David B. Dodd
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 of Western adolescents developed into an industry after World 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 ancient Greece have served as models for literary scholarship. In 1939, Henri Jeanmaire published a landmark study comparing Spartan practices and the myths 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 van Gennep’s rites de passage.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
Vidal-Naquet combs through a wide range of material, including myth, art and description of ritual, and, under the influence of the structuralist anthropological theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Van Gennep’s work on rites de passage, produces a clearly defined portrait of the Greek adolescent in his passage to adulthood. Defining the mature Greek man in terms of his social roles, as hoplite warrior, citizen, husband and father, Vidal-Naquet claims that adolescence entailed a temporary identity that was the reversal of these roles, so that the adolescent appeared as a hunter in the wild, given to tricks and deception, with an ambiguous sexual identity that ranged from transvestite, to celibate, to hypersexual womanizer. Vidal-Naquet conceives of this reversal in terms of the dialectic that has informed structuralism since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure: the semantic differentiation that makes meaning possible must arise from acts of negation in the material that makes up the sign. That is to say, what makes the letter “t” meaningful in speech or handwriting is that it is not a “d” or an “l” or any other letter.5 Accordingly, Vidal-Naquet looks for the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek adolescent in those behaviors that contradict what is expected of the adult Greek man.6
In the introductory essay to this volume, Fritz Graf has noted how apt Vidal-Naquet’s ideas were for the time in which he introduced them; I would add that this particular model was especially attractive to scholars of narrative, whatever their generational and political loyalties.7 Jeanmaire and Brelich used material from ethnographic study as hypothetical comparanda that could provide a plausible prehistory for previously obscure rituals and institutions. The meaning drawn from such comparison was a meaning that belonged to that prehistory, since the descriptions of the historical rituals never referred to such a meaning, and sometimes proposed quite different meanings. To repeat this comparison with narratives rather than rituals forces one to take a stand on questions of whom traditional stories have meaning for. If a prehistoric practice is the meaning of a narrative of the fifth century, the notion of storytelling as a historically located act of communication between a storyteller and his audience, a notion basic to literary interpretation, breaks down completely. Accordingly, Jeanmaire’s and Brelich’s work was initially of greater use to historians of religion seeking to employ traditional narratives as a source than to literary critics looking for a means of understanding the poetic unity of a popular tragedy.
In Vidal-Naquet’s work, the semiotic axis on which the transition from adolescence to manhood takes place itself provides a metatext which makes it possible for historically specific practices and narratives to possess meaning. Whether in an account of a particular ritual, a narrative from poetry or drama, or a narrative history of some institution, the roles of black hunter and hoplite preserve the semantic values that arise from their relationship of contradiction. Indeed, political history itself can be read off of this grid, as when Vidal-Naquet proposes that the unusual educational practices of the Spartans were tools through which they located their society on a timeless mythical plane that would not be disturbed by historical transformation.8 This claim for a purely semantic dimension to black hunter imagery suggests that theories of initiation are properly sources of philological knowledge rather than comparanda for the prehistory of Greek religion, and Vidal-Naquet’s ideas have been employed by a number of scholars interested in the adolescent adventures of such heroes as Theseus, Jason, Ion, and Hippolytus.9
In the wake of Vidal-Naquet’s work, scholars began to use a whole range of theories of initiation to make this metatext of adolescence more widely applicable to ancient narrative. In the work of such well-known theorists of initiation as Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade, the temporary separation of the initiand from his community is the necessary condition for reshaping him from a child into a man. Accordingly, a number of literary scholars have concluded that the conjunction of youth, marginality, and a transition in status in narratives reflects the same concern over the question of how a boy becomes a man that Turner and Eliade find in adolescent initiation. Ethnographic material also provides a wealth of other symbolic events and terrains that appear in the various forms that adolescent initiation takes, and classical scholars have drawn on this material as well, treating ordeals10 and certain locales such as bodies of water11 and forests12 as definitive symbols marking narratives as accounts of youths being initiated into adult life.
