Often stigmatized, sex workers have inhabited the imagination of writers and artists since at least our earliest texts, sculptures, and paintings — from the harlot who civilized Enkidu to Pretty Woman, from the Lady of the Camellias to Bruna Surfistinha, prostitutes and courtesans (real and imagined) are often turned into celebrities.
In classical Athens, where wives and daughters were confined to the innermost accommodations of a house and were rarely seen in public squares and temples, hetairai, escorts of powerful, influential personalities, came and went as they pleased. These women could amass fortunes and become powerful and influential themselves — although that did not free them from a situation of perpetual vulnerability, with their liberty, dignity, and life depending on the good will of free male Athenians. Frequently they were prosecuted by scorned admirers or by those seeking to attack their lovers indirectly, and more than one shared Socrates’ final fate.
Vilified in comedies and persecuted in the law, but also celebrated in anecdotes, epigrams, sculptures and painting, Phryne (Melissa Funke’s subject of study) competes with Laïs for the position of the most (in)famous of hetairai.
Antiquity bequeathed to us no vita of Phryne, but as Funke points out we possess biographical “fragments” that, when read together, give us the illusion of a coherent and almost complete narrative of her life, with beginning, middle, and end.
Mnesarete (“recalling virtue”) was born in Thespiae in Boeotia, daughter of a certain Epicles. She moved to Athens with her family after her city was conquered by Thebes or was carried there as a sex worker, having been coerced or lured into the trade while still a child. Owner of a much-admired beauty, she was nicknamed Phryne (“toad”)[1] due to the paleness of her skin. She escaped poverty by the sweat of her brow and became one of the richest women of the Mediterranean — so rich she offered herself to rebuild Thebes, destroyed by Alexander the Great in 335 BC, provided that the Thebans recognized the favour with a public inscription (“Destroyed by Alexander, rebuilt by Phryne”). Vain, she had a monument raised to herself in Delphi, to the scandal of Diogenes and Crates. Greedy, she started to handpick her clients and showed herself nude in public in at least three occasions, one of them before 500 judges who couldn’t decide whether to acquit or condemn her to death. Thanks to her fame, even in her old age she was able to charge fortunes from her clients.
It is not known, however, if the Phryne that emerges from these fragments bears much relation to a flesh-and-blood Phryne. More likely, as Melissa Funke argues, she was eclipsed by what Funke calls the “ultimate fragmented dreamgirl” (p. 1) of later Greek writers, nostalgic for an age of Athens in which philosophers and hetairai alike kept a cordial (albeit risky) relationship with temperamental and at times vengeful aristocrats.
Many, if not most, fragments are concerned with episodes of public nudity: they show Phryne modelling for Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidos, bathing in the sea during a festival in honour of Poseidon (and simultaneously inspiring Apelles), supplicating to the judges at the Areopagus. They show her without showing her, never describing her looks, always from the perspective of observers filled with admiration and reverence — for her or for her portraits. What we get as a result, as Funke points out, is an image of Phryne whose beauty is idealized to the extreme, but whose appearance constantly eludes our glance. We try to see Phryne portrayed in the several copies extant of Aphrodite of Cnidos, and the original statue (destroyed long ago) in Phryne, but they evade us like shadows haunting our peripheral vision.
The only thing we can know with reasonable certainty about the judicial process of which she was victim is that it occurred. Actually, from the title of a speech by Aristogeiton (Against Phryne) it seems that Phryne had trouble with the law more than once. The accusations directed against her — of hosting a brazen kômos (κῶμος) in the Lyceum, introducing a new god (Isodaites), and organizing thíasoi (θίασοι) gathering men and women —, summarized as asébeia (ἀσέβεια),[2] had become common fare by the middle of the fourth century bc. And hetairai were easy to blame, since as sex workers and (mostly) outsiders they enjoyed very few rights in Athens. Many times, they were prosecuted as a way of attacking indirectly (and hence without great risks of reprisal) their powerful sources of income: such was likely the case with Aspasia, also accused of asébeia. And we know of at least one hetaira (Ninon) who was executed for organizing θίασοι that allegedly mocked the Dionysian Mysteries.
We know nothing more about the prosecutor of Phryne, Euthias, later turned by Alciphron into a sort of archenemy of the hetairai. It was said that Euthias was a rejected lover of Phryne, and that he sought to take revenge on her with all the weight of the law. Phryne’s defender, Hypereides (perhaps Euthias indirect target), was not himself freed from such vengeful feelings, since in another occasion he prosecuted Aristagora, herself a hetaira, apparently out of spite.
However, the most famous moment of the entire trial — Phryne’s pleading nudity before male judges intent on her execution — was the fruit of imagination of a later writer, possibly Idomeneus of Lampsacus, source (via Hermippus) of many of the anecdotes found in Athenaeus and Pausanias. We may be fairly sure of it because none of the comedy writers contemporaneous with Phryne (such as Timocles or Posidippus) mentions the incident, despite its many obvious comic opportunities.
Phryne’s bold but fictional judicial move was reminiscent of mythological episodes involving Hecuba, Clytemnestra, and Helen. Ignored by Renaissance artists, it was depicted by nineteenth-century painters eager to represent female nudity and looking for an excuse to do so. The book reviews some of the better known of those representations (not all of them nude), visits the Phrynes of the Parisian cabarets and theatres, and ends in three Italian films of the 1950s. After that it seems that she hid herself from the public eye. Funke’s overview highlights the women who posed as Phryne for photos and paintings, or incarnated her on stage and on screen.
According to Funke, she wrote her book during the lockdown imposed by Covid-19. She spent her time with profit: her work is very well researched and written, and enjoyable to read. My criticisms of her text are few.
For example: when discussing the artistic representations of Phryne by painters and sculptors, and calling our attention to the recurrent visual tropes used by them, Funke fails to notice the obvious similarities of composition in the paintings by Gustave Boulanger (1850) and Antônio Parreiras (1909). Moreover, although she insists on the purely coincidental deaths of some of the actresses and singers who played Phryne died an early death,[3] Funke is silent on the small scandal, to me of significant relevance to Phryne’s critical fortune, caused by the removal of Parreiras’ picture from the walls of the National Press Club in Washington, DC, when even its defenders were not embarrassed to call the portrayed woman an old hooker.[4]
My only other complaint is the absence of a section in the book collecting the biographical fragments on Phryne. Part of these texts (but not all of them) are scattered throughout the book, hindering an overview of the remaining material.
Academic readers will find Funke’s book useful and entertaining, but by its style and subject matter a much broader public will be enlighten and delighted by it as well.
Notes
[1] I wonder if Phryne’s nickname had other motivations. In Brazil, one popular name for the female genitalia is perereca (“tree-frog”), perhaps reminiscent of the Greek φρύνη.
[2] The online LSJ (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph) defines these terms as “revel, carousal, merry-making” (κῶμος), “Bacchic revels” or “religious guilds” (θίασοι), and “ungodliness, impiety” (ἀσέβεια).
[3] We will never know the causes of soprano Sibyl Sanderson’s alcoholism, and the other three deaths were caused by accidents (Marie-Christine Leroux in a shipwreck, Belinda Lee in a car crash), or by appendicitis (Jane Margyl).
[4] See, for example, the article in The Washington Times. The webpage of The National Press Club posted its own more lucid article “Is it art? Or is it offensive?”.