Part 13 (1/2)
These philosopher-hetaerae were indisputably the most interesting phenomenon in the social life of ancient times, to which the later Greek world and modern times afford no adequate parallel. They were present always at theatrical exhibitions and on all public occasions when respectable women remained at home. They took an absorbing interest in politics and in all public affairs; they discussed with the citizens the burning questions of the day; they criticised the acts of statesmen, the speeches of orators, the dramas of the poets, the productions of painters and sculptors. They exerted, in a word, an enormous influence for good or ill on the social and political life of the day; while they themselves had the consciousness of a mission to perform in having in their hands the real power of their s.e.x.
Almost every great man in Athens had his ”companion,” usually in addition to a lawful wife. Plato had Archeana.s.sa, to whom he wrote sonnets; but we know not what were her attractions. ”For dear to me Theoris is,” sings Sophocles; and we should like to know more of Archippa, to whom he left his fortune. Aristotle had his Herpyllis, and the eloquent Isocrates his Metaneira. Speusippus, Plato's successor, found a ”companion” in Lasthenia, and Epicurus in Leontium. It is difficult to believe that all these for whom the learned men of the day showed such regard were vicious women; in fact, some of them are described as n.o.ble and high-minded.
”She was a citizen, without a guardian Or any near relations, and her manner Pure, and on virtue's strictest model form'd, A genuine mistress [Greek: heraira]: for the rest of the crew Bring into disrepute, by their vile manner, A name which in itself has nothing wrong.”
But if the careers of the learned hetaerae were influential, they did not equal in brilliancy and power those of the more celebrated domestic hetaerae. The vastness of the influence of this latter cla.s.s is best shown by naming the prominent rulers of various periods who were under the domination of their ”companions.” We have in an earlier chapter called attention to the work of Thargelia in moulding Persian sentiment before the invasions of Darius and Xerxes, and to the influence of Aspasia during the Periclean Age. Many later hetaerae played prominent roles in the courts of princes and kings, and not infrequently enjoyed royal honors, Leaena, Myrrhine, and Lamia were favorites of Demetrius the Besieger, and the latter shared with him all except the throne. Thais, for a time beloved of Alexander the Great, and at whose nod he set fire to the palace of the Persian kings, later bore two sons and a daughter to Ptolemy Soter, the first Macedonian king of Egypt. Pythionice and Glycera were in high favor at the court of Harpalus. Hieronymus of Syracuse elevated a beautiful prost.i.tute named Pytho from the bawdy house to his palace and throne. Ptolemy Philadelphus was celebrated for the number of his mistresses, among them being a Didyma, a Blistyche, a Stratonice, a Myrtion. Ptolemy Philopator was under the degrading influence of an Agathoclea, daughter of the procuress Oenanthe, both of whom, in the trenchant phrase of Plutarch, trod diadems under their feet and were finally murdered by the Alexandrian mob.
Some hetaerae inspired such regard that they were honored with public monuments. The first instance of this in Athens was in the case of Leaena, who, after the murder of the tyrant Hipparchus, bit out her tongue rather than reveal the accomplices of her lover, Aristogiton. The Athenians at this early date felt a reluctance to erect a statue representing a hetaera, but they placed on the Acropolis a bronze lioness to commemorate perpetually the name of Leaena, and to preserve the memory of her n.o.ble deed. In honor of Phryne there was a marble statue at Thespian sculptured by Praxiteles, as well as another of gold at Delphi.
In Sparta, in her degenerate days, there was a monument to the celebrated hetaera Cottine. There were also famous statues of Lais, Glycera, Pythionice, Neaera, Clino, Blistyche, Stratonice, and other women of pleasure. To Lamia, the renowned flute player, and to her rival, Leaena of Corinth, favorites of Demetrius the Besieger, the servile Athenians erected temples, in which they were revered as G.o.ddesses. There was also in Athens a most beautiful and costly tomb in honor of Pythionice, erected by the Macedonian governor Harpalus, described by Pausanias as ”the best worth seeing of all ancient tombs.”
Such are instances of the tributes offered by the beauty-loving Greeks to these beautiful but light-minded women, who were regarded as incarnations, as it were, of the G.o.ddess Aphrodite herself.
”'Tis not for nothing that where'er we go We find a temple of hetaerae there, But nowhere one to any wedded wife,”
sings one of the poets of the Anthology.
