Laura McClure - Böcker

Although Phryne is considered the most famous of the many Greek courtesans who flocked to Athens during the fourth century BCE, there have been no modern attempts to reconstruct her life. It was not until the eighteenth century that artistic interest in her developed and her stories were continually reimagined and embellished. Artists and writers have recounted again and again how she served as the model for the Praxiteles' Cnidian Aphrodite, the first monumental female nude in Western art, and how the sight of her naked body won acquittal when she was prosecuted for impiety. However, she left no writings in her own words, and only a handful of fragments related to her have survived from her time. Until now, the primary evidence for her life comes down to us from texts composed hundreds of years after her death, all of them written by men, whose works reflect the changing tastes, experiences, and values of Greeks living under Roman rule. Phryne of Thespiae offers a close analysis of the evidence for sexual labor in classical Athens to find parallels between Phyrne and other Greek courtesans. The result is an innovative biography that examines key moments of Phyrne's life that have been dismissed as male fantasies, arguing that many of them could have plausibly originated in historical events. The portrait that emerges is that of a powerful and socially consequential woman whose wealth and connections helped to shape the society in which she lived.

Although Phryne is considered the most famous of the many Greek courtesans who flocked to Athens during the fourth century BCE, there have been no modern attempts to reconstruct her life. It was not until the eighteenth century that artistic interest in her developed and her stories were continually reimagined and embellished. Artists and writers have recounted again and again how she served as the model for the Praxiteles' Cnidian Aphrodite, the first monumental female nude in Western art, and how the sight of her naked body won acquittal when she was prosecuted for impiety. However, she left no writings in her own words, and only a handful of fragments related to her have survived from her time. Until now, the primary evidence for her life comes down to us from texts composed hundreds of years after her death, all of them written by men, whose works reflect the changing tastes, experiences, and values of Greeks living under Roman rule. Phryne of Thespiae offers a close analysis of the evidence for sexual labor in classical Athens to find parallels between Phyrne and other Greek courtesans. The result is an innovative biography that examines key moments of Phyrne's life that have been dismissed as male fantasies, arguing that many of them could have plausibly originated in historical events. The portrait that emerges is that of a powerful and socially consequential woman whose wealth and connections helped to shape the society in which she lived.

The disappearance of the chorus after antiquity--along with its association with female marginality, lyricism, and ritual authority in the Athenian drama that preserved it--rendered it an enigmatic vestige of the Greek past that invited innovative receptions by women from the early twentieth century onward. This book traces a feminine, and feminist, genealogy of the chorus from archaic Greece to the 1930s, focusing on three anglophone women whose work was profoundly shaped by it: the classicist Jane Harrison (1850–1928), the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), known as H.D. All three women were drawn to the chorus as the most elusive and unknowable aspect of Greek drama, envisioning it as fundamentally feminine in origin and identifying with its marginality, lyric power, and ritual authority. As a literary anomaly with no modern parallel, the chorus, with its detachment from dramatic action, distinctive metrical form, and indeterminate language, offered an abstract medium through which to explore narrative fragmentation, temporal disjunctions, and polyphonic voice. Their pathbreaking work in the fields of classical scholarship, modernist fiction, and verse emerged in the wake of the nineteenth century, a period critical for the transmission and reception of Greek tragedy in Britain and the United States. Modernist Women and the Greek Chorus argues that these women not only reimagined the chorus from a feminist perspective, but in turn were themselves critical agents of its modernist reception, radically reshaping how their readers understood the Greek past. Their innovative scholarly and literary work further challenged traditional male academic Hellenism, which they viewed with skepticism, if not outright disdain, and opened the way for imaginative, feminist readings of Greek texts that ultimately expanded the field of classics beyond philology.

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World explores the implications of sex-for-pay across a broad span of time, from ancient Mesopotamia to the early Christian period. In ancient times, although they were socially marginal, prostitutes connected with almost every aspect of daily life. They sat in brothels and walked the streets; they paid taxes and set up dedications in religious sanctuaries; they appeared as characters - sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable - on the comic stage and in the law courts; they lived lavishly, consorting with famous poets and politicians; and they participated in otherwise all-male banquets and drinking parties, where they aroused jealousy among their anxious lovers. The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of genres and sources, from legal and religious tracts to the genres of lyric poetry, love elegy, and comic drama to the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans.

Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.

Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.

This volume provides essays that represent a range of perspectives on women, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, tracing the debates from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

This collection attempts to recover the voices of women in antiquity from a variety of perspectives: how they spoke, where they could be heard, and how their speech was adopted in literature and public discourse. Rather than confirming the old model of binary oppositions in which women's speech was viewed as insignificant and subordinate to male discourse, these essays reveal a dynamic and potentially explosive interrelation between women's speech and the realm of literary production, religion, and oratory. The contributors use a variety of methodologies to mine a diverse array of sources, from Homeric epic to fictional letters of the second sophistic period and from actual letters written by women in Hellenistic Egypt to the poetry of Sappho. Throughout, the term "voice" is used in its broadest definition. It includes not only the few remaining genuine women's voices but also the ways in which male authors render women's speech and the social assumptions such representations reflect and reinforce. These essays therefore explore how fictional female voices can serve to negotiate complex social, epistemological, and aesthetic issues.The contributors include Josine Blok, Raffaella Cribiore, Michael Gagarin, Mark Griffith, Andre Lardinois, Richard Martin, Lisa Maurizio, Laura McClure, D. M. O'Higgins, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Marilyn Skinner, Eva Stehle, and Nancy Worman.