Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

The terms used to describe women were so slippery that to avoid misunderstandings Athenians had to resort to various, often revealing, circumlocutions. Instead of simply gunē, a wife might be described as a gunē gametē, ‘a married wife’, or even a gunē gametē kata tous nomous, ‘a wife married according to the laws’. A hetaera could be more closely defined as ‘one of those women that are hired out’ or ‘one of those women who run to the symposia for ten drachmas’.12 It was in law, however, that the categorization of women became a matter of vital necessity. Adultery carried heavy penalties in Athens. One antique law from the Draconian code (c. 621 BCE) allowed a man caught in the act of having sex with another man’s woman (wife, daughter, mother, sister, concubine) to be slaughtered on the spot. It was thus a matter of some importance to define those women with whom one could copulate in safety and so another ancient law, ascribed to Solon (c. 594), specified the women who fell outside the law’s protection, referring not to pornai, but to ‘those who sit in a brothel or those who walk to and fro in the open’.13

STREETS

As we have seen, space in antiquity was rarely a neutral concept and its silent dispositions were very often charged with symbolic meaning and ideological distinctions. On the personal level this might involve the opposition between right and left that governs the morality of eating. On a grander scale it provided separate domains for gods and goddesses within the territory of the polis, the cultivated spaces of Demeter, the marginal mountains, meadows and woods that belonged to Artemis and Pan, and the citadels of Athena. One of the most carefully delineated zones within the city was the zone of Hestia centred on hearth and home, opposed to the sphere of Hermes god of the threshold, of the paths that led from it, and of luck.14 According to this stark symbolic opposition, the women of the streets stood at the farthest remove from the world of the wife who kept to the interiors, ‘trusty guardian of what’s inside’, as Apollodorus puts it. Women who wanted to preserve a reputation for decency rarely strayed out of doors except under pressing necessity and a thick cloak; public activities, such as politics and shopping, were the province of men. Women of the streets therefore lived on the wrong side of the threshold and advertised their availability by submitting to the public gaze. They carried their homelessness in their names, which convey in terse slang something of the monotony of life on foot: ‘bridge-woman’ (gephuris), ‘runner’ (dromas), ‘wanderer’ (peripolas), ‘alley-treader’ (spodesilaura), ‘ground-beaters’, ‘foot-soldiers’.15 They form an anonymous mass of women, faceless ‘ranks’, or ‘droves’.

Not surprisingly, these women have left little trace apart from their nicknames in the historical record. A roofless existence and a nomadic lifestyle were not productive of long-lasting monuments. But the casual remarks of observers indicate that ‘women who walk to and fro in the open’ were still very much a feature of the urban landscape long after Solon made them an exception. Xenophon, for instance, records Socrates in the late fifth century observing that the streets of Athens were full of such safety-valves for ‘releasing the pressures of lust’.16 More evidence for this form of prostitution can be gleaned from speeches and comedies casting aspersions on the sexual morality of male politicians. This often obscene innuendo takes us a little beyond mere speculation and sheds some light on the alfresco shadowlands of Athenian sexuality.

