Aspasia of Miletus

Bust of Aspasia. We have a  few copies likely made
from an original placed on the Acropolis as a dedication.

Every time I see someone post, publish, podcast, or whatever about Aspasia of Miletus, I have a moment of false hope that they will be doing so based on scholarship on Aspasia published in the last few decades and not based on fantasies of her as some high-class Grande Horizontale. Aspasia the hetaira is a long-standing trope that resists evidence to the contrary even though such a trope was disputed even as far back as the 1920s and in some cases, even in the 19th century. It is based on the application of a multivalent term hetaira to a woman whose prevalence in our male-dominated sources from ancient Athens makes her stand out (even though the terms was not applied to her in ancient sources). I was going to write something up for the great site Bad Ancient on this, but I've already written on it a lot, so, I am placing here a summary of the problem, links to further readings, and an excerpt from my book. 

Part of the insistence on "Aspasia the hetaira" is rooted in a misunderstanding of that term itself. Hetaira, as the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon gets right, has a wide range of meanings from the address one woman uses for another who happens to be her friend (Sappho speaks of Hera and Artemis as "girlfriends" in this sense) to a woman who is in a sexual relationship with a man, but is not married to them (what we in the modern world might also call a "girlfriend"). Some of these "girlfriends" may have received payments in gifts or support from the men they were with. In a specific mental landscape, this gets translated as "whore". 

Another part of this insistence is because we have accepted as real a trope of the wife/whore as the primary structuring device for women in pretty much every society. And, we have come to assume that Aspasia was not Perikles' wife, so she must have been a "whore".  And yet, this notion is rooted in an assumption that the Citizenship Law of 451 BCE banned marriage between citizen men and non-citizen women. Scholarly consensus, however, is coalescing around evidence that marriage was not, in fact, banned, until the 380s BCE. And yet, even with this assumption of a 451 BCE marriage ban, many scholars acknowledge that Aspasia was more likely a pallake (also spelled pallakis) in relation to Perikles instead of his "girlfriend" (hetaira). 

But what is a pallake? It is most often translated a "concubine", but it really only has something resembling that meaning in a handful of references in Herodotus to women of the Persian King's court. Or, it gets conflated with the use of the term to refer to temple attendants (who themselves get yoked to a disputed concept of the "temple prostitute") or it gets conflated with enslaved women who worked as personal servants in Athenian households, women who are threatened by their enslavers, we are told, with being sent to brothels. Any enslaved woman could be sent to work in a brothel, whether she was the pallake of an owner or a farm hand or wetnurse. More importantly, however, is that the term pallake is also used in Athenian law to refer to a domestic partner who is free and eligible to bear legitimate children to their partner. If Aspasia was not a wife, she was, as Madeline Henry argued in the 1990s, this sort of pallake. 

And yet, Aspasia is accused in numerous comic fragments of either being a sex worker or a madam. And Plutarch took this seriously. Except that we know for a fact that the easiest way to attack a politician in Athens was always through their mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives. It's hard to take the anti-Athenian writer Ephorus or the comic poets Cratinus and Aristophanes at face value when they call Perikles' non-citizen wife a madam, when the attack would have been a normal part of political discourse AND expected within anti-immigrant, misogynist comic norms. 

We also, of course, have to contend with the Socratic tradition that positions Aspasia as a teacher of rhetoric, likely of young women, but also of young men (see discussion in ch 5 of Immigrant Women). 

Anyway, point is, Aspasia was most likely NOT any form of sex worker or madam, but there are a lot of people invested in this specific version of her and resist any evidence to the contrary. I collated all the evidence in my 2014 book Immigrant Women in Athens and discussed the disputed concept of the hetaira again in my 2015 article on two women named Elpinike (sister of Kimon) and Koisyra (mother of Megakles). You can read the whole section on Aspasia in the book (it's chapter 3; ch 1 is an overview of the laws, ch 2 on tragic representations of foreign women, ch 4-5 moves to the 4th c and oratory and further inscriptional evidence for non-citizen women's lives but includes a section on Aspasia as teacher of rhetoric)). Please feel free to read both the book and the article for further contextualization and evidence for why I and other scholars dispute that Aspasia was a madam or hetaira (in the sense of a sex worker) and what is at stake in continuing to promote that version of her. 

Below, I am reproducing an excerpt from that study that attempts to reconstruct a more likely version of her life based on a broad range of evidence that includes inscriptions that may refer to her male family members and within the context of how immigrants, especially from Miletus, integrated into Athens in the 5th century BCE. Please consider referring to it next time you see some new encyclopedia entry or textbook that tells you Aspasia was a hetaira because her name means "sweetie" or some bullpuckey like that (citizen women in Athens often had names that meant "honey", "sweetie", etc). Aspasia was a wealthy metic (resident non-citizen) woman in Athens with connections to wealthy citizen families. That context matters. 