The characteristic traits of these reigning queens of the demi-monde were in almost all cases the same. The princ.i.p.al attributes of their characters were selfishness and greed. With all their outward good nature and apparent warmth of disposition, they were at all times ”marble-hearted,” cold, incapable of any n.o.ble emotion, and impervious to the stirrings of true love. There are a few exceptional cases of self-sacrificing devotion, as of Leaena, and of Timandra, who stood by Alcibiades in all his misfortune, but their exceeding rarity proves the rule. A few were of good character and were faithful to the relations which they had formed; many were merely fair and frail; while most of them descended to the lowest depths of corruption and depravity. While the deportment of those hetaerae who cultivated every womanly charm presents much that is attractive, yet their manner of life has been aptly compared to baskets of noxious weeds and garbage, covered over with roses. Extravagance, debauchery, and dissolute habits were sure to work out in time the attendant ills of wretchedness, dest.i.tution, and penury. Realizing that for them there was possible no such thing as true love and domestic happiness, they became rapacious and vindictive, cynical and ill-tempered. Nothing could be mare fearful than the pictures which the comic poets and satirists draw of some of these women; Anaxilas, for example, thus describes them as a cla.s.s:
”The man whoe'er has loved a courtesan, Will say that no more lawless, worthless race Can anywhere be found: for what ferocious, Unsociable she-dragon, what Chimaera, Though it breathe fire from its mouth, what Charybdis, What three-headed Scylla, dog o' the sea, Or hydra, sphynx, or raging lioness, Or viper, or winged harpy (greedy race), Could go beyond those most accursed harlots?
There is no monster greater. They alone Surpa.s.s all other evils put together.”
Their outward behavior and manner were characterized by great elegance.
One comic poet remarks that they took their food most delicately and not like the citizen-women, who ”stuffed their cheeks and tore off the meat.” Their speech, however, was unrestrained, and they delighted in indelicate witticisms and _doubles entendres_. Machon made a collection of the witty remarks of the most celebrated hetaerae, in his book of anecdotes. In Athenaeus we also have specimens of their witticisms.
Sinope of aegina was particularly famous for her coa.r.s.e wit, and had many clever encounters with the brilliant men of her day. To preserve or to enhance their natural beauty, the hetaerae were given to the use of cosmetics. Eubulus, in a fragment, thus represents a citizen-woman reviling the much-hated cla.s.s:
”By Jove, we are not painted with vermilion, Nor with dark mulberry juice, as you are often: And then, if in the summer you go out, Two rivulets of dark, discolored hue Flow from your eyes, and sweat drops from your jaws And makes a scarlet furrow down your neck, And the light hair which wantons o'er your face Seems gray, so thickly is it plastered o'er.”
The secret mysteries of hetairism, which were celebrated chiefly by the Lesbian and Samlan hetaerae and which occasioned a hetasra literature, prepared in part by such members of the craft as Philaenis, Elephantine, Niko, and others, const.i.tute an important aspect of our subject, which must be briefly noticed. Suffice it to say that the women of pleasure of Lesbos and Samos excelled in the invention and practice of shameful, unnatural arts, and that the lasciviousness of the Lesbian courtesans led to the loathsome form of l.u.s.t known as ”Lesbian love,” which has become proverbial.
Plutarch expressly distinguishes from the hetaerae a cla.s.s known as ”emanc.i.p.ated women,” whose preeminent virtue, however, was certainly not modesty. To this cla.s.s belonged many of the flower girls, wreath weavers, painters' and sculptors' models, who earned a living by means of their good looks, though they did not follow a life of shame. The best known representative of this cla.s.s was Glycera, whom Goethe has immortalized. She was a native of Sicyon, and supported herself by the sale of flower wreaths, which she knew how to make most artistically, for use at banquets, funerals, and for adornment of the door of one's sweetheart. The painter Pausias, likewise a native of Sicyon, loved her pa.s.sionately and used to enter into compet.i.tion with her, whether she could wreathe flowers more artistically than he himself could paint them. He painted a portrait which represented her seated with a flower wreath; it was so excellent that the Roman general Lucullus, after the Mithridatic War, when he was making a collection of statues and paintings, paid two talents for a copy.
It is not strange that many of the hetaerae, noted for their superlative beauty and for their cultivation of art and literature and the refinements of life, should attain historical celebrity and, as heroines of the demi-monde, should influence for weal or woe the destinies of Greece. We shall briefly notice important incidents in the careers of a few of the members of this prominent cla.s.s.
Gnathaena, daughter of the panderess Sinope, was one of the most keen-witted and clever of Athenian hetaerae. She was noted for her happy play on words. She also devised a set of rules for the conduct of dinners and banquets, which lovers had to observe when they visited her or her daughter, Gnathaenion. In this she imitated the most cultured hosts of Athens, and exhibited a regard for social forms which throws a commendable light on the deportment of the more cultivated hetaerae.
