Phryne was one of the most famous hetairai of ancient Greece. She lived in the fourth century bce, and all that survives of her life is a handful of anecdotes preserved primarily in Athenaios. So, the first thing to know about her, as both McClure and Funke attest, is that there is not enough material to write a 150-page book (or two) about her. Therefore, both books consist of some combination of information about Phryne herself, data on prostitutes, Phryne's role as artist's model, her trial for asebeia and Phryne's Nachleben in post-Renaissance art.

As both authors claim that Phryne was a prostitute, one immediate issue to be dealt with is the definition of ‘prostitute/sex worker’. Funke says: ‘I consider sexual labor to be sex acts or companionship with erotic undertones that is compensated in some way (either with direct payment or through gift-giving)’ (p. 25). For McClure, ‘Marginalized, non-citizen women in Classical Athens were often identified as prostitutes, whether they actually engaged in commercial sex or not, because their behavior did not conform to prevailing social norms for citizen women’ (p. 21). These definitions are vague, such that we do not know if Phryne was an enslaved brothel worker, an elite metic who received gentlemen callers with gifts, or anything in between. She is a ‘sex worker’ without the necessity of there being any sex – not the standard, modern conception of a prostitute.

Identifying Phryne (et al.) as a prostitute, however, influences how the primary sources are read and translated, always providing a more meretricious reading than was necessarily intended. For example, in Anaxilas’ Neottis there is the line ὡς ἐρῶσι καὶ φιλοῦσι καὶ σύνεισι ἡδέως, which Funke (pp. 45–6) takes as ‘how they desire and kiss and do the deed gladly’. But suneisi (from suneimi) simply means ‘to be with’; it is only taken as sexual intercourse (‘do the deed’) if we presuppose sex must be involved. Likewise, McClure bases her interpretation of Against Neaira on the assumption that Neaira was a prostitute, that she began as a brothel slave (p. 36), that she was the ‘personal sex slave’ of Timanoridas and Eukrates, and that Stephanos ‘came to her rescue, staying at her house and having sex with her’ (p. 37). What Apollodoros claimed was: ὡς αὐτὴν ἑταίραν οὖσαν καὶ πλησιάσαντα αὐτῇ (‘she being a companion and he associating with her’). Hetairai will appear as prostitutes if we eroticise anything said about them, especially if they are non-citizen women who potentially flirt with men who give them gifts. The fact that both authors are willing to consider just about any woman who is not a proper citizen wife a whore rubs against McClure's stated aim to ‘construct a new feminist biography of Phryne’ (p. 17).

Both authors consider the thorny problem of sources when it comes to anything we might know about Phryne. Both the genres and the chronology are problematic. As both note, most of the data about Phryne (and many other hetairai) come from oratory and comedy. Or, as E.E. Cohen put it, ‘comedic material (which seeks laughs rather than the transmission of reliable information) and forensic testimonia (which seek persuasion rather than factual truth)’ (E.E. Cohen, Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex [2015], p. 6). This is complicated by the chronology: most of the data come from the Roman period, centuries after the facts in question. Also, what data we do possess were written by men. The source material is skewed in every possible direction, leading McClure to the warning:

McClure's work opens with an introduction: a look at Phryne's artistic Nachleben, how the tales of her disrobing during her trial led to Jean-Léon Gérôme's famous painting Phryne before the Areopagus (1861) and all of his own imitators and continuators. There is a nod to Gérôme's model Marie-Christine (Le)Roux as well as forerunners such as Angelica Kauffmann and more modern painters, including Franz von Stuck, whose Phryne graces both book covers. Chapter 1, ‘Her Story, in Quotations’, is concerned with sources and chronology. McClure recognises the problem of a lack of material when it comes to Phryne, and so the text focuses instead on those aspects of ancient Greece about which we have information and which would have been relevant in Phryne's life, specifically: sex work, sex and law. ‘[W]e might construct a life for Phryne … from our knowledge of the historical realities of hetaeras and other sexual laborers in fourth-century Athens’ (pp. 26–7).

