Ephebos

Ephebos (often in the plural epheboi), also anglicized as ephebe (plural: ephebi), is a Greek word for an adolescent age group or a social status reserved for that age in Antiquity.

Though the word can simply refer to the adolescent age of young men of training age (especially in the gymnasion, for intellectual, moral and physical education) its main use is for the members, exclusively from that age group, of an official institution (called ephebia) that saw to building them into citizens (at least in democracies, as Athens) but especially training them as soldiers, sometimes already sent into the field - the Greek city state (polis) mainly depended, as the Roman republic before Marius's reform, on its militia of citizens for its defense.

The shared experience of the occasionally harsh (the rod was never spared in ancient education- e.g. the Spartan crypteia), but prestigious (showed off in art and parading, as in religious festivals) training doubtlessly had a similar social-bonding and 'old boys'- networking effect as the British public school.

Ephebus

In Rome, where the (mainly Patrician) elite were often sent to Greece or received Greek (slave or hired) teachers, the Greek word was adopted in the latinized form ephebus (plural ephebi), and fixed at the age bracket of 16 to 20.

See also

*ephebophilia
*ephebiphobia

Ephebus also occurs as an individual name, as in the cases of:
*a martyr Ephebus, in the central Italian city of Terni
*Claudius Ephebus, mentioned in the letter to the Corinthians, chapter 59, as a messenger of the Apostle Paul, sent to the Greek city of Corinth along with Valerius Bito and Fortunatus

Sources and references

*Pauly-Wissowa