In another essay in this volume, Irene Polinskaya demonstrates that the very fusion of ideology and social reality in the Black Hunter model that makes it appealing actually undermines the value of that model; in this essay I will go further and show that the treatment of ideas in the model implies a rigidity to Greek thought that is unwarranted by the evidence. We can see this most clearly if we consider what aspects of a narrative justify identifying the narrative in some way with the phenomenon of adolescent initiation. Depending on what features have been chosen as evidence of adolescent initiation, this question can be more or less obvious. Some of the aspects of narratives that are linked to initiation are extremely general. For instance, the fact that initiations may involve immersion or time spent in the wild seems insufficient evidence to support a claim that a young man engaged in actions in or near water or in a forest is in some way an initiand. In the case of ordeals and tests, unless we can tie a particular activity to a specific initiation rite, there is no way of distinguishing an ordeal from other types of danger, whether war, spontaneous heroism, victimization or careless stupidity; which of these it is will make a striking difference in how we understand the narrative.
The case of the black hunter seems less open to this line of criticism in as much as the figure that Vidal-Naquet describes is quite definite and striking. Hunting, use of deception, use of the bow, refusal of normal sexuality, lack of any normal political role in a community; these are features shared by a number of mythical figures such as Paris, Hippolytus and Heracles, who could conceivably be characterized as ephebes, as Greek adolescents. However, before we look to structuralist categories in order to assign every character in Greek myth to an age-class, we should first see what effect applying the category of black hunter to an actual narrative has on our ability to interpret that narrative.
Vidal-Naquet presents us with a useful example of this sort of application with his own attempt to use his theory as literary criticism: Sophocles’ Philoctetes.13 He argues that the tragedy presents an image of the renewal of society through the initiation of young men, by portraying Neoptolemus as a typical initiand in his interactions with Odysseus and Philoctetes. Lemnos serves as a marginal wilderness where the youth undertakes an ordeal, while Odysseus serves as a master of the initiation who directs Neoptolemus in the deceptions that will teach him the meaning of being a warrior. Neoptolemus further marginalizes himself by befriending Philoctetes, who lives utterly outside human society, although this also involves turning away from the war at Troy, a potential failure for this initiation. So at the end, the hero Heracles, presented as a sort of ideal hoplite warrior, arrives on the scene to dissuade them from their plans and assure that the newly-initiated Neoptolemus joins the other adult warriors at Troy. Vidal-Naquet’s ideas about Greek adolescence serve as both models for the task that Neoptolemus undertakes, and the reason for his final elevation at the end of the play. The youth is engaged in this strange quest for Philoctetes’ bow, and is expected to use deception, because he is a black hunter, and the special status that Heracles prophecies for him results from his success in this ordeal.
This reading of the Philoctetes vividly illustrates the problems of using initiation as a means of reading narrative, in that it shows the difficulty of recognizing a particular character and series of events as definitive of an initiation. This problem becomes most apparent if we employ Vidal-Naquet’s concept of the black hunter more rigorously than he does himself. If we are seriously looking for a character in the play who obeys authority unquestioningly, pursues a quarry in the wilderness that he intends to master through deception, and seeks military victory through the use of the non-hoplite bow, we must surely turn our attention to Odysseus. If we consider too the other actions of this hero that the fifth-century audience would have remembered from the Odyssey, that in addition to marginality, deception, and the use of a bow to kill his enemies, Odysseus is characterized by a recurrent rejection of marriages along with nearly unrestricted sexual activity, we have the most perfect example of the black hunter in Greek mythology. Vidal-Naquet’s portrayal of the black hunter helps us to see more fully the transgressive qualities of Odysseus, but offers no way of understanding why Odysseus is depicted with these qualities. Vidal-Naquet’s primary claim, that these characteristics are tied to adolescence, offers no help, as Odysseus is not an adolescent, and these qualities put him in conflict with Neoptolemus, the only adolescent in the play. Vidal-Naquet himself simply ignores the similarity of Odysseus to the black hunter and identifies him instead as a “hypercivilized” politician.14 Once we lose the educational function that he links to adolescence, Vidal-Naquet offers no clear reason to identify such figures as ephebes.