Most revealing of all is Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus of Sphettus, whom he accused of having been a common prostitute. It seems quite clear that Aeschines in fact had very little evidence to substantiate his allegations and he relies instead on rumour and insinuation, recalling in particular an event at a meeting of the Council some months previously. Timarchus was lecturing the committee on the need to strengthen the city’s defences, but the grave atmosphere had been punctured by giggles whenever he mentioned the ‘walls’, or ‘a tower’ in need of repair or someone being ‘led off somewhere’. Since Aeschines uses this laughter to prove that the defendant’s activities as a common prostitute were common knowledge, it seems clear that the places mentioned were known to be the favoured haunts of ‘ground-beaters’ and ‘alley-treaders’. At a general Assembly of the People held on a winter morning some time later, Autolycus, a distinguished member of the august Areopagus, decided to take issue with Timarchus’ proposals: ‘You must not be surprised, fellow-citizens,’ he began, ‘if Timarchus is better acquainted than the members of the Areopagus with this deserted area and the region of the Pnyx … we can make some such allowance as this for Timarchus: he thought that where everything is so quiet, there will be but little expense for each of you.’ Immediate applause and cheers and loud laughter. Autolycus does not quite get the joke. He frowns and continues, but when he comes to the question of the ‘derelict buildings’ and ‘the wells’, the whole Assembly degenerates into a riot. ‘Fortunately the modern reader is spared a knowledge of the double-entente that made the vulgar listeners laugh –’, claims Charles Darwin Adams in a footnote to his translation of this passage, but if he or she bears in mind that Timarchus was formally charged with prostitution at the same meeting, the modern reader should not find the ancient allusions quite so opaque. Lakkos, a well or a cistern, is the most straightforward to decipher. It was used of prostitutes, referring apparently to their enormous sexual capacity, or, more graphically, to their passive reception of effluvia.17

City walls, on the other hand, in many times and places have had a reputation as areas for quick and surreptitious sexual transactions, and where they still stand they still do, but here perhaps ‘the walls’ and the ‘tower’ might refer more specifically to the red-light district of Athens, the Ceramicus, lying in the north-west around the main entrance to the city, the double Dipylon gate. The Ceramicus took its name originally from the potters who used to dominate the district, but it was distinguished also for the splendid monumental tombs that lined the roads out of Athens, taking the initiated to celebrate the Mysteries at Eleusis, or leading would-be philosophers to the gymnasium of Academy for a session with Plato. When later commentators explained its significance to their readers, however, they fixed on a quite different local feature: ‘a place at Athens where prostitutes (pornai) stood’ was the usual succinct gloss. This green and tranquil park is one of the quieter archaeological sites in Athens, but a passage from Aristophanes’ Knights helps to bring it noisily to life: the Sausage-seller having knocked the chief demagogue off his perch thinks up a suitable punishment for him: ‘he will have my old job, a solitary sausage-selling franchise at the gates, blending dog meat with asses’ parts, getting drunk and exchanging unpleasantries with the whores, and then quenching his thirst with dirty-water from the baths.’ ‘Yes, an excellent idea. That’s all he’s good for, outbawling the bath attendants and the whores.’18 Some of the prostitutes lining the streets will have had beds in the brothels nearby, others may have made do with the nearby cemetery itself, enabling Aristophanes to concoct a gross combination of two extra-mural activities, mourning and whoring, in another piece of invective against a public figure: ‘Amidst the tombs, I hear, Cleisthenes’ boy bends over, plucking the hair from his arse, tearing at his beard … and crying out.’19 In Peace Aristophanes outdoes even this gross image and reveals in passing that Athens’ port, the Piraeus, was another popular zone for street-women. Flying high above the city on the back of a dung-beede on a mission to rescue the goddess Peace, Trygaeus catches sight of ‘a man defecating amongst the prostitutes in the Piraeus’, a disaster if his coprophiliac transport should catch the smell.20 He calls down to the man quickly to dig a hole, plant around it aromatic thyme and drench it in myrrh.

