A IDADE DOS HOMENS NA GRÉCIA ANTIGA

A IDADE DOS HOMENS NA GRÉCIA ANTIGA

 

Em complemento à minha publicação de ontem sobre a classificação etária dos homens na Grécia Antiga, transcrevo uma parcela do capítulo “Age-Classes, Love-Rules and Corrupting the Young”, sub-capítulo “What is a ‘Young Man’? what is a Boy”, do livro The Greeks and Greek Love, do professor James Davidson, da Universidade de Warwick (páginas 78-79):

«Now alongside all these set-names are names for grades, i.e. the particular status a set achieves when it reaches a certain age. This double system of titles, according to both set and grade reached, threw Western observers into confusion when they first came across age-class societies in Africa, for sets might take their titles not from heroes, Arthurians, Panopticians, etc. but from animals, say, or sometimes more picturesque – “those who ignore their fathers”, impervious to hexes” etc. It might be seen something of  a relief therefore that Athenians grade which we can reconstruct with a reasonable, if not total, amount of certainty are so transparent-seeming:

A – Under-Eighteen: Boys (paides)

B – Eighteen and Nineteen: Striplings (meirakia or neaniskoi = Stripling-in-the-Gymnasium/Officer Cadets?)

C – Twenty+: Men (andres)

i – Twenty to Twenty-Nine: Young Men (neoi)

ii – Thirty+: Seniors (presbutai – as in Presbyterian, a church ruled by its seniors)

 

But in fact “normal sounding” words for civic grades create lots of problems. For instance, we are told by some technical writers who had probably read Aristophanes of Byzantium’s lost  treatise on age-terms that in Sparta teenagers were given a different grade name for every year, corresponding roughly to UK “fourth-former, fifth-former…” up to “…finalist”. Most of these are unique, odd-sounding or archaic terms – mikkizomenos (“littl’un”?), rhobidas(?), meleiren (“about to be eirên” = about to be a Twenty-Something”). One year grade, however, the rough equivalent of “freshman”, was called simply “Boys”: in Sparta boys are called Boys when they are Eighteen. How do you know if a Spartan “boy” referred to by an Athenian writer like Xenophon is an Eighteen-year-old Spartan Boy, an Athenian under-Eighteen Boy, or just a generic boy? Thucydides is clearly using the Athenian age-class term when he pointedly observes that Alcibiades in his early Thirties would have been “still young in another polis”. What he means is “he would still have been in the grade of Young Man in another polis” and therefore ineligible to became a general and to lead the disastrous Sicilian expedition. But elsewhere the same term might just mean “young person”. Here is Socrates, executed for, among other things, “corrupting the youth” (literally “destroying the neoi”, the “Young Men”), disingenuously asking what grade he is not allowed to corrupt: “Until what age are people young [neoi]?” “So long as they are ineligible to sit on the Council” is the reply. “Don’t even have a conversation with anyone under Thirty”.

 

O assunto é realmente complexo, mas também se conclui desta transcrição que o autor não procurou simplificar; pelo contrário, a prosa parece intencionalmente confusa, quando deveria ser clara para a boa compreensão do leitor.

Ou então, apesar da sua erudição, James Davidson não sabe escrever um texto legível.