In general the connection between the black hunter figure and an educational function in ancient Greece seems very arbitrary. We can also see this in the case of actual social institutions in Vidal-Naquet’s description of the krypteia at Sparta.15 In this practice, a small number of young men in their twenties spent a year away from their fellows, killing Helots. They went about naked16 and were to avoid being seen by any other human beings, under penalty of death. This institution thus offers an excellent example of the black hunter, as Vidal-Naquet notes. Accordingly, in answer to the question, “Why did the Spartans have these young men do this?” Vidal-Naquet proposes that they meant to “dramatize the moment when the young elite Spartan leaves his childhood behind him forever.”17 While a certain educational function for the practice is not without some logic (and appears in some of our ancient sources as well),18 Vidal-Naquet offers a strangely placid description of what must have been one of the most horrifying features of Helot life.19
There is undoubtedly a link between the age of the participants and the other features of the institution, but it seems grotesque to privilege this link as an “origin” for this institutionalized state terror, implying that the krypteia was “really” a form of education rather than a tool for destroying the political will of a large portion of the Spartan population.20 Vidal-Naquet does acknowledge that the primary function of the krypteia was to terrorize Helots, defending his initial observation about the meaning of the krypteia with a claim that the role of “black hunter” that developed in initiation rites was adapted to the needs of the Spartan state in the eighth century. Yet in doing so, he notes that the krypteia preserves in full the transgressive qualities of the black hunter that adolescent transition rites like the ephêbeia and the koureion only display in a very restricted fashion.21 If the demands of state terror preserve an institution for over three centuries, shouldn’t such demands be considered sufficient to account for the basic structure of the institution? Certainly they should be considered more significant than a presumed origin in age-class transitions, which by the classical period refer to this structure primarily in aetiologies and etymologies.
The examples of Odysseus and the krypteia do support the notion that the Greek imagination was haunted by figures who were the opposite of the citizen-hoplite in that they traveled alone in the wild and hunted animals and men using treachery or a bow and arrows. Yet this figure was not always an adolescent making a transition from childhood to adulthood, or even an adolescent. I find it simpler to note that in adopting the role of black hunter one distanced oneself from the roles of citizen and hoplite. This distancing could have many meanings, and hence does not necessarily mean that the hunter is in the process of becoming a citizen-hoplite.
We have seen that the concept of the black hunter, which is persuasive so long as one uses it merely as a tool for classifying static characters, becomes far less so when one takes into account the actual goals these characters aim at in their actions. This does not in itself demonstrate that anthropological models of adolescent initiation and other rites of passage are of no value, but it does show a need to articulate the differences between anthropological knowledge and our goals in interpreting narrative. Wolfgang Iser has recently examined questions of this type directly, by considering the act of interpretation as a form of translation.22 By making clear how interpretation always involves producing a new set of signs that is in some way treated as the truth of the object being interpreted, Iser focuses attention on the relationship between the two symbolic registers, that of the object itself and that of the interpretation. He distinguishes between a number of different forms of interpretation, the most important for us being those he makes between interpretation performed through a hermeneutic circle and that performed through recursion. The hermeneutic circle treats the object under study as one whose various elements possess some sort of logical relationship to each other which provides the object with its unity and coherence. Thus one can test one’s interpretation of the whole object by seeing whether it also provides acceptable interpretations for the parts, or an interpretation of an author’s psychology by seeing how it corresponds to more general interpretations of the language the author is using. The hermeneutic circle is, of course, the basic interpretive method of literary studies and philology, since these fields take as basic working assumptions that a given text, the whole body of work of an author, and the language the author writes in each possess a positive unity that can be described through acts of interpretation.
Recursion, on the other hand, is a mode of interpretation developed for objects of study where one can distinguish between an input and an output to a system; interpretation through recursion seeks an interpretation such that given any particular input, the output can be predicted. Iser develops his notion of recursion from Clifford Geertz’s concept of thick description of human culture, and such an interpretive practice is particularly well adapted to interpretations of human action. Unlike texts, the actions of a human being or of a community of people do not have a single unified shape in toto. We do not understand a person’s actions only at their death, rather, we feel we understand their actions when we can sense a coherent unity between how they respond to various situations. That is, our interpretation of them accounts for the relationship between the information they take in and the actions they take, between input and output. From this perspective, any description of a person or a community is necessarily incomplete and an approximation, since there is no reason to believe that all significant inputs have been received and hence that one has seen the full range of action of the system. Recursion presumes an unobservable infinitude to the set of data. In contrast, while the hermeneutic circle may admit that the object could become more complete, actually discovering new data that belong to the object is likely to actually contradict a given interpretation. It therefore requires the notion of the lacuna: one seeks to know as well as possible what one knows one does not know, presenting it as a gap in a recognizable unity rather than as a missing boundary to that unity.