Gnathaenion, the daughter, was for some time the favorite of the comic poet Diphilus, and he had many a brilliant pa.s.sage of repartee with the mother on the occasion of his visits to the daughter.
Melitta was another famous hetaerae, beloved for her beautiful figure and voice as well as for her pleasing conversation and sprightliness. As each of her lovers said, ”the fair Melitta was his madness,” she was also called Mania. She was one of the many favorites of Demetrius the Besieger. More celebrated, however, than Melitta as a favorite of Demetrius was the beautiful Lamia, the most renowned flute player of antiquity. She was the daughter of a prominent Athenian citizen, by name Cleanor, and, choosing to follow the independent life of a hetaerae, she made her native city the first scene of her exploits. From here she journeyed to Alexandria, where by her art and her beauty she speedily won recognition at the court of Ptolemy. Accompanying Ptolemy Soter in his naval war against Antigonus and Demetrius, she fell a prisoner into the hands of the latter. Although her youth and beauty were already on the wane, she succeeded in captivating Demetrius, who was much younger than herself, so that, as Plutarch states, he appeared to be actually her lover, while with other women he was only the object of love. Lamia ruled him completely and led him into many excesses. Thus he once compelled the Athenians to collect for him at short notice two hundred and fifty talents, and when it was finally brought to him he sent it straightway to Lamia and her companions, ”for pin money,” Lamia herself on one occasion exacted from the citizens an enormous sum of money to prepare a magnificent banquet for Demetrius. This banquet, because of the exorbitant expenses which it occasioned, was so extraordinarily notorious that Lycurgus of Samos wrote a book about it. On this account, a comic poet characterized Lamia as the true _Helepolis_, or city destroyer, the name of one of the most famous engines of war of Demetrius. Demetrius remained pa.s.sionately enamored of her, even after her beauty had faded. As a means of flattering Demetrius, the Athenians erected altars to her, made propitiatory offerings, and celebrated her festival. The Thebans went so far as to erect a temple in her honor, and wors.h.i.+pped her as Aphrodite Lamia.
Pythionice, the favorite of Harpalus, the friend and confidant of Alexander the Great, partook of honors which rivalled those of Lamia.
During the most brilliant period of Harpalus's career, Pythionice was summoned to Babylon, where she shared his honors and bore the t.i.tle of a queen of Babylon. A letter from the historian Theopompus to Alexander is extant, in which he speaks of the pa.s.sionate devotion of Harpalus to his favorite, and thus alludes to her: ”To this Pythionice, a slave of the flute player Bacchis, who in turn was a slave of the hetaera Sinope, Harpalus erected two monuments, one at Athens and one at Babylon, at a cost of more than two hundred talents, which seemed cheap to that spend-thrift; and, in addition, he had a precinct and a sanctuary dedicated to her, which he named the temple and altar of Aphrodite Pythionice. She bore him a daughter, and died before the sudden change which came in his fortunes.”
Another favorite of Harpalus, and later of the celebrated deformed comic poet Menander, was Glycera, the daughter of Thala.s.sis. She was a native of Athens, and pa.s.sed most of her time in the company of litterateurs and philosophers. The Megarian philosopher Stilpo once accused her, at a banquet, of misleading the youth through her seductive art. She made the reply: ”Stilpo, we are in this under like condemnation. It is said of you that you impart to your pupils profitless and eristic sophisms, of me that I teach them erotic sophisms.” Some of Glycera's letters to her poet lover Menander, still extant, show how warm a sympathy existed between the two, and how delicate a sentiment could characterize such a union.
One of the names of hetaerae famous in both ancient and modern times is that of Lais, which belonged to two Greek women celebrated for their extraordinary beauty, who are differentiated by being known as Lais the Elder and Lais the Younger.
The elder and indisputably more famous of the two was the daughter of that hetaera, Timandra, who remained faithful to Alcibiades in his evil fortunes. As a seven-year-old maiden, Lais was taken captive by the Athenians during the sack of her birthplace, Hyccara in Sicily, and was brought as a slave to Corinth. Here she was early initiated into the arts of gallantry and was given a thorough training in the culture of the day.
The physical charms of Lais developed into a beauty rarely witnessed.
Her bosom was of such indescribable perfection that sculptors and painters took it as a model in their creations of the ideal female form. She was regarded as surpa.s.sing not only all her contemporaries, but also all the famous beauties of earlier times; and later ages regarded her as the prototype of womanly beauty, and delighted in giving lengthy and minute descriptions of her charms, as, for example, that by the sophist Aristaenetus in the first of his fifty erotic epistles.