Boy Performers: Pueri maiores et minores in the lusus Troiae

This article reappraises the pueri maiores et minores formula used by Suetonius to designate the boys who performed the lusus Troiae, a ritual mock battle and paramilitary parade staged by two squadrons of boys at public ceremonies. Modern scholarship has mostly read maiores and minores as an age distinction («older» and «younger» respectively). The article challenges this view on several grounds: the physical and equestrian training the ceremony demanded, the attested dangers at performances of the game, the absence in Latin sources of any division of pueritia into older and younger phases, and the correction of the supposed age threshold for congiaria from eleven to fourteen. It instead revives and tests Theodor Mommsen’s largely overlooked suggestion that the terms reflect the division of the patriciate into gentes maiores and gentes minores. By examining the six attested republican performances, from Sulla’s dictatorship to Octavian’s sole rule, alongside early imperial instances, it demonstrates that ancient authors consistently foreground the boy performers’ social standing rather than their age, and that admission to the turmae tracked contemporary political agendas and adlectiones to the patriciate. The lusus Troiae thus presented boys publicly as the future ruling elite.