ABSTRACT
The scholar of Greek tragedy or myth today is likely to treat anthropological models of adolescent initiation as a solid and practical body of knowledge to use in developing interpretations.1 This relatively recent state of affairs reflects, in the most general way, the fact that two of the defining features of adolescent initiation, the adolescence of the initiand and the symbolic marginality through which he is initiated, are social phenomena that have become increasingly of interest to social scientists over the last century.While there has always been a certain awareness of adolescence as a category, in fields as distinct as medicine and history, ethnological interest in the adolescent initiation rites of non-Western societies increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and sociological and psychological interest in the changing roles ofWestern adolescents developed into an industry afterWorld War II.Marginality only became a formal concern in the twentieth century, in the work of such scholars as the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep and the sociologist Robert E. Park, but it too has had a diverse history in the different social sciences.While it generally reflects sociological models of communities as entities with boundaries and centers, there is little common ground between the use of marginality by Van Gennep (for whom it is a category for distinguishing types of symbols) and Park (who uses it to describe the situation of people with multiple cultural loyalties). This theoretical diversity in the study of adolescence and marginality has
not been obvious in the reading of ancient literature, as classicists have used relatively simple models of adolescent `` initiation'' that have long been a part of ethnographic lore.2 For the most part a small number of landmark studies on the subject of adolescent initiation in ancientGreece have served asmodels for literary scholarship. In 1939, Henri Jeanmaire published a landmark study comparing Spartan practices and themyths about Theseus to tribal initiations and initiations into secret societies in Africa, then in 1969, Angelo Brelich produced a work that interpreted a number of enigmatic Greek rituals as
examples of vanGennep's rites depassage.3 However, the notion that studies of adolescent initiation might be of value for the reading of Greek poetry only became widespread in the wake of a work whose theoretical perspective was more complex, Pierre Vidal-Naquet's essay, ``The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebeia.''4
