The ephebate was a programme of physical, religious, and civic training, which initiated Athenian male youth into public life as adult men in the fourth century BC, the Hellenistic Period, and the Imperial period. The institution is known primarily from inscriptions, which have been used by many scholars to demonstrate the importance of the ephebate as a product and perpetuator of Athenian social and political ideals. In this paper I discuss how the ephebic inscriptions are not just sources for the ephebate, but a key part of the process by which the ephebate crystalised the experiences of the young men who went through it. The exact way in which the inscriptions did this changed over time, but in all periods, they used imagery and text to give a permanent form to the ephebes’ experiences, to elide variation between individuals and variation over time, and to present an authoritative version of the meaning of the ephebate for the ephebes themselves and for the wider Athenian society. This was important for the individual ephebes, as they made sense of their experiences, but also for Athenian society as a whole. By asserting that each year’s ephebes had been successfully initiated, these monuments assured Athenians of the vitality of their society.

CONTACT
CRC 933, A01 UP1 "Lettered and Inscribed. Inscriptions in Urban Space in the Greco-Roman Period and Middle Ages"
Anna Sitz – anna.sitz@uni-heidelberg.de