Structuralist anthropology has a significant potential for confusing these two modes of interpretation. In developing structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure posited that language consisted of two distinct but related phenomena: parole, the actual statements made in a particular language, and langue, the structure of the language which accounts for why statements in the language mean what they do. Langue, rather than parole, is the proper object of the study of language23. In one respect this is a completely unproblematic distinction, since for the products of the field of linguistics to be of any use, they need to be more systematic and compressed than the whole collection of things that the members of a linguistic community say. In this sense it is simply an example of interpretation through recursion, as newly studied data in the form of parole lead linguists to refine their notions of a langue that can accurately account for all the parole of that language.
The theoretical difficulty arises when the langue that linguists create is treated as the actual knowledge that enables the members of a linguistic community to produce parole.24 This is a black-box problem, a question of how well one can know the inner mechanism of an object that is opaque to direct observation solely by analyzing the effects of that mechanism on the outside world.25 This problem becomes far more important when structuralism is used in anthropology. Lévi-Strauss grounds his application of methods from structuralist linguistics to ethnographic data in his notion that cultural formations should possess a structure like that of language because both are products of the human mind.26 With this move, he rejects the possibility of a weak interpretation of what a derived structure describes; the structure derived from the action is explicitly not merely an economical means of describing the actions observed by an ethnologist, it is the actual structure of the minds of the people of the community. This focus on mental structure further implies that accounting for the contents of a person’s mind in purely semiotic terms is the best means of interpreting their actions, denying that issues of evaluation and negotiation might be significant elements of human action. From this perspective, function possesses the meaning it has in Vladimir Propp’s morphology of folktales, referring to actions as predicates that mark the relationship between the actors, rather than the purpose in the minds of the actors.
By adopting this perspective and schematizing action to such an extent that reaction and intention become meaningless, Vidal-Naquet assures that any statement he makes about the meaning of the black hunter will bear no relationship to the expressed aims of the black hunters he mentions. Because the demeanor of the black hunter contradicts that of the hoplite-citizen, he is Other; because contradiction can mean negation and negation can mean transition-to, the black hunter can be a pre-hoplite. Then all that is necessary is to offer a few cases in which the black hunter is a young man as exempla of this definition he is proposing.
In this elevation of possibility over purpose we begin to get some insight as to why structuralist interpretation of the action of adolescents would be appealing to classicists. The cultural products of the classical world are finite, in the sense that more may be discovered, but no more will ever be produced. The most straightforward way of interpreting classical culture is therefore with a hermeneutic circle: one uses the material that can be observed to grasp an often imperfect whole, whether a text, the corpus of an author, or a building being excavated. The paradigmatic image for what is not known is the lacuna, the space to be filled by the scholar’s creative ingenuity, and the most important guideline for this creative work is that of Sherlock Holmes, that once one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. Indeed, the philological training of most classical scholars leads them to value more highly the improbable, the lectio difficilior. A belief in the intellectual and artistic exceptionalism of the ancients and a legitimate fear that a significant but novel piece of data will be obscured by one’s preconceptions encourage a tendency to find ever more baroque orders of meaning in ancient material.
In contrast, the ethnographer has the task of finding the normal, of identifying preconceptions and prejudices that he is not familiar with, but which assign values to a much wider variety of activities than a scholar of the past can ever hope to observe. He can hardly expect to anticipate every action of his subject community, and so must seek to acquire a sense of which sorts of actions are the most successful in achieving the already highly coded ambitions of the various actors. Indeed, the ethnographer runs the risk that his own actions may seriously affect the way his subjects arrange their lives. Furthermore, because the living subjects of ethnographic study are often subject to Western political jurisdiction, one of the most controversial issues in anthropology today is the way in which ethnographic texts and anthropological theories have been incorporated into legal discourse as a means of identifying the primitive and aboriginal elements of societies.27 We can contrast this with the recent testimony of Martha Nussbaum and John Finnis in Colorado’s judicial conflicts over the “naturalness” of homosexual intercourse: while Nussbaum and Finnis disagreed profoundly over what “Greek attitudes” toward homosexuality were, neither ever showed any concern that by articulating their views in a legal forum they were in some way de-Hellenizing those future Ancient Greeks who might have different attitudes.28
Having delineated the chasm between traditional methods of studying ancient literature and the increasingly self-reflective approaches of ethnographic research, I should state immediately that I do not feel that this gap precludes the use of anthropological theory in the interpretation of ancient narrative. It does, however, demand that we only turn to narrative once we have found a way to answer the question of how narrative is like the social actions that anthropology thinks about. The most obvious answer to this question is that narrative is like social action in as much as it imitates social action. This is, in a sense, the inverse of Victor Turner’s notion of social action as a sort of drama. Turner finds it illuminating to address the way that social actions can be described as dramas in which the various participants each have roles in a series of events with a very specific order, meaning and climax. The mimetic function of narrative reverses this dramatic function of social action: while individuals can dramatize their concerns to others by modeling their actions on paradigms shared by their community, a narrative can make explicitly universalizing statements by delineating a fictive character in terms of those same shared paradigms.
