Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (12 page)

[W]hen Philip, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred that fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, “Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base.”

Thirty-eight years after that battle, the Thebans erected a giant stone lion on a pedestal at the burial site of the Sacred Band. The restored statue still stands as a monument to some of the bravest—and gayest—soldiers ever to fight on the field of honor.
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DARK PLEASURES, BRIGHT CONVERSATION

However beguiling fifteen-year-old hairless boys might have been to aristocratic men, it doesn’t take long to consume a fig. Callow adolescents could not have been interesting company for men so far beyond them in education and experience. Here women return to the picture, in the form of the hetaerae, that sophisticated class of prostitutes who passed long evenings with the city’s prominent men. (Demosthenes observed that Athenian men kept wives for “the production of legitimate children,” concubines for the “care of the body,” and companions for “pleasure.”) Many of these women stimulated the mind as well as the body—Greek courtesans were known throughout the ancient world for their refinement and ability to match wits with the best minds in Athens. Top-tier courtesans often enjoyed better lives than their clients’ wives.

That many of them survived childhood, much less became beloved companions to the likes of Pericles, spoke to their scrappy ingenuity. Many hetaerae either were the children of prostitutes or were acquired by brothel-keepers after being left to die as babies. If they later showed an aptitude on their backs, they could try to persuade their clients to buy them out and invest in their liberty. Under these conditions, and without the benefit of formal instruction, some managed to learn music, philosophy, and rhetoric.

Hetaerae didn’t have long to make their mark. In a culture even more worshipful of youth than ours today, time was their main enemy. Their prime earning years were often spent laboring as slave prostitutes. By the time they scraped together enough money to purchase their freedom, many had, in the words of the comic poet Philetairos, “rotted away fucking” and were no longer able to command top fees. Facing a decline in earning power, the more enterprising of them became brothel-keepers themselves, buying babies and girls and living off their earnings. This kind of work generated more than its share of litigation.

IN THE EARLY fourth century BC, one married man’s love for an elderly prostitute in his employ caused an inheritance battle. This fellow, Euktmon, was advanced in years himself, and had money, a family, and a number of profitable whorehouses. One of his prostitutes, the well-known Alce, worked at his brothel in Piraeus until she became too old to generate much money. She remained at the house where she serviced a few clients, had a couple of babies, and plotted a way to survive in her old age. First, she convinced Euktemon to let her manage his brothel in the potters’ district of Athens. Then she set out to manage Euktemon himself. Despite his ninety-six years, the records show that he began to spend far more time at the brothel than was necessary to collect the receipts:

Sometimes [Euktemon] took his meals with [Alce], leaving his wife and children and his own home. In spite of the protests of his wife and sons, not only did he not cease to go there but eventually lived there entirely, and was reduced to such a condition by drugs or disease or some other cause, that he was persuaded by the woman to introduce the elder of the two boys to the members of his ward under his name.

When Euktemon’s son resisted his father’s attempt to legitimize Alce’s son, the old man threatened to marry her and recognize her offspring as his heirs. His son decided to cut his losses by agreeing to the legitimization, so long as the boy’s inheritance was limited to a single farm.
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Another lawsuit involved a man who had bought a slave boy from a courtesan named Antigone, but claimed that he was so aroused when he made the deal that he didn’t realize he was being tricked. The purchaser, Epicrates, told the jury that Antigone and her partner in the sale, Athenogenes, convinced him to buy the boy’s brother and father as well, and take on their debts in the perfume business. “It is a trifling amount,” Athenogenes reportedly told him, “counterbalanced by the stocks in the shop, sweet oil, scent-boxes, myrrh ... which will easily cover all the debts.” Epicrates testified that he did not pay much attention to the contract when it was read to him. He could think only of the moment when he would have the slave boy to himself. The sale went through, and Antigone used her portion of the money to buy another child prostitute.

