The Women of Athens II: Courtesans, Heroines, and the Greek Polis

Abstract

For a tradition, stretching from Schlegel in the 1790s to the Glasgow classicist A. W. Gomme in the 1920s, and which is still resonant today, Antigone and Diotima could not but reflect to some extent the really existing women of Athens that surrounded their creators.¹ For others, the Antigones and Andromaches reflected instead a bygone age of power and respect that had been enjoyed by aristocratic women in the heroic age and which had been eroded by the rise of Athenian democracy.² Their opponents, always more numerous, have resorted to Xenophon’s treatise on domestic life and to Lysias’s court speeches in the fourth century to emphasize the universal subordination, simplicity, and separation of respectable women from public life, from the street, and from the intellectual and political pursuits of their husbands in classical Athens.³ Where Schlegel and Gomme emphasized the paradigmatic nobility and prominence of female characters in literature, others, like the pedagogue Friedrich Jacobs and Christian Martin Wieland, sought firm historical ground for a freer Greek femininity by examining the level of education available to spirited women in Athens.⁴ And since the most educated and spirited women of Athens, or so it was believed, were the hetaerae or distinguished courtesans, it was with them that such an endeavor had to begin.⁵