***

If Aspasia's tomb remained, 
it probably looked a lot
like this.

Reconstruction: When Aspasia arrived in Athens sometime around 450 BCE, she did not come as a poor immigrant looking for work in the bustling imperial city that was Athens at that time or as a trained courtesan. Rather, she came to Athens from the politically unstable Miletos  as the sister-in-law of the fabulously wealthy and well-known Athenian Alkibiades the elder, just returned from his ostracism. When Alkibiades left Athens in 460 BCE and arrived in Miletos, where he seems to have spent his exile, his marriage to a daughter of the wealthy Milesian Axiochus was nothing outside of the norm for an aristocratic Athenian man. His two children from this union, Axiochus and Aspasios, while metroxenoi, were still reckoned as Athenian citizens because they were born before 451 BCE.  When Alkibiades returned to Athens, however, with his Milesian wife and her younger sister Aspasia, the laws had changed thanks to Perikles.  What had been possible for Aspasia’s sister, producing citizen children, was no longer a possibility for the young Aspasia. 

Thus, when Aspasia arrived in Athens, she came allied by marriage to one of the most powerful families in the city, but would perhaps not be able to contract such a dynastic marriage for herself if only because her children could not be citizens. Still, she was not without citizen friends and family in the city and her immediate social circle was from the cream of Athenian society. The possibilities for finding a good marriage were not out of bounds for her. It is even possible that when Kleinias, the son of the elder Alkibiades from an earlier marriage, died at Koroneia in 447/446 BCE and Perikles became guardian of the younger Alkibiades (III), that Perikles also became the kurios of the still young Aspasia. Around this time, Aspasia and Perikles began a long-term relationship that was recognized as a marriage that lasted until Pericles’ death in 429 BCE. They had one child born sometime before 441 BCE who was enfranchised in 430 BCE. Their relationship, because of Perikles’ prominence and because of the law he himself proposed (and which made his child by Aspasia initially a non-citizen), became the subject of much gossip on the comic stage for certain, and likely, in the agora and the assembly.

Upon Perikles’ death in 429/8 BCE, it is unclear what happened to Aspasia and her son Perikles Jr., although it is possible that the latter became the ward of Alkibiades, now aged around 23, or his own uncle Axiochus, Aspasia’s nephew. Aspasia, Alkibiades’ aunt now aged around 40, would have either become the dependent of Axiochus or of Alkibiades himself until her son came of age. The tradition that Aspasia was remarried to Lysikles, by whom she supposedly had a child named Poristes, is neither secure or necessary.  Many of the comic slanders against Aspasia come from the years after Perikles’ death and may be associated with the careers of her nephew and son. Her relationship to Lysikles could have been one of teacher and student because many of the philosophical texts (Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines) treat Aspasia as something akin to a Sophist. It is quite possible that Aspasia and Lysikles were not married at all and never had a child, but by learning rhetoric from her, he was able to bamboozle others as the comic figure Strepseides attempts to do in Aristophanes’ Clouds, thus bearing the metaphorical child, Poristes, a polite way of calling someone a thief.  Aspasia also could have offered basic education to young women, thus the reference to her ‘girls’ in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, the pornê whose kidnapping he jokes led to the Megarian decree. We might view both as comic slanders against Aspasia as Sophist, dressed erotically in the guise of madam or prostitute.

This reconstruction of Aspasia’s journey to Athens and her life is based primarily on the epigraphical and historical evidence linking her Milesian family to the Athenian family of Alcibiades (II). Whether it is completely accurate or not does not matter, although I think it a more accurate picture of Aspasia’s life than what is traditionally posited. What matters most, however, is its plausibility and what that means for understanding the possibilities for metic women found frequenting citizen social circles in mid-fifth century BCE in Athens and the impact laws like the Citizenship Law might have had on them. Aspasia has long been reckoned among scholars, especially among scholars studying women’s history, as a courtesan and madam mostly because she was associated socially with Athenian citizen men and scholars have long rejected any notion that a respectable citizen woman could socialize with men in this way. 

Aspasia was also considered by her contemporaries as educated and intellectual. The combination of her foreign birth, education and eroticization has led to the inevitable conclusion that she must have been a courtesan because within the dynamics that have become established in the study of Athenian women, the only possible way to understand the famous foreign women of wealth we encounter in the historical record is as such. But it is unclear if such prostitutes really did exist in Aspasia’s lifetime. And the history reconstructed for Aspasia by Bicknell suggests a very different path for metic women of wealth in Athens, especially for those with ties to citizens. While the Citizenship Law did eliminate temporarily and technically the possibility that a metic woman’s child could be a citizen, it did not eliminate relationships for those with connections to the Athenian elites nor did it reduce these women to indigence with no options but to prostitute themselves (or others) to survive. What we see at work both in the invectives against Aspasia and in the scholarly tradition is the ideology of the metic woman, especially reflected in the representation of Phaedra. Aspasia, living in Athens on the cusp of a change in Athenian self-definition, bears the scars of the ideological warfare waged after 451 BCE on metic women under the guise of protecting the citizen body. 

