In ancient Greece, Corinth was a city with a rep. It was so well known for prostitution, writes Debra Hamel, that the Greeks made its name into a verb, korinthiazein: to fornicate.
It was there, in the early fourth century BC, that a young girl named Neaira became one of the courtesan-slaves in a brothel run by a woman named Nikarete. Several of Nikarete’s “daughters,” as she called them, including Neaira, were immortalized in Greek plays and comic poetry. But Neaira figures elsewhere in history, notes Ms. Hamel, an independent scholar and the author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press).
Decades after leaving Nikarete’s, Neaira had to watch silently in an Athenian court as her life, from brothel girlhood on, became the lurid topic of a legal proceeding. Her adversary, and unkind courtroom biographer, was one Apollodoros, a man sometimes called the 11th Attic orator (slipping in after the canonical top 10).
Apollodoros is generally accepted as having been the true author of six orations originally attributed to Demosthenes, writes Ms. Hamel. Against Neaira is among those, but the title misleads. While Apollodoros trashed Neaira’s life, his true target was Stephanos, an Athenian with whom Neaira had lived for 30 years. Against Neaira was the latest legal skirmish in a longstanding feud between the two men.
In the case, Apollodoros accused Neaira, a foreigner, of living with Stephanos as his wife, thus breaking Athenian laws that banned marriage between citizens and noncitizens. The “color” in his oration concerning Neaira’s career as a prostitute, both as a slave and later as a free woman, was often tangential. However, writes Ms. Hamel, in the Athenian courts of the era, “relevance, and the truth itself, very often took a back seat to a more urgent concern, rousing the jurors’ hostility, by any means possible, against one’s opponent.”
Perhaps we should be glad for the rousing. Taken with a critical caution, writes Ms. Hamel, Apollodoros’s oration offers a rare look at an individual woman’s life in the ancient world. Describing, challenging, and fleshing out the text, the scholar sends the reader on a tour of Greek culture and custom linked to the case and the feud. Among the stops are the demimonde hierarchies of prostitution, a raucous Greek jury system, the ancient and very different meaning of sycophant, and a vivid description of how seducing a respectable Athenian’s wife or daughter could lead to a fine, death, or correctional intimacy with root vegetables.
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http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 23, Page A19