Chapter 2, ‘Precarious Lives, Unstable Identities’, is about hetairai and sex workers in classical Athens. Phryne does not appear in this chapter. Rather, McClure discusses how difficult it is to find a hetaira in the historical record, observing that, ‘Attempts to distinguish with certainty hetaeras from other types of prostitutes, and even from citizen women, whether by terminology, dress, cosmetics, special shoes, activities, ethnicity, or naming practices, have largely failed’ (p. 28). The first half of the chapter is focused mainly on Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Neaira. McClure's reading follows the standard interpretations (e.g. Cohen 2015), accepting that Neaira was a foreign sex worker (plying her trade in the sex markets of Corinth and Megara, p. 39), trying to pass herself off as a citizen wife, that not only Phano – also a prostitute (p. 38) – but Stephanos’ sons as well were her own children (pp. 40–1), and that Stephanos was her pimp (p. 62). A greater use of K. Kapparis (Apollodoros Against Neaira [D 59] [1999]) and S.L. Budin (Freewomen, Patriarchal Authority, and the Accusation of Prostitution [2023]) would have offered a more up-to-date approach.

The second half of the chapter deals with vase painting. However, there is no clear evidence for hetairai in the iconographic record. McClure must simply end with, ‘the images of women in Attic red-figure vase painting pose substantial interpretative challenges for the modern viewer. Women of all types – foreigners, slaves, hetaeras, and wives – can share similar iconographic attributes’ (p. 53).

Chapter 3, ‘Sex and the Ancient City’, is about sex (work) in ancient Athens with a focus on named hetairai. There is still no Phryne in this chapter, but the data are intended ‘as a way of framing and imagining Phryne's biography’ (p. 66). This chapter is problematic. It begins with Nikander's tale (in Athenaios) that Solon established a public brothel in Athens to democratise sex and founded a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos, followed by a discussion on the relationship between Aphrodite, sex and prostitution. McClure discusses Herodotos 1.199 – the foulest custom of the Babylonians – to show ‘how intertwined were conceptions of venal sex, barbarian customs, and the worship of Aphrodite in the Athenian imaginary by the middle of the fifth century bce’ (p. 69). The only citation is to Budin 2008 (The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity), yet I never made any such claim. Having at least established that there was no sacred prostitution, McClure goes on to note all the places where Aphrodite appears to be associated with prostitutes, starting with ‘our primary and earliest Athenian account … that of Herodotus’ (who was not Athenian), and that he made it clear that sex work was a Near Eastern custom (he did not).

The chapter continues with archaeological evidence for prostitution in Athens – Building Z, arguing that the prostitutes working here were foreigners, based on finds of pixides and lekythoi, a bronze mirror and a small chest of jewellery. (p. 75). Just like those held by Athenian wives on their grave monuments, or, for the mirrors, owned by Spartan women. The chapter then considers the biographies of three famous ‘fourth-century Athenian’ hetairai: Rhodopis, Aspasia and Theodote. Rhodopis lived in sixth-century Naukratis. It is debatable if Aspasia was a hetaira. Theodote is never called a hetaira (although it is likely). Where McClure came up with the idea that Theodote was a pimp, though (p. 88), is beyond me.

Chapter 4, ‘Phryne's Receptions in Greek Art’, includes Phryne. The chapter is divided into two parts. Part 1 looks at women in private and public portrait dedications. Part 2 shows the rise of ‘respectable’ female nudity in art, leading up to Praxiteles’ Knidia. There is little in the chapter that is original. The section on portraiture is based mainly on S. Dillon (The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World [2010]), the section on Praxiteles’ portraits on A. Ajootian (‘Praxiteles and Fourth-Century Athenian Portraiture’, in: P. Schultz and R. von den Hoff [edd.], Early Hellenistic Portraiture [2007]), the discussion of Phryne's statue at Delphi mainly on A. Corso (The Art of Praxiteles [2004–2007]) and C. Keesling (‘Heavenly Bodies: Monuments to Prostitutes in Greek Sanctuaries’, in: C.A. Faraone and L.K. McClure [edd.], Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World [2006], pp. 59–76), and that of the Knidia mainly derives from C. Havelock (The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors [1995]).

In the final chapter, ‘The Prosecution of Phryne’, McClure starts with background on the Athenian legal system, mostly following K. Kapparis (Women in the Law Courts of Classical Athens [2021]) and E. Eidinow (Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens [2016]). She then gives the particulars of Phryne's trial, again mostly dependent on Eidinow. The chapter finally gets to the matter of Phryne's famous disrobing before the court, with the data for this event taking up pages 144–5. McClure makes the argument that this display of Phryne's breasts was not intended to be erotic, but rather stands within the long-established tradition of females displaying breasts as a means of soliciting pity/mercy as with Hekabe and Hektor, or Helen and Menelaos, or even in the biblical tradition as a means of displaying grief (p. 149).

In sum, little of this book pertains to Phryne, and much of it presents background that has been treated, recently and fully, by other scholars.

