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Reviewed by:
  • Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex by Edward E. Cohen
  • Konstantinos Kapparis
Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex. By Edward E. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 243. $74.00 (cloth).

This eagerly awaited volume by Edward Cohen expands on the author’s previous work on sexual contracts between prostitutes and their clients, and its stated purpose is to discuss the Athenian sex worker in the context of the economic structure and business ethics of fourth-century BCE Athens. In this respect, the book has a tight focus on the economic aspects of prostitution.

In the introduction Cohen provides a discussion of the previous literature and of his own main sources, as well as a brief, oblique look into the material evidence on vase iconography (he does not discuss the vases themselves but cites a few important studies). In the first chapter Cohen discusses the terms hetaira and porne against the backdrop of Athenian civic ideology. He mistakenly states that hetairos was the term used for a high-end male prostitute in ways analogous to how the female equivalent, hetaira, was used for a high-end female prostitute. This is certainly not the case; the term hetairos, meaning “companion,” often with old-fashioned, aristocratic undertones, had been sanctified through centuries of use to embody all that is best in male friendships, a tradition that protected the term from being subverted by the sex market the way the feminine form hetaira was. For the masculine, a participle was used (ho hetairesas, only attested in the lexicographers, or ho hetairekos, e.g., Aesch. 1.161). The second chapter, entitled “Prostitution as a Liberal Profession,” touches upon the topic of slave versus free labor. [End Page 513]

In the third chapter Cohen offers some discussion of male prostitutes in politics. He correctly argues that a fair number of male citizens were actually practicing prostitution, although when it comes to specific cases he puts too much faith in the slander of the orators against their opponents. The author argues that the case of Timarchos was not unique. However, the other cases that he mentions (threats against Androtion, Epichares, and Hegesandros by their opponents) never materialized, making the prosecution against Timarchos the only such prosecution ever to reach an Athenian court. In this light, the author’s faith in the ill-conceived notion that citizens engaging in homosexual affairs (74–75) were vulnerable to prosecutions for prostitution is misplaced, as there is not a scrap of evidence to support that such vulnerability ever existed in a city where males routinely had affairs with other males; one unique case does not constitute proof of a trend or a norm. Cohen’s interpretation of the hetairesis and dokimasia rhetoron laws as predominantly financial precautions in a city full of corrupt magistrates, not as some kind of moral imperative, is broadly correct. These laws were intended to make sure that persons who would sell their own bodies for profit could not be put in charge of the affairs of the city, just as Aeschines suggests (1.29).

Cohen’s work on commercial sexual contracts has been pioneering in the field. The bulk of the evidence comes from comedy, where one can understand why the absurd possibilities of sex under contract were used as fodder for jokes. Outside comedy the existing evidence is scarce, to the point that some scholars have doubted its practical applications. Although Cohen may have overstressed the importance and frequency of such contracts, his basic tenet that they were legal and enforceable agreements with no conceptual or practical barriers is in my opinion close to the truth. In the section where Cohen discusses the contractual capacity of women and slaves, he correctly stresses that in many of the attested contracts of prostitution one of the parties is a woman, and that she had a perfectly legal right to engage in it and seek the contract’s enforcement in the courts through a male representative if necessary. Cohen misunderstands the phrase kyria heautes as a special category of women. The phrase simply indicates that a woman is a free person (as opposed to a slave).

The author correctly argues that...

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