Adolescence EphAdolescence_ephebeia_and_Athenian_drama

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Adolescence, ephebeia, and Athenian drama

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2015.All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of amonograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy ). Subscriber: University ofOxford; date: 02 May 2015

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In andAround Greek TragedyAlan 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 two-

year, 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 years—Angus Bowie's Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and

Comedy —three 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 suggested—not yet—that 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 fifth‐century

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 Lada‐Richards 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 anancient 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 fifth‐century Athens, and wonder whether someone hasuncovered new evidence, inscriptional or artistic or both, that the system of ritual and

training for 18–20‐year‐olds, 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 (kosmētēs) 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 period—in Sparta, Arcadia,

Crete, to name a few—which 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 twenty‐three 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 fifth‐century 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 two‐year 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 whatwas later called the ‘ephebic oath’11 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 (4.51–2) 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

training…those 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 full‐time activity and the

ephebes lived a semi‐segregated 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 toengage 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 fifth‐century 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 hadelaborate 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 of—and 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 fifth‐century 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 pre‐war 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 ill‐acquainted 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 much‐praised pursuits of

aristocratic adolescents, hunting and chariot‐driving, has left him thoroughly ill‐prepared

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 ‘mob’—in which he includes his father.22

The ephebic and educational features of the other tragedies I have mentioned will be

sufficiently obvious:* the self‐discovery of Neoptolemos as he wavers between the

influence of two, or maybe rather three, rival preceptors—the 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), andWasps.24 These plays

all belong to the 420s, but a decade or so later, in Birds, two scenes late in the play25

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 transition‐scheme, 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, willy‐nilly, the pupil of the amoral Odysseus.

These patterns can be seen to correspond to well‐marked 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 gap’28 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

paides—those 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 creeds—new 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 mid‐sixth 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 middle‐aged, there were plenty of the younger

generation who were willing and eager to serve as its storm‐troops. In 411 they

provided the death‐squads 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 10‐year 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 sōphronistai). 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 18‐year‐olds 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 untilafter the shock of defeat at Chaironeia and vassalage to Philip and Alexander. The pivot of

the new system was the sōphronistēs 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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sōphrosynē, 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 new‐style 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

Addendap. 47 on ‘transgressive ephebeia’: this prophecy does not appear to have been fulfilled.

p. 48 on Ismene Lada‐Richards' paper: the substance of this paper was incorporated in

Lada‐Richards (1999).

p. 49 n. 9 see now also Giuman (1999); Gentili and Perusino (2002); and Parker (2005:

232–49).

(p.60) p. 50 n. 11 this inscription is now best read in Rhodes and Osborne (2003) no.

88.

p. 53 Thomas Talboy and I have discussed the Hippolytus plays, together with

Sophocles' Phaedra, in detail in Sommerstein, Fitzpatrick, and Talboy (2006: 248–89); our

analysis of the lost Hippolytos Kalyptomenos (pp. 255–66) confirms that in this playHippolytus was ‘essentially a victim’. We also argue (pp. 266–72) 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 436–433 inclusive.

p. 53 on Philoctetes see now especially Lada‐Richards (1998).

p. 55 n. 28 it 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'Année

philologique whose title contains this phrase (the first appeared in 1970).

Notes:

(1) Vidal‐Naquet (1969/1990: 154–6); Zeitlin (1978: 160–1 = 1996: 98–100).

(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: 45–112).




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(5) [Arist.] Ath.Pol. 42.2–5.

(6) See Reinmuth (1967).

(7) Lewis (1973: 254).

(8) Wilamowitz‐Moellendorff (1893: i. 192).

(9) See especially Sourvinou‐Inwood (1988).*

(10) See Sommerstein (1996d: 53–9) <= Sommerstein (2009: 192–7)>, 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 quasi‐literary (Pollux 8.105, Stobaios 4.1.8). There is an excellent discussion of it

by Siewert (1977), who inter alia demonstrates its archaic, pre‐democratic 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: 196–7) reviews the evidence on Ephippos' career and concludes that

it lasted from c.375 to c.340.

(15) The so‐called ‘law of Epikrates’ (cf. Lycurgus fr. V 3 Conomis).

(16) Reinmuth (1971: 134, 136).

(17) And the Apatouria myth discussed by Vidal‐Naquet (1986: 99, 109–12) 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 initiation‐ritual 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. 138–57); 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. 1–85, 1326–75.




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(21) Eur. Hipp. 952–4.

(22) Ibid. 78–81, 986–9.

(23) Eur. Supp. 860–917.

(24) See Bowie (1993) and Sommerstein (1996d: 59–64) <= Sommerstein (2009: 198–

202)>, with the paper by Niall Slater (1996) to which it is a response.

(25) Ar. Birds 1337–71, 1410–69.

(26) Ar. Clouds 529; Ar. frr. 205, 206, 233.

(27) Soph. Phil. 969–70.

(28) See Forrest (1975); and Handley (1993).*

(29) Thuc. 8.66.2, 8.69.4.

(30) Xen. Hell. 2.3.23, 50–1, 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 9–12.

(36) Pl. Laws 760b–763c (infrastructure projects, 760e–761d; guard and patrol duties,

761d, 763a; common quarters and meals, 762b–c; strict obedience, 762e; austerelifestyle, 762e–763a; 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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