By the late sixth century if not before, the boisterous street-walkers had competition from the more tuneful aulētrides. Often called ‘flute-girls’, the double-reeded and frequently double-piped aulos they played was closer in timbre to an oboe or shawm. The Greeks likened it to the buzzing of wasps at the lower end of its range and the honking of geese on the high notes. Pollux the lexicographer put together a list of Attic words used to describe it: ‘wailing, enticing, lamenting’.21 Along with other music-girls the aulētrides played an important role at the symposium, entertaining the guests with music at the beginning and with sex at the end of the party, but just as often they are to be found out of doors, in the docks of the Piraeus where ‘just past puberty they take a fee and no time at all to sap the strength of cargo men’ or in Athens ‘smiling at you on streetcorners’; clearly it was possible to have sex with a flute-girl without taking her to a party first.22 Unlike the solipsistic lyre which accompanied poetic introversion and repose, the aulos was usually found providing music for working and moving, more particularly for moving off in the dancing-lines of the procession and the march.23 It possessed a supernatural power to take over the body; when the aulos played, men forgot themselves. The showpiece orator of the Roman period, ‘Goldenmouthed’ Dio, tells the story of the great flautist Timotheus performing for Alexander. Alexander was so excited by the tones of the music and by the rhythm of the playing that he got to his feet at once and rushed for his weapons like one possessed. Even animals were susceptible to its charms. It was said that the decadent Sybarites made the mistake of acquainting their horses with the sound of flutes and watched helplessly when in mid-battle the cavalry started dancing to the enemies’ tune, waltzing off into the opposite camp. In the ancient world all flutes were half way to being magic ones.24 The flute was an important element in the symposium, providing the rhythm for the mixing and distributing of the wine as well as the singing, but in many ways this narrow space of horizontal drunkenness was rather restricting for the aulos. One medical writer knew of a man who was thrown into a panic whenever he heard its tone within the andrōn’s narrow confines. It was outside, on the street, that the flute-girls really came into their element, in the kōmos, a conga of revellers that took the drinking-party out into the city on expeditions of riot and debauch.25

We hear of ‘training-schools for flute-girls’ where old men like Isocrates thought young men were spending too much time, but Plato implies they could not play very well, and it was not generally for their musical skill that they were so popular.26 Although a few among them rose to the highest ranks of the courtesans, it seems quite clear that flute-girls were always considered among the cheapest and most despised of hired women. By the fourth century aulētris is used almost as a synonym for ‘cheap prostitute’.27 Crucially they shared the same space as the ground-beaters, in the Piraeus, on the streets, or under the walls, providing musical accompaniment when the battlements were torn down in 404 after the victory of Sparta.28 It was not long before the ramparts rose again, of course, to provide Athens with seclusion, but for about ten years the city, too, knew what it was like to be on the outside.

The streets could be rough. Fighting over prostitutes was a commonplace of low-life escapades and flute-girls were especially vulnerable to being mauled by competing males. Demosthenes refers casually to a member of the board of archons, the thesmothetai, who had been involved in a punch-up while attempting to carry off a flute-girl. In Wasps Aristophanes stages just such a tug-of-war with a father on one side, his son on the other, and a naked aulētris, stolen from a party, in between. In Achamians he reduces the origins of the Peloponnesian War from a high-minded feud over sacred land to a squalid dispute over pornai, and makes a straightforward equation between naval expeditions, flute-girls and black-eyes.29 So long as these fights were confined to the symposium, it was a private matter to be sorted out in a private law-suit. On the streets, however, there was a serious problem of public order, and the Astynomoi, a board of ten responsible for keeping the highways of the city open and clear, were empowered by law to sort out disputes peacefully, making sure that the flute-girls and other musicians did not themselves profit from the demand for their services. A maximum fee for the night was set at two drachmas. If more than one man wanted the same woman the matter was setted by drawing lots; she herself was not consulted.30 This was not an idle statute and we know of prosecution through the heavy-handed mechanism of eisangelia (public impeachment) against men who paid more than the law allowed.31

The other duties of the Astynomoi involved disposing of the corpses of those who died in the street and making sure the shit-collectors dumped their shit at a requisite distance from the city walls, and this seems a fair summary of the spatial, administrative and symbolic position of street-women in Athens, occupying the places where bathmen poured the effluent of public baths, where those who needed to might take a casual crap, where the city buried its dead. A street-woman was not just on the streets, she was somehow of the streets as well, a ‘public thoroughfare’ in the words of the poet Anacreon, a public convenience for bodily functions, a ‘cistern’ for collecting the effluent of surplus sexual desire.32

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