> [[goh]]. "The poetics of chariot driving and rites of passage in ancient Greece". Dissertation. Harvard. ## Abstract > This dissertation analyzes the representation of chariot-driving as a metaphor for coming of age in literature and art of the archaic and classical Greece. Youth is represented as a glamorous yet precarious time in which all the possibilities of ideal adulthood are poised to be unleashed and the image of chariot driving conveys this allure, excitement, and the anxiety inherent in coming of age. Since adulthood is a culturally defined concept, however, coming of age also involves coming to an understanding of a nexus of related notions, such as social agency, citizenship, legitimacy, and sexuality. Accordingly, narratives about rites of passage define, explore, and question these concepts. Such narratives contributes to the larger cultural discourse about self and society and reveals a complex set of assumptions and problems articulated in that discourse. I begin by examining the poetics of chariots in divine epiphanies, Homeric battle scenes, races, and journeys. I show the distinction between divine chariot driving and human chariot driving. As a vehicle that evokes the heroic past to provide continuity with the present, the chariot is an ideal conveyor of ceremony. In chapter 2, I explore how the representation of young eromenoi as charioteers in lyric poetry explores the ambiguous boundary between childhood, when youths are conceptually not yet male, autonomous, nor citizens, and adulthood, marked by masculinity, agency, and authority. The impression of control suggested by the image of the charioteer plays on the ambiguous status of young men in their hôra. The erotically charged image of the chariot also conveys the idealized beauty associated with those in the bloom of youth. In chapter 3, I argue that chariot driving functions as a sign of legitimacy in Athenian tragedy. In Euripides' Hippolytus, the fragmentary Chrysippus and the Phaethon, chariot accidents are closely associated with illegitimate young men. Youths in danger of losing their inheritance, such as Orestes in Sophocles' Electra, imagine a death in a chariot crash. The last chapter examines a narrative that evoke a coming of age and an apotheosis. The Elean philosopher Parmenides introduces his philosophical discourse with the image of a young man on a divine chariot. By comparing this depiction with Herodotus' narrative about the return of the tyrant Pisistratus and Heracles' apotheosis, I show how philosophical and political authority is negotiated by goddesses as chariot drivers. ## Identifier ISBN: 0496790897 ISBN: 9780496790890