The use of anthropological theory that addresses the recursive nature of social action actually focuses attention on an aspect of narrative that differentiates it from other forms of communication. Because the recursive modes of interpretation that anthropology aims at have the advantage of describing changes in systems by accounting for responses to situations that arise, they offer possibilities for describing how narrative communicates time, and does so by depicting action.29 The notion that understanding human action is fundamental to understanding a narrative is not in any way novel, and is taught as a basic communication skill both in school and informally. What anthropology (and other theories of social action) offer to this elementary way of interpreting narratives are some radically different notions of motivations and values.
We can see the value of such an approach if we turn back to the Philoctetes and focus on how the characters transform their relationships toward each other and toward the values they express over the course of the play. Above all, Sophocles presents the scheming of Odysseus and the changing attitudes of Neoptolemus toward honesty and friendship not as the ritual inversion that Vidal-Naquet proposes, but as problematic subjects requiring self-justification and debate. Neoptolemus, and presumably Sophocles, rejects Odysseus and the role of black hunter that Vidal-Naquet declares a necessary stage in order to become a man. While Vidal-Naquet refers to this aspect of the plot, he tries to minimize its significance by saying that Neoptolemus’ failure to obey Odysseus’ orders is somehow an indication that his initiation is actually at an end,30 creating the strange image of an initiatory ordeal that the initiand succeeds at by failing. The problem of Neoptolemus’ obedience to Odysseus becomes even more obvious and profound when we consider that there is no single act of defiance on the part of Neoptolemus, but a series of actions that undermine Odysseus’ plans, some of which are not intentionally acts of disobedience.
Carefully examining the actions and goals of the characters in the play allows us to see the artistry of Sophocles that transcends such a simple pattern. Neoptolemus undertakes Odysseus’ plan, and wins over Philoctetes, by promising falsely to take him back to Greece, to keep his bow from falling into the hands of Odysseus and to not leave him behind on Lemnos (219–538). When Philoctetes is unconscious and Neoptolemus has the bow, the youth pities him and does not steal the bow (836–67). When he is taking Philoctetes to his ship, Neoptolemus decides he cannot keep up the deception and tells him they are going to Troy, which results in Philoctetes demanding the return of his bow so he can stay on Lemnos (882–924). Neoptolemus at first decides to take the bow and go to Troy with it (1054–80), but cannot do it, and resists Odysseus in order to do what he believes is right and return the bow (1221–92). He tries again to persuade Philoctetes to come to Troy, but when this fails, he resolves to honor his earlier promise and return Philoctetes to Greece, even though it will mean becoming an enemy of the whole Greek army (1308–1408). At this point Heracles appears and sends them both to Troy (1409–51).
The issues of deception, obedience and honor in the play are knotty, but clearly delineated. Neoptolemus is capable of disobedience if it is honorable, but is so incapable of dishonesty that he ends up fulfilling the “false” promises he made under Odysseus’ direction, and truly becomes the friend to Philoctetes he initially claimed to be. While the complex interactions between Neoptolemus, Philoctetes and Odysseus deserve far more analysis than I am giving them here, this cursory examination of Neoptolemus and his actions shows plainly that the Greek army, through its agent Odysseus, cannot simply take control of Neoptolemus to achieve its ends, that the very nature which is needed to overthrow Troy resists such manipulation. The marginal location of the events, and Philoctetes’ separation from civilization, seem particularly significant as a setting in which Neoptolemus can challenge the legitimacy of the Greek leadership at the same time as he continues to embrace its cause, by allowing him to see the effects of that leadership’s decisions from a critical distance. Sophocles presents a hero with a unique claim to respect and a good reputation, rather than a youth who is shaped to embody the values that predominate on the campaign against Troy.
