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Ephebes and Horses

The Greek ephêbeia has been the object of many studies in the recent past. It is especially the post-classical ephêbeia in Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman period which enjoys a preferential treatment. A.S. Chankowski’s L’éphébie hellénistique: étude d’une institution civique dans les cités grecques des îles de la Mer Egée et de l’Asie Mineure, announced in several of his preparatory studies, is eagerly awaited. Among the numerous problems connected with this institution I single out developments in the age of ephebes (no longer invariably 18-20 years of age, as in classical Athens), the social status of ephebes, their ‘educational’ program in the urban gymnasia, and their role in public ceremonies of the city. In a recent article, Hin (2007) has demonstrated that the Hellenistic-Roman ephêbeia was not an exclusively elitist institution but also contained a number of (upper-)middle class boys. In doing so she set out to criticize a thesis defended by me in an article in Dutch in 1981, but fortunately she realized, either before she started writing the article or in the process of writing, that since then I had changed my position and concluded that, although the elite dominated the ephêbeia, both quantitatively and qualitatively (i.e., ideologically), they were not the sole constituent. In a recent article (2005) I wrote: “Generell kann man vielleicht feststellen, daß Söhne der Oberschicht und der Mittelschicht die Klientele des Gymnasions dominiert haben”. I referred to a study by O.M. van Nijf, who argues that gymnasium-education was not limited to the bouleutic class—“but it will not have extended much beyond a broad middle class”. So in her attempt to demolish an argument put forward by me in 1981, H. in fact was tilting at wind-mills. Important in her article is the demographic contribution: analysis of a number of ephebic texts from Asia Minor shows that some ephebic contingents were too large for them to have been recruited solely from the obviously small urban upper-class. As to the educational program of the ephêbeia there seems to be a growing consensus that in the Hellenistic period the focus was on military (cf. D’Amore 2007) and athletic education and that from the period of the Pax Augusta the military aspect dwindled or was transformed into para-military activities: hoplomachia developed into a sort of fencing. Military virtues like eutaxia and philoponia persisted but characterized the ‘martial’ ideology of the jeunesse dorée. Intellectual pursuits begin to appear in our sources in the Late-Hellenistic period but it can be doubted whether they really ever dominated the educational system in the gymnasium. In an article from 1969, basically devoted to collegia iuvenum in the West, I allowed myself a tentative comparison between such collegia and the Greek