Материал: Myth A Very Short Introduction by Robert A. Segal

As for the domestic lives of Greek tyrants, whom Herodotus acknowledges but deems aberrations, Periandros of Corinth murders his wife, deposes his father-in-law, and dispossesses his one talented son (Herodotus 3.50.3–3.52.6). Peisistratos of Athens refuses to have ‘normal’ sex with his second wife because he fears a curse upon her family (Herodotus 1.61.1).

Adonis is incapable of citizenship because he, like the tyrants, is incapable of family life. On the one hand he fosters no family: he never marries, has no children, and dies young. On the other hand he is born into no family: he is the child of incest, not marriage, and his father tries to kill his mother. He is thus barred doubly from citizenship: he lacks not only maturity but also a pedigree, itself the result of the immaturity of his mother. If Herodotus testifies to the political necessity of siring a family, the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians testifies to the political necessity of descending from one: ‘the right of citizenship belongs to those whose parents have been citizens’.

Until Cleisthenes in 507 bc changed the basis of Athenian citizenship from kinship to locale, membership in a phratry, or kinship group, was prerequisite. Even after the deme, which was a matter of locale, replaced the phratry as the prime political unit, the phratry remained important. Though a fourth-century Athenian, for example, could be a citizen without belonging to a phratry,

his position would be both ‘uncomfortable and questionable’. Moreover, membership in the deme was itself hereditary. Consequently, citizenship remained a matter of birth, as the

Constitution of the Athenians, referring to the time after Cleisthenes, states.

The Greeks linked immaturity not only to politics but also to hunting. Adonis’ haplessness at hunting would have symbolized his haplessness at adulthood. He becomes the hunted instead of the hunter. He has no conception of hunting and of its dangers. Either he thinks the world maternal, or he thinks himself protected from it

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by maternal goddesses. To Venus’ warnings that dangerous animals respect neither youth nor beauty, he is deaf.

The tie between human and hunter becomes a metaphor for the tie between human and citizen. Pierre Vidal-Naquet

(b. 1930) suggests that hunting was a key aspect of the two-year military stint that, according to the Constitution of the Athenians, Athenian youths were required to undergo before citizenship. Vidal-Naquet argues that those years were a rite of passage and therefore involved a break with the life that the youths, or ephebes, both had known until now and would know afterwards. The ephebes thus spent their years at the frontier rather than in the city and spent them with one another rather than with their families.

Above all, claims Vidal-Naquet, the adolescent ephebes engaged in a brand of hunting that was the opposite of the brand that, as adult hoplites, they would soon be undertaking. As ephebes, they hunted individually, in the mountains, at night, and armed only with nets – thereby relying on trickery to capture their prey. As hoplites, they would be hunting in a group, on the plain, during the day, and armed with spears – thus relying on courage and skill to kill their prey. The contrast between the hunting of ephebes and the hunting of hoplites served to inculcate hoplite values in the ephebes.

Vidal-Naquet’s evidence for the link of the ephebeia with hunting is twofold. He appeals, first, to the myth associated with the Apatouria, the festival at which Athenian fathers registered their sixteen-year-old sons as at once citizens, members of phratries, and ephebes for two years. Vidal-Naquet asserts that the subject of the myth, the Athenian Melanthos, or ‘Black One’, is a negative model for the ephebes: he is an ephebe who never becomes a hoplite. Even as an adult, he resorts to deceit rather than

courage or skill to defeat his opponent, the Boeotian King Xanthos (the ‘Blond One’).

I wish to tell you a story I once heard when I was still a boy:

how there was once a youth, by the name of Melanion,

who, eschewing marriage, went away to live in the mountains. He spent the time hunting hares,

for which he set snares, and he had a dog,

and he hated women so much that he never went home again. Melanion loathed women, and so, no less than he,

do we, the wise.

(Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 781–96)

The connection between Melanion and the ephebeia is both that Melanion, as a fellow black character, has all of the dark associations of Melanthos, and that Melanion is an ephebe-like hunter who never marries.

If one extrapolates from Melanthos as fighter to him as hunter, both he and Melanion succeed at hunting of only an adolescent variety. But Adonis is worse: he fails at hunting of any kind. He is thus not, like Melanthos and Melanion, merely an adolescent who never advances to adulthood but an infant who never even advances to childhood. The severity of his failure as a hunter signifies the severity of his failure as a citizen. The myth preaches citizenship, just by a conspicuously negative example.

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