As C., quoting L. Foxhall, points out, ‘prostitution at Athens could never be merely a “job like any other”’ (p. 40). The quotation from Plato's Symposium (182a7–9) that begins the work represents the problem succinctly: ‘In other poleis, sexual conventions are easy to understand and well-defined, but at Athens they are poikilos (complex, intricate, many-hued)’ (p. 1). Whether this statement is correct about other city-states is debatable (was sex ever simple in Corinth?); it certainly captures the nature of erotic protocols in Athens. Sex in Athens occupied a special place amongst physical activities because it inevitably involved confronting and reaffirming or renegotiating expectations about gender roles, ethnicity, citizenship, slavery, age capabilities, hierarchies of labour, the disposal of economic resources, the limits of familial groupings, the line between fantasy and reality, and the limits of pleasure. Sex involves a complicated chronology. It both looks back to past encounters and eagerly anticipates future gratifications.
The important feature of sex is that it is entangled in other larger narratives about the nature and function of the world. This applies as much to modern scholars as it does to ancient practitioners. You cannot talk about sex without committing yourself to a wide variety of positions on other matters. This is both the strength and the weakness of this book. C.’s vision of prostitution is part of a much more comprehensive understanding of the shape and operation of Athenian society and economy. This book needs to be seen alongside C.’s other works, most notably The Athenian Nation (2000) and Athenian Economy and Society: a Banking Perspective (1992). The image that C. paints of independent, empowered prostitutes untroubled by pimps reflects a view about the operating principles that informed the Athenian economy. C. has long argued for a very dynamic, sophisticated and open model of the Athenian economy in the fourth century bc. It is an economy which encouraged the participation of women, slaves and foreigners and was rewarded with a significant level of take-up by these groups: ‘Female traders held prominent presence as dealers in a broad spectrum of goods, especially foods (like bread, grains, figs, herbs, beans, and salt), and commodities for domestic use such as clothing, garlands, and ribbons’ (p. 136). Similarly, ‘in business matters there is significant evidence that the Athenian courts substantially disregarded incapacity because of personal status – and allowed slaves full court access, as parties and witnesses’ (p. 109). Athens was so keen to encourage the participation of foreigners that it even developed legal procedures to compensate if they had poor Greek by waiving the expectation that litigants should represent themselves in court and allowing them to be represented by talented speech-writers (p. 110). Indeed, the city was apparently so committed to the principal of freedom of contract that it never developed a doctrine of rescission and was prepared to enforce all contracts, even those entered into for illegal ends (pp. 112–14).
It should be noted that none of these claims about the operation of the Athenian legal system and the broader economy are uncontested. On the topics of female participation in the economy, the legal capacity of slaves, the treatment of foreigners and the idea of freedom of contract, there are any number of critics who would disagree, often quite vehemently, with the positions advanced by C. in this book.
The book begins with a discussion of sources. In order to make his argument work, C. is unavoidably committed to an interpretation that grounds literary works firmly within a historical context. Considerations of genre tend to be flattened throughout the book. Texts are always seen to be trapped by the horizons of expectations of their audience and the potential for genre to give licence to the absurd, the irrational, the implausible and the impossible is generally ignored or relegated to a quickly-skipped-over caveat. This has important consequences for the discussion which often puts great reliance on comedy, one of the trickiest genres for extracting the realia of daily life.
Subsequent chapters outline the general social rules and protocols that delineated the lives of prostitutes in Athens. The first two chapters (‘Aphrodite's Workers in Democratic Athens’ and ‘Prostitution as a Liberal Profession’) set out the general framework for thinking about labour that inform attitudes towards prostitution. Here C. advances the argument that the actual job undertaken mattered less than the relationship in which the activity occurred. Working for someone was more shameful and less attractive than working as an independent contractor, and it is this distinction that informs the distinction between prostitutes classified as the lower-class pornai, who worked for others, and hetairai, who worked for themselves.
Chapter 3, ‘(Commercial) Sex and the City’, is largely devoted to a discussion of prostitution by male citizens. This was a topic made famous by K. Dover and important by J.J. Winkler and D. Halperin, who saw in the regulations barring male prostitutes from addressing the Assembly the key to understanding the peculiar nature of Greek homosexual behaviour. Recent scholarship has downplayed the significance of this issue for the broader understanding of sexual mores, and C. continues this trend, arguing that the concern expressed by the regulations reflected a general concern about corruption, not sexual activity. The work in this chapter complements the work on prostitution and homosexuality by J. Davidson (who deserves to be more prominently cited in this chapter). The question of the amount of male citizen prostitution remains debatable. C. tends to believe that the widespread nature of accusations of prostitution by various notable figures in our rhetorical sources reflects a reality of pervasive prostitution. A more sceptical attitude towards the sources would yield a different result.
The final chapters relate to the regulatory mechanisms that governed prostitution. There is a chapter on the contractual relationships that were established between clients and hetairai. A subsequent chapter examines some of the protections available to prostitutes. Here significant weight is placed on the Athenian interdiction on pimping (proagogeia). However, the fact that both the range of activities that ‘pimping’ included was vague and the extent to which the laws were enforced is unclear makes it hard to determine the level of independence enjoyed by Athenian prostitutes. After surveying the legal protections, there is a discussion of the way in which prostitution could be constructed as a family trade by mothers and daughters in a manner that imitates the familial structure of more ordinary industries. Finally, there is an attempt to calculate the financial rewards that prostitution could bring.
It is a full book, plentiful in ideas and with an argument to make. It is a shame given the richness of the contents that its general index is so impoverished. Its sparseness is positively insulting to anybody who has spent a not inconsiderable amount of money purchasing this book. Fortunately, Oxford University Press provide it as an e-book, which should be machine-searchable, and so it should be possible to partially overcome this shortcoming. It is hard to recommend any other format for serious scholars.
