Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ it easier than most to fade into decent obscurity), but they certainly existed, providing an important bridge between Wives and the Rest and muddying masculine distinctions.¹⁰ One cannot help thinking that this dogmatic distinction is a way for scholars to avoid dealing with prostitution altogether and helps to account for the astonishing lack of research in a subject which sits at the intersection of two of the biggest growth areas in modern classics, the study of women and the study of sexuality.

      Instead of two stark groups of women and one great undifferentiated mass of sex-workers I want in the next couple of chapters to emphasize the diversity and complexity of the sex market in Athens and to re-establish the importance of the hetaera. There were numerous gradations between the miserable life of the streets and the comfortable existence of the most successful courtesans, quietly encroaching on the territory of the legitimate family and causing consternation to Apollodorus and his fellow-citizens. To talk of ‘mistresses’ and ‘courtesans’ may risk glamorizing, romanticizing or exoticizing a life that was in most cases nasty, brutish and short and there are dangers in reconstructing a kind of hierarchy, but, on the other hand, historians are providing no compensation for the wretchedness of ancient women’s lives by lumping all ‘bad girls’ together. Moreover, the sex market in Athens was not just about the exploitation of women. Men were sexual commodities as well as consumers and although male sex-workers were, I think, nowhere near as numerous as their female counterparts, they did take on very similar roles in the city, making prostitution more than a straightforward gentler issue.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