The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens by Matthew Shipton (review)

The role of young people, or youth, should be taken seriously by classical scholars. This compelling argument is at the core of Shipton’s monograph. Shipton argues that, to date, while youth have been considered as a category by classics scholars, they have been poorly understood. Scholars frequently adopt what Shipton terms the “Aristophanic view” of youth, namely that all young people are “argumentative, insubordinate, and prone to violence” (141). This reduction of youth and age relations to a caricature is particularly problematic as these themes occur in nearly every tragedy of the classical period—in fact, youth and age relations are ubiquitous characteristics of the tragic landscape.

Shipton ably demonstrates the fallacy of these assumptions in his readings of a series of Greek tragedies of the classical period: Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Heraclidae, Orestes, Bacchae, and Iphigeneia at Aulis. Shipton’s fresh readings of these tragedies illustrate a wide range of often contradictory views of the role of youth in society: in Antigone it seems that age is not just a number, as the youthful Haemon and his father Creon alternatively exhibit characteristics associated with youth and maturity, while in Philoctetes Neoptolemus is on the one hand controlled and manipulated by Odysseus, and on the other hand is depicted as an indecisive young man caught between the identities exemplified by his father, Achilles, and Odysseus. The Orestes depicts the formation of a closely-knit group of three youths, Orestes, Electra, and Pylades, who unite against those in authority who would condemn their execution of Clytemnestra as unjust, and indeed, condemn them to death as a punishment. The group, formed in opposition to wider society, channels their energies towards violent action after being rejected by Menelaus, in that they plan to kill Helen, kidnap Hermione, and ultimately burn Menelaus’ palace to the ground.

Shipton demonstrates that depictions of youth in Greek tragedy cannot be reduced to the caricature promulgated by Aristophanes: while youth and age relations play a role in nearly all Greek tragedies of the classical period, they are themes that manifest themselves in a dizzying diversity of images of what it meant to be a young person in classical Greece, as well as how young people interacted with their elders and those in authority. One explanation for this diversity of interpretations, Shipton suggests, is that the plays reflect the shifting view of youth in society throughout the tumultuous fifth century BCE. Sophocles’ Antigone, Shipton posits, was likely performed during a period characterized by new social forces, which fostered a softening of negative attitudes towards youth, while Euripides’ Orestes uses the group formed by Orestes, Electra, and Pylades as an analogy for the hetaeriae, exclusive clubs defined by age, violence, and a political aim. Both groups used violence and sacrilege as ways of expressing their newly formed identity, striking against authority.

The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy demonstrates the shifting range of views of youth in ancient Greece, which inevitably reflected and refracted the changing political environment. The core of this monograph is certainly Shipton’s reading of youth and age-related dynamics in a range of tragic plays: these readings are thought-provoking, and they present new interpretations of some well-trodden territory. Shipton’s argument, moreover, is convincingly presented in a concise manner; the individual chapters, none longer than twenty pages, would be an excellent accompaniment to these plays in the undergraduate classroom. Hopefully, the challenge presented by Shipton—that we consider youth as a category seriously, as we have come to consider the categories of gender, slavery, ethnicity, and economic status—will be taken up by other scholars, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of the role of youth in classical Greek society.