By focusing on the mimetic quality of narrative we can recognize how the poets, by ascribing particular actions and goals to characters, present events as unique as those we have seen in the Philoctetes, Rituals and institutions involving adolescents will be useful for such study, not as paradigms in themselves, but as statements made in the same language of beliefs and ideology as the narratives, declarations made by whole cities rather than by an individual poet. But other institutions may be of equal value for making sense of the narratives, since there is no a priori reason why attitudes that connect marginality and status in the stories of young men need be unrelated to the attitudes embodied in other institutions involving marginality and status transition. Instead, in those myths in which a young man appears to undergo some rite of passage, it may well be more useful to work from a paradox that led Van Gennep to formulate his theory of rites de passage, namely that achieving a new status inside a community may require that a number of events take place outside it.
This pattern relies on an opposition between inside and outside that serves as a useful point of contact between narrative and a variety of theories of social action. The metaphorical application of this spatial opposition to social situations is a common human practice: people frequently use various criteria to determine whether some person or object is more inside or outside their society relative to other people or objects. As a result, concepts derived from this opposition, such as “the center” and “the periphery” of a society, as well as “marginality,” are important in a number of theories of cultural anthropology, sociology, and the history of religion.31 By addressing the location of characters and events in terms of whether they are inside or outside their communities, it becomes possible to adapt the full range of these theories to interpretation of poetic narrative. This focus on location in relation to various communities has the further advantage of creating more points of contact between narratives and the cultural world that gave them their significance, since the relationship between interior and exterior of communities is important in a wide range of Greek institutions, from athletics to the relationship between the sexes. As we consider a range of social institutions, we can see how poets constructed plots that described unique events but appealed to the common experience of the audience. By drawing on a variety of paradigms for their heroes’ situations, the poets produced narratives that are, in a sense, initiations of the protagonist, but not so much into adulthood in general as into the future they will enjoy as heroes and great kings.
Only as we examine such narratives individually will we have an adequate opportunity to observe how stories of young men express concerns tied uniquely to their youth, since we will be able to recognize recurring patterns that differ from the more general issues involved in obtaining status, without having to rely too heavily on our obscured knowledge of Greek adolescence. In the research I have so far been able to carry out along these lines I have already found one unanticipated, but not improbable, similarity between stories of this type. Many of these narratives share an interest in heredity and the problems a family faces as a father tries to hand down his place in society to his son, in particular in the possibility that such a transfer can be unjustly interrupted.32 This is in fact a concern that was recognizably addressed in real adolescent transitions (most notably the koureion rite in the phratries of Attica), but it has not been foregrounded because of our limited information about such rites. This outcome suggests that it is not the categories of adolescence and marginality, or even the insights of those who have combined them into “initiation” that are the greatest barrier to the mutual interpretation of ritual and narrative, but a tendency to see these categories as recipes instead of classification tools. A useful analogy may be the distinction between mode and theme in music: adolescence and marginality, as conceptual categories used by nearly all human beings, lay out “notes” that are available to everyone, but the “themes” that individuals express through them are both infinite in variety and shared among the members of specific communities. The social sciences can offer us a sense of the resources ancients (and moderns) used to express their concerns, but our greatest satisfactions as scholars are likely to come as we grasp the various specific statements that poets, artists, communities, and individuals communicated by means of these resources.
1 For instance, Simon Goldhill, in Easterling, ed. (1997) 335, declares that such models show how “tragedy manipulates and explores ritual patterns to express a sense of order and disorder in the world.”
2 See the beginning of Graf’s essay in this volume, for a short account of how the Latin initiatio came to be used for rituals involving adolescents.
3 Jeanmaire (1939); Brelich (1969).
4 First published as Vidal-Naquet (1968) and then revised for inclusion in Vidal-Naquet (1981) 151–75. References to this essay will be to Vidal-Naquet (1986a) 106–28, the English translation of Vidal-Naquet (1981) 151–75.
5 Saussure (1972) 117–18.
6 Since it is not necessary for my argument, I have not evaluated the validity of the “black hunter” model itself, however, Benedetto (1978) 202–7 and Leitao (1993) 23–8, have raised serious questions about Vidal-Naquet’s methods and conclusions. The essence of these criticisms is summed up well in a remark of Benedetto’s: after presenting an observation of Brelich’s on the difficulty of discovering the origins of the Athenian institution of the ephebia he notes, “Una cautela critica di questo genere è totalmente estranea al modo di lavorare del Vidal-Naquet, che invece procede a passi di gigante” (203). Those who wish to travel as far as possible in their readings of Greek poetry will find Vidal-Naquet’s conclusions exhilarating, but those who hope to remain in Greece may prefer another mode of transportation.