Not long afterward, Epicrates regained his senses and realized that he had taken on more debt than he could pay. He gathered some friends and went to confront Athenogenes. A crowd gathered, a fight erupted, and a lawsuit resulted. At the trial, Epicrates tried to persuade the jury to let him out of the contract. There is no record as to whether or not he was successful, but it does not seem likely that a jury would agree that sexual excitement should excuse a buyer from reading what he signed.

ANTIGONE’S AND ATHENOGENES’S legal problems were nothing compared to the tumultuous existence of the Corinthian hetaera Neaera. The lawsuit
Against Neaera
describes her fight against accusations that she, a foreigner, had illegally married an Athenian man and fraudulently passed her daughter off as an Athenian citizen. The case, which was at least the third one filed in Athens against Neaera and her husband, threw her entire life open for inspection, covering decades in the sex trade. According to Neaera’s accuser, Apollodorus, she was sold as a little girl to Nikarete, a Corinthian madam with a “good eye” for the earning potential of children. There, in the prostitution vortex that was Corinth (the city lent its name to the Greek verb
korinthiazein
, meaning “to fornicate”), Neaera was put to work before being physically able to have intercourse, and spent her early years learning how to please men and succeed in the business. To command a higher price, Nikarete marketed Neaera as one of her daughters.

It was tough work, but at least Neaera got to travel. One of the business’s best customers was the famous Athenian orator Lysias (the same as hired by the stepson in
Against the Stepmother
), who was smitten with Neaera’s “sister” Metaneira. As a gift, he brought Metaneira, Nikarete, and Neaera to the religious festival at Eleusis, where he paid for their initiation into the sacred mysteries of the goddess Demeter.

After about twenty years in Nikarete’s employ, Neaera was sold to two customers as their shared sex slave. The three-thousand-drachma sale price was equivalent to five years’ worth of a laborer’s wages, but the buyers must have figured it was less than paying retail every time they wanted her company. The arrangement worked fine for about a year until the men each decided to get married and lighten their financial burdens. They offered Neaera her freedom at a substantial discount of two thousand drachmae if she left Corinth forever.

This was the chance for which Neaera had been waiting many years. Nothing was going to stand in the way of her freedom, not even the boorish perversions of the man who gave her the money, Phrynion. He brought her to Athens, where he “had intercourse with her openly and whenever and wherever he wished”—outrageous conduct even by local standards. At one banquet, Phrynion allowed everyone present, including slaves, to have their way with her while she slept in a drunken stupor.

Neaera was used to humiliation, but this last act went too far. She waited until the time was right and packed up her clothes, along with some of Phrynion’s household possessions and slaves, and left for Megara to start up her own brothel. The business foundered, but Neaera’s personal life improved when she met the Athenian Stephanos, who agreed to take her and her children back to Athens. Stephanos was kinder to Neaera than Phrynion—their thirty-year relationship implies devotion on his part—but he had a long list of enemies. Once back in town, Neaera began to lure wealthy men to their home for sex, where Stephanos waited to “discover” them in the act and shake down the unsuspecting mark for money.

Their racket continued until Phrynion showed up. He sued Stephanos for receiving both Neaera (whom he deemed a runaway slave) and the property she had nicked from his house. Rather than risk everything at trial, Stephanos agreed to have Neaera return most of the stolen belongings, and further allowed Phrynion to take her home for sex on a set schedule.

Disposing of Phrynion turned out to be the simplest of Neaera and Stephanos’s legal worries. Some years later, Stephanos gave Neaera’s wild-child daughter Phano away in marriage to the sober Phrastor, assuring him that the girl was Athenian. The marriage was a disaster. Phano refused to assume the reserved manner of a good Athenian wife, and was thrown out of Phrastor’s house. He filed a lawsuit claiming he had been defrauded into believing Phano was a citizen, and not the daughter of a Corinthian whore. Stephanos countersued for the return of Phano’s large dowry, but must have realized that he was going to lose the case, and settled. Phrastor kept the money.