Funke's book is more useful. She presents the fragments that make up the ‘life’ of Phryne in both Greek and English translation. She provides a clear chronology of sources and how they came to influence each other (pp. 10ff.). She indicates that little in the sources is non-fiction, ‘in the case of Phryne, that fictionalizing was an ongoing process that had already begun in her own lifetime in the courtrooms and on the stages of Athens and so from the time she became a public figure, “Phryne” was subject to constant renegotiation’ (p. 18).

None of this changes the fact that we have too few data to fill a book on Phryne, and, like McClure, Funke has copious materials that show the ‘world’ of Phryne rather than the woman. Thus in Chapter 1, ‘Mnesarete to Phryne’, we read, ‘Because so much of our material on Phryne is concerned with her as a grand hetaira and ties that term directly to sex workers, a significant portion of the evidence I present here will necessarily apply more generally to the sexual labor of women in fourth-century Athens and as such is purely speculative in regard to the actual life of Phryne’ (p. 23). Like McClure, Funke turns to Neaira to fill out potential data on Phryne. But the coverage of Neaira is weak: for example, there is no reference to Phrynion, and Funke seems to think that Neaira ultimately bought her own freedom in Corinth (pp. 30–2).

Chapter 2, ‘Phryne the Artist's Model’, looks at Phryne as the model and muse (and lover) of the artists Praxiteles and Apelles. The chapter is heavily involved with art theory, especially considering the notion that ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Funke observes that most fragments dealing with Phryne's extraordinary beauty fail to give actual details (e.g. hair colour) (p. 52). This allows readers to envision for themselves what she looked like, thus accommodating any person's concept of beauty. Funke also attempts to employ theory to argue that Phryne shows her own subjectivity as art model, especially using Alciphron's ‘Phryne's Letter to Praxiteles’, wherein the model ‘controls the gaze’ of both reader and viewer (pp. 62–3). The problem here is that all the sources were written by men. The phantom of a female voice does not negate the reality of male penmanship. The chapter continues with a consideration of how tenuous the connections between Phryne and the Knidia are, followed by more theory, this time on The Nude, bringing in the works of K. Clarke (The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form [1956]) and J. Berger (Ways of Seeing [1972]). Funke ends by merging ideas of nudity and subjectivity, saying that, ‘For Phryne to claim subjectivity in such a context, … she needed to both placate the gaze (by showing her nude body) and subvert it (by aligning herself with Aphrodite)’ (p. 76).

Chapter 3, ‘Phryne on Trial’, gives a good background to the trial through the fragments, background on the dramatis personae (e.g. Hyperides) and the nature of the charges (e.g. asebeia). Like McClure, Funke discusses the display of breasts in the context of Greek supplication. The chapter then detours into the ‘Power of Beauty’, including Sappho, fr. 31 (‘He seems to me …’) in full.

Particularly problematic is the section on ‘The Vulnerability of Phryne in Court’. Like McClure, Funke stresses how vulnerable foreign-born sex workers were in Athens. She ends this chapter saying, ‘The combination of beauty, lasciviousness, and the reversal of an overwhelmingly unbalanced power dynamic proved as irresistible to later audiences as it did to those in antiquity as Phryne's nudity became a blueprint for later generations to navigate the divide between eroticism and public morality’ (p. 102). What both authors do not seem to understand is that Phryne did have power: she was wealthy (they acknowledge this) and associated with the Athenian 1%. Like Socrates she had powerful friends in high places. Maybe her trial came down to a jealous middling class wanting to bring down a privileged person. When she takes them by the hand (as in our oldest version of the trial, the one without the bared breasts), maybe she charmed the pants (and hostility) off them. If we want to present a feminist reading of Phryne, perhaps we should consider the version where a wealthy, popular woman uses her charisma and ‘reading of the room’ to save herself.

The final third of Funke's book deals with Phryne's artistic Nachleben, going into more detail than McClure. The chapter is well illustrated and includes sections on theatre, modern art and cinema. I especially enjoyed her brief but fascinating biography of Marie-Christine Leroux, personal Phryne to Gérôme's Apelles (pp. 116–18).

‘What I offer here is largely speculative’ (Funke, p. 29). This is not a bad summation of both books. There are not enough data to write a book about Phryne. Once the materials that are too late or do not prioritise truth get weeded out, there is next to nothing. Both authors make liberal use of the word ‘imagining’ in their works, and this seems accurate. Readers will come away from these works with more understanding of cultural elements that surrounded Phryne. But the real woman remains lost in the discourse.