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Introduction
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Introduction laura k. mcclure The study of prostitution in the classical world has been until recently but a footnote to scholarship on ancient sexuality and gender. And yet, as David Halperin noted in his introduction to the landmark volume, Before Sexuality, a comprehensive view of ancient sexualities must include “the varieties of prostitution and prostitutes, from the cultured and powerful Athenian courtesans of the fourth century, to the professional dancer performing at men’s symposia, to the poor streetwalker” (Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990, 18). The neglect of this subject cannot be explained by a dearth of primary sources, as the German scholar Friedrich Karl Forberg long ago demonstrated: his Apophoreta, published in 1824, catalogued and classified hundreds of references to Greek and Latin sexual practices from ancient authors of all periods. Much later, Paul Brandt observed in his Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (Sittengeschichte Griechenlands), published under the pseudonym Hans Licht (Licht 1932, 329): “If in the course of the previous discussion of Greek morals and culture I have had to remark that it was a question of working upon entirely new ground, or that, in the case of a particular chapter, preliminary works of reference were non-existent, no such complaint can be made with regard to the depiction of Greek prostitution. Rather the contrary would be true, and an author might almost apologize for the abundance of [ancient] works treating of his subject, the number of which in this case can scarcely be estimated.” Translated into 3 English in 1932 by J. H. Freese, Brandt’s work quickly became for classical scholars the standard text on ancient sexuality and prostitution—a subject to which he devotes over eighty pages. Around the same time, two German monographs substantially devoted to the representation of the courtesan in the Greek comic tradition appeared, Die Gestalt der Hetäre in der griechischen Komödie (Hauschild 1933), and Motivstudien zur griechischen Komödie (Wehrli 1936). But while German scholars like Forberg , Brandt, and Hauschild pondered the shocking directness and profusion of Greco-Roman accounts of sexuality and prostitution, Anglophone scholarship largely remained silent on the question until well into the second half of the twentieth century. By the early 1970s, the proliferation of feminist scholarship in multiple disciplines kindled an interest in issues of gender and sexuality among Anglo-American classical scholars. The pioneering work of J. P. Sullivan, Jeffrey Henderson, and Sir Kenneth Dover led to advances in our understanding of sexual terminology and the social construction of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. The subject of prostitution figured in broad surveys of women in ancient Greece, such as that of Pomeroy (1975), and in analyses of erotic vocabulary and behavior in Athenian comedy and oratory, e.g., Henderson’s Maculate Muse (1975) and Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978). The publication of Menander’s Courtesans and the Greek Comic Tradition by Madeleine Henry in 1985 furnished a feminist perspective on the question of the portrayal of the courtesan in Greek New Comedy initiated by Hauschild and Wehrli. Around the same time, the large number of images of prostitutes found in classical art, particularly in Attic vase painting, engendered Otto Brendel’s lengthy essay, “The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Graeco-Roman World” (Brendel 1970) and the subsequent studies of Keuls (1985), Peschel (1987), and Reinsberg (1989). On the Roman side, feminist scholars such as Amy Richlin, Judith Hallett, and Marilyn Skinner published important studies of ancient Roman constructions of gender and sexuality during the 1980s, most notably Richlin’s The Garden of Priapus (1983), a study of Latin sexual vocabulary and its social meanings. The profound influence of Michel Foucault, palpable in almost every study of ancient Greek sexuality from 1990 onward, occasioned a shift of focus in scholarly discourse and privileged a Hellenic perspective. Instead of emphasizing historical realities, these studies have taken up the role of prostitution as one of many cultural discourses produced by Athenians during the archaic and classical periods. The fact that the 4 laura k. mcclure [3.238.57.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:56 GMT) topic has figured prominently in many larger projects of cultural criticism attests to its pivotal importance for understanding ancient constructions of gender, sexuality, and even political ideology. Halperin, following on Dover and Keuls, elucidates the political repercussions of male prostitution in classical Athens in a chapter of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990). More recently, James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes...