Ephebos

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The Agrigento Ephebe, a "Severe Style" Greek sculpture of the 5th century BCE in the museum of Agrigento, Sicily
The Agrigento Ephebe, a "Severe Style" Greek sculpture of the 5th century BCE in the museum of Agrigento, Sicily

Ephebos (often in the plural epheboi), also anglicised as ephebe (plural: ephebi), is a Greek word for an adolescent age group or a social status reserved for that age in Antiquity.

Though the word can simply refer to the adolescent age of young men of training age, its main use is for the members, exclusively from that age group, of an official institution (ephebia) that saw to building them into citizens, but especially training them as soldiers, sometimes already sent into the field; the Greek city state (polis) mainly depended, as the Roman republic before Marius's reform, on its militia of citizens for defence.

The shared experience of the occasionally harsh but prestigious training doubtlessly had an effect of social bonding similar to the 'old boys' networking culture of the British public school.

[edit] The Term, "Ephebus"

In Rome, where the elite (mainly Patrician) were often sent to Greece or received Greek teachers, the Greek word was adopted in the latinate form ephebus (pl. ephebi), and fixed at the 16–20 age bracket.

[edit] See also

Ephebus also occurs as an individual name, as in the cases of:

  • Ephebus, a martyr from Terni, a city in central Italy
  • Claudius Ephebus, mentioned in the letter to the Corinthians, chapter 59, as a messenger of the Apostle Paul, sent to the Greek city of Corinth along with Valerius Bito and Fortunatus
Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis museum in Athens
Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis museum in Athens

[edit] Sources and references

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.


  • Pauly-Wissowa
  • H. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Courètes : essai sur l'éducation spartiate et sur les rites d'adolescence dans l'Antiquité hellénique, Bibliothèque universitaire, Lille, 1939 ;
  • C. Pélékidis, Éphébie : histoire de l'éphébie attique, des origines à 31 av. J.-C., éd. de Boccard, Paris, 1962 ;
  • O. W. Reinmuth, The Ephebic Inscriptions of the Fourth Century B.C., Leiden Brill, Leyde, 1971 ;
  • P. Vidal-Naquet, « Le Chasseur noir et l'origine de l'éphébie athénienne », Le Chasseur noir. Formes de pensée et formes de société dans le monde grec, Maspéro, 1981 ;
  • U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Aristoteles: Aristoteles und Athen, 2 vol., Berlin, 1916.
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