Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World

Free and Unfree Sexual Work: An Economic Analysis of Athenian Prostitution

Free and Unfree Sexual Work An Economic Analysis of Athenian Prostitution edward e. cohen “It’s Greek to Me”—Difficulties in Defining Prostitution Modern languages use the word “prostitution” (and its foreign equivalents ) inexactly to cover a multitude of conflicting meanings denoting a variety of physical, commercial, and social arrangements.1 Although scholars have long sought to differentiate commercial sex from other erotic arrangements, emphasizing factors like payment, promiscuity, and emotional attachment (or indifference), the defining line—if any— between modern prostitution and other forms of sexual exchange remains unclear:2 even marriage has sometimes been characterized as “legal prostitution.”3 Ultimately, and in frustration, it is sometimes asserted that “the meaning of ‘prostitution’ is self-evident” (Pateman 1988, 195). But for modern historians of ancient Greece there is little “self-evident ” about the meaning of the two principal clusters of ancient Greek words relating to “prostitution”—those cognate to “pernanai” (“sell”) and those cognate to “hetairein” (“be a companion”).4 Our comprehension of these terms is impeded by the limited number and nature of our sources, our imperfect knowledge of Athenian social and economic 95 institutions, and the absence of native informants who might illuminate nuances of usage and contexts of behavior. Although these generic difficulties constrict our understanding of virtually all ancient Hellenic institutions, “Athenian prostitution” provides yet a further exegetical challenge—the unusual complexity (noted by ancient sources) of Athenian attitudes to both sex and business. Sexually, in Plato’s concise summary , “in other poleis erotic conventions are easy to understand and well defined, but at Athens they are poikilos”—“complex,” “intricate,” “many-hued” (Symposium 182a7–9).5 Commercially, Athens was a thriving entrepreneurial megalopolis—in fact, in the fourth century the dominant commercial center of the eastern Mediterranean—but she nevertheless harbored a conservative side that objected to all profitmaking endeavor,6 including that relating to sex. Xenophon, for example , finds the commercialization of erôs no less disgusting than charging for education (Memorabilia 1.6.13).7 But Athens was not monolithic, and such views had to coexist with the reality of a “city [that] lived entirely by cash transactions” (Humphreys 1978, 148), producing a culture “fraught with ambivalence, ambiguity and conflict” (D. Cohen 1991a, 21; cf. Larmour, Miller, and Platter 1998, 27) in which legislative disincentives to “citizen” prostitution paralleled the widespread, lawful purchase of sex from “citizen” prostitutes. Athenian commercial life was rife with a “multiplicity of narratives” (Dougherty 1996, 251), reflecting the discontinuities, contradictions and deviations that rendered the definition or explanation of few Athenian institutions “self-evident.”8 But one aspect of Athenian prostitution is self-evident—the fact (but not the significance) of the dual use of the words “pernanai” (and cognates ) and of “hetairein” (and cognates) for what in modern Western societies is a single, albeit intractably undefinable, concept of prostitution. This Greek binomialism reflects the Hellenic tendency to understand and to organize phenomena not (as we do) through definitional focus on a specific subject in isolation, but through contrast, preferably antithesis .9 Where modern Western thought generally posits a broad spectrum of possibilities and seeks to differentiate a multitude of slightly varying entities,10 ancient Greek assumed not a medley of separate forms, but only a counterpoised opposition, complementary alternatives occupying in mutual tension the entire relevant cognitive universe. For modern thinkers, opposites are mutually exclusive; for the Greeks, antitheses were complementary (and thus tended to be inclusive). Greek commercial institutions accordingly tend to derive their meaning from their binomial interrelationships with their putative opposites.11 Thus, 96 edward e. cohen interest (tokos, literally “yield”) is either “maritime” (“nautikos”) or “landed” (“eggeios”): there is no alternative.12 Where Anglo-American law easily contrasts “real property” and “personal property” but still allows for items sharing certain characteristics of both (“fixtures”), for the Greeks all property is either “visible” (“phanera ousia”) or “invisible ” (“aphanês ousia”):13 even the differentiation between realty and personalty tends to be expressed through this antithesis.14 And so it is not surprising that every manifestation of commercial sex had to be encompassed within the antithesis of pernanai (“sell”), and its cognates, and hetairein (“be a companion”), and its cognates. Modern scholars have generally recognized the fundamental importance of this dualism to an understanding of Greek prostitution but have uniformly ignored the business context within which prostitution occurred and...