to c.340.
(15) The socalled law of Epikrates (cf. Lycurgus fr. V 3 Conomis).
(16) Reinmuth (1971: 134, 136).
(17) And the Apatouria myth discussed by VidalNaquet (1986: 99, 10912) was very
likely one of them. By the fifth century, however, the Apatouria was no longer an ephebic
festival, boys being admitted to the phratries in childhood, indeed usually in infancy (it
was cause for grave suspicion if a boy was admitted as late as the age of 7, like
Archedemos [Ar. Frogs 418], or even later like the demagogue of Eupolis fr. 99.24). It is
not unknown for the timing of an initiationritual to change in this way: consider the
varying practices of Christian Churches in regard to confirmation, a rite once common to
all of them, which today in some Churches is performed in adolescence, in others during
childhood, and in others again in infancy directly after baptism.
(18) Buxton (1987).
(19) Hamlet, as is well known, is 30 years old in the gravedigger scene (Shakespeare,
Hamlet V. i. 13857); but at the beginning of the play he is an undergraduate, wanting to
resume his studies at Wittenberg. If Hamlet were an Athenian tragedy, scholars would
probably identify Hamlet's time at sea as a period of ephebic liminality.
(20) Soph. El. 185, 132675.
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(21) Eur. Hipp. 9524.
(22) Ibid. 7881, 9869.
(23) Eur. Supp. 860917.
(24) See Bowie (1993) and Sommerstein (1996d: 5964) <= Sommerstein (2009: 198
202)>, with the paper by Niall Slater (1996) to which it is a response.
(25) Ar. Birds 133771, 141069.
(26) Ar. Clouds 529; Ar. frr. 205, 206, 233.
(27) Soph. Phil. 96970.
(28) See Forrest (1975); and Handley (1993).*
(29) Thuc. 8.66.2, 8.69.4.
(30) Xen. Hell. 2.3.23, 501, 55.
(31) Like Mantitheos, the speaker of Lysias 16.
(32) This is beautifully skewered by Aristophanes in Clouds 1432; when Strepsiades
points out an inconsistency in his son's exploitation of the nomos/physis antithesis (he
wants to behave like a cockerel when it comes to assaulting his father, but not when it
comes to eating dung and sleeping on a wooden perch), Pheidippides replies It's not the
same thing, man, and Socrates wouldn't think it was [emphasis mine].
(33) A figure reminiscent of the ideal archaic erastes/mentor, as exemplified, over a
century before, by the relationship between Theognis and Kyrnos.
(34) Such as Phokion (Plut. Phok. 20.4).
(35) Xen. Cyr. 1.2.4 and 912.
(36) Pl. Laws 760b763c (infrastructure projects, 760e761d; guard and patrol duties,
761d, 763a; common quarters and meals, 762bc; strict obedience, 762e; austere
lifestyle, 762e763a; hunting, 763b; called kryptoi, 763b).
(37) Eur. Ba. 504, 1150, 1341.
(38) Eur. Hipp. 80, 731, 949, 995, 1007, 1100, 1365.
(39) This paper was delivered at the Annual Conference of the Classical Association at
Nottingham in April 1996. It is published here for the first time.
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Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

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The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and

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Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

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Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

Access brought to you by: University of Oxford

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