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Conflict seems to bring fundamental aspects of society, normally overlaid by the customs and habits of daily intercourse, into frightening prominence.1
THIS essay focuses on a particular aspect of Hippolytus' social nature in Euripides' drama, his status as an ephebe, and the relationship between Euripides' drama and the ephebia. My goal is to show how the drama engages certain Athenian social rituals as an integral part of its form and meaning. Through a close study of the play's language, we will find that the drama's text embodies and enacts these social structures as Hippolytus undergoes a passage to a manhood that he can only achieve in death. I pursue this inquiry in the light of recent work by Vidal-Naquet and Winkler on the ephebia and Greek drama, examining the social function of Euripides' drama, its evocation and imitation of specific Athenian social practices, and the way the text's language specifically negotiates these practices.2
Any rite of passage is designed to prepare its initiant for her or his next stage in life, and for an adult Athenian male this meant martying, producing legitimate offspring to be the next generation of citizens, serving in the army, and taking part in the assembly. While Hippolytus is a young man refusing to marry and to participate in civic life, neither studies of the ephebia nor specifically of Euripides' Hippolytus have discussed him in much detail as an ephebe.3 I thus examine the intersection of this drama both with the language of manhood and the cultural practices which guided the transition to manhood and celebrated the Athenian model of civic male virtue, Theseus, who also happens to be Hippolytus' father.4 The male members of this drama's audience, who themselves underwent rites and participate in festivals wherein they imitate Theseus, watch a young man who ostensibly rejects his father as a paradigm, but is nonetheless compelled to suffer strange, dislocated forms of the events celebrated in the very rites and festivals associated with him.
Structure, Ritual, and the Ephebe
Following Vidal-Naquet's brilliant study, one easily identifies Hippolytus, who enters the play returning from the hunt, as a variation on the Black Hunter. The founding myth of the Apatouria, the festival where the young joined their fathers' phratries, involved a border...