7 Graf in this volume.
8 Vidal-Naquet (1986) 147–51.
9 Theseus in Bacchylides 18: Ieranò (1987) 91–2; Jason in Pindar’s Pythian 4: Segal (1986) 57–9; Ion in Euripides’ Ion: Goff (1988) 45–7; Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus: Goff (1990) 4 and Goldhill (1986) 120.
10 Burnett (1970) 6; Hubbard (1987) 5; Carnes (1996) 25.
11 Segal (1979) 34; Ieranò (1989) 168–9; Burnett (1985) 29–31; Krummen (1990) 201.
12 Segal (1979) 137–8.
13 Vidal-Naquet (1988), a translation of Vidal-Naquet (1971).
14 Vidal-Naquet (1988) 171–2.
15 This institution is described in Plato Laws 633b-c, the scholia to this passage, Plutarch Lycurgus 28.1–3, and Heraclides Ponticus FHG 2 p. 210.
16 There is disagreement in our sources about what this nakedness entailed: Plato Laws 633c mentions going barefoot and sleeping without bedding; the scholia to Plato Laws 633b says they were naked and traveled without servants or provisions, living by theft; Plutarch Lycurgus 28.2 has them provided only with daggers and minimal provisions; and Heraclides Ponticus FHG 2 p. 210 describes them as fully armed. Levy (1988) 251–2, suggests that this might reflect two stages in the career of the kryptos, a period of testing in the wilderness followed by service as “des sortes de commandos, utilises aussi bien pour terroriser les hilotes et éliminer certains que pour des missions de reconnaissance a la guerre.” Such a solution, however, ignores how Plutarch’s account involves both a form of nakedness and violence against helots. Given the emphasis on secrecy in this institution, we should perhaps be content with a certain amount of ambiguity in our sources.
17 Vidal-Naquet (1986) 113–14.
18 Plato Laws 633b-c, and the scholiast on this passage. It is worth mentioning that Plato put this description of the krypteia in the mouth of the Spartan Megillus.
19 Plutarch (Lycurgus 28.3) supports his description of the murder of helots in the krypteia with Thucydides’ account (4.80) of how the Spartans once determined who the 2000 most spirited helots were, and had them killed in such a way that “no one knew how each one was killed.”
20 The task of persuading the world of classical scholarship that the krypteia ought to be read as a mechanism of state terror rather than as an initiation has recently become easier with the publication of Paul Cartledge (2001). His essay “A Spartan Education” brings his extensive learning to bear on this issue, especially on page 88, and more or less proves what I had managed to intuit from my more limited reading.
21 Vidal-Naquet (1986) 147–8.
22 Iser (2000).
23 Saussure (1972) 8–15.
24 Saussure has no real interest in this point, apparently because he is so content with the theoretical power he has gained in distinguishing langue and parole. To be fair to his achievement, however, I should note that he does understand the phenomenon of language as something that is social and pragmatic, he merely has no interest in studying these dimensions of language. Specifically, his references to the process of training in language that a child undergoes (1972: 14) and to an undefined “collective consciousness” (1972: 98) ought to be of some comfort to those friends of structuralism and semiotics who see these practices as a necessary prelude to intelligent discussion of the political dimensions of language and other sign-systems.
25 For a highly skeptical account of black-box approaches to the functioning of the human mind, see Searle (1984).
26 Lévi-Strauss (1963) 71.
27 For example, see Povinelli (1998) and the response to it by Frow and Morris (1999).
28 Both published articles defending the views they expressed in their testimony: Nussbaum (1994) and Finnis (1995).
29 Ricoeur (1984) 52–87.
30 Vidal-Naquet (1988) 172.
31 For the purposes of my own work I have found most useful Edward Shils’ notion of central values in relation to the center and peripheries of societies (1961, 1965), Victor Turner’s idea of the liminal (1967, 1969), Mary Douglas’s discussion of the role of the marginal in concepts of pollution (1970: 137–53), and Clifford Geertz’s conception of royal courts as ideological centers for Javanese culture (1983: 122–3).
32 Dodd (1999).