Phano moved back home, joined the family extortion business, and sparked more litigation. This time, Stephanos “caught” her in bed with Epainetos, a former client of Neaera’s, and held him in the house until he extracted a promise to pay three thousand drachmae. However, as soon as Epainetos was released he filed suit against Stephanos, claiming that there had been no cause to hold him. Phano was, he charged, no ordinary daughter living in a common Athenian home. Rather, she was a prostitute, and the household a brothel. Again, Stephanos saw that he would be defeated in court, and gave up his claim.

By the time Apollodorus sued Neaera, he had already faced off in court against Stephanos on other matters, and hated him. His lawsuit, which was based on Neaera having passed herself off as a respectable Athenian wife and mother, was admittedly brought out of spite against Stephanos. The fact that Apollodorus was not directly affected by Neaera’s actions didn’t matter; anyone could sue for violations of the citizenship laws. As Apollodorus harangued the jury for three hours, giving all of the details of Neaera’s “service in every kind of pleasure,” the former hetaera must have felt that her luck was running out. If she lost the case, she faced a return to slavery. (Stephanos, moreover, stood to lose his civil rights as an Athenian citizen.) We have no record of the speeches for the defense, nor do we know the jury’s verdict, but it seems well within likelihood that her lifelong jig was up.
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NEXT TO NEAERA, Athens’s best-known courtesan was Aspasia, the brilliant mistress of Pericles. The great statesman-general’s love for her was open and passionate, to the point that some historians believe he got rid of his wife to live with her. Most marital relations in Athens were arid affairs, but Pericles felt tender affection for Aspasia. “Every day, when he went out to the marketplace and returned, he greeted her with a kiss,” wrote Plutarch. Far from the model of respectable Athenian wives who were supposed to be ashamed even to be seen, Aspasia’s life was lived in public. Even Socrates took his disciples to learn rhetoric from her.

Aspasia had traveled a long way up to breathe the rarefied air of Athenian high society. A native of Miletus, she had most likely come to the city under the usual grim circumstances of foreign-born prostitutes—enslaved and exploited. Eventually she obtained her freedom, setting up a high-end bawdy house that functioned as both a philosophy salon and an urban resort for wellborn men seeking good food and sexual adventure.

Aspasia’s attachment to Pericles was both a benefit and a risk to him. As the case of Timarchus demonstrates, sexual misadventure was a trap for politicians in Athens. Pericles’s many enemies spared no effort in using Aspasia as a way to get to him. She was reviled as the product of sodomy and as a skin trader who filled “all of Greece . . . with her little harlots.” Despite her acclaimed political wisdom, she was also accused of influencing Pericles to act against the city’s best interests. (It was said that she had goaded Pericles into a war with Samos, a rival of her native Miletus.) Aristophanes took these accusations one step further, in satire, supposing that Aspasia had even convinced Pericles to start the catastrophic Peloponnesian War after two of her prostitutes had been stolen by residents of Sparta’s ally, Megara.

Finally, Aspasia was sued on a charge of “impiety,” allegations of which included procuring freeborn girls to satisfy Pericles’s perversions and defiling temples. In a monumentally dramatic scene, Pericles—preeminent man of the city, military and political leader, orator, builder of the Parthenon—went to court personally on her behalf. According to Plutarch, he “burst into floods of tears” before the jury, begging them to acquit Aspasia. The jury complied.
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It is virtually impossible to imagine a present-day political leader pleading with a jury to show mercy to his mistress, much less tearfully acknowledging his love for her. Think of Bill Clinton’s conduct when sued for exposing himself and demanding sex from Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee. He denied everything, hired top Washington legal talent, and eventually won the case on a procedural technicality. Before that happened, however, he lied under oath about his encounters with another young woman, Monica Lewinsky—a denial that was easily disproved and gave his enemies in Congress a pretext on which to impeach him. That Clinton beat the impeachment and served out his presidency with much popular support only highlights the paradox: Would any of his loyalists, including his wife, have stayed with him had he acknowledged his sexual relationship with Lewinsky or, worse, that he cared for her? Probably not. (The president’s affectionate gift to her of a copy of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
was never explained—with good reason.)