Reconstruction quoted from Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge, 2014) Copyright Rebecca Futo Kennedy. 

Wine and Milk: Drinking Cultures as Acts of Exclusion

The Milk Booth at the State 4 H Fair at Charleston, W. Va. Location: Charleston, West Virginia, 1921. Photo by Lewis Hine.  National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-04435.

This is the first (and hopefully not the last) special guest post to the blog. Here, classicist and art historian Dr. Kate Topper explores the way drinking cultures can act as forms of identity politics in both antiquity and now. These cultures normally act to create an 'in' group -- a norm-- against which others are defined and excluded. Here she compares recent 'milk chugging' parties by some white supremacist groups to the ancient symposium. 

For additional readings on the history of the American eugenics movement and how milk fits into it, I recommend Volume 29 of the Public Historian, particularly the article on the Fitter Families programs at local, state, and national fairs.

By Dr. Kate Topper

As readers of this blog know, white supremacist groups are in the news with alarming regularity these days, and earlier this month they made headlines for a reason that – to judge from my social media feeds – struck a lot of people as really strange. Relying on a widely held but not quite accurate belief that only white Europeans are genetically capable of digesting lactose as adults, some of the more exhibitionist members of American white supremacist groups have taken to chugging milk as a way of demonstrating the “purity” of their European descent.

Following moral disgust and nausea, the most common reaction I’ve seen to this stunt is bafflement, both at its logic and at the fact that it would even occur to someone to chug milk to prove their racial superiority. Yet for someone who studies the history of a different type of drinking – ancient Greek wine-drinking, in my case – it feels depressingly familiar, and I believe that looking at white supremacist milk-drinking in light of one of its historical precedents can help to expose the emptiness of its claims in a way that scientific debunking alone can’t.

Symposium scene. Athenian red-figure cup by
Douris, ca. 480 BCE.
London, British Museum 1843,1103.15.

The focus of my research (and much of my teaching) is the symposium, a nocturnal wine-drinking party for ancient Greek men. One point I take pains to emphasize when I introduce the symposium to students is that the ability to drink wine “correctly” was considered a proxy for the ability to participate responsibly in civic life. The symposium was all about defining community – determining who got to be part of it, and who had to remain on the margins – and the people who were excluded from the rights and protections of citizenship (such as women and foreigners) were, not accidentally, the same ones who were most commonly lampooned as incompetent drinkers of wine.

Competent sympotic drinking meant drinking your wine communally and at the same pace as your companions. An early fifth-century cup shows a group of men arranged comfortably around the room, each supplied with a large cup. The wine should also be mixed with water; there was a special bowl for this purpose, called a krater, and as early as the eighth century BCE, we find oversized kraters used as grave markers. Funerary kraters sent a clear message about the deceased’s social identity – he drank his wine communally and mixed with water, so he was a civilized Greek man.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE.
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side a.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE. 
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side b.

Women and foreigners, by contrast, were both seen and represented as incompetent drinkers. On a cup from mid fifth century Athens, a woman gulps her wine down alone, having pilfered it from the storeroom depicted on the other side of the cup. Her body language suggests that she’s trying to drink it hastily and furtively, and the wineskin carried by her small attendant suggests that she hasn’t bothered to mix it with water. We’re probably meant to laugh at the woman’s excesses – not to mention her dubious housekeeping abilities – but the scene also contains a serious warning about women's unsuitedness for serious responsibility.

Sleeping symposiast in Asian dress.
Athenian red-figure cup by the Chaire Painter, 5th c. BCE.
Basel, Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig BS 1423.

The story was much the same for non-Greek people – who, according to a common stereotype, drank their wine unmixed. On the interior of another cup, we find a sleeping symposiast whose clothing identifies him as being from western or central Eurasia. His sympotic behavior is a collection of stereotypes about foreigners – he has passed out drunk after imbibing from the drinking horn that rests below his couch. The horn was a shape the Greeks associated with foreigners and primitives and with the drinking of unmixed wine, and it was also one that couldn't easily be put down and that thus encouraged fast, intemperate drinking. This man would be an embarrassment at the symposium – but what else, it is implied, could an Athenian expect from a barbarian, who was not culturally or physically suited to drink wine properly? Like the woman on the Getty cup, this guy was not the type to be trusted with serious matters of governance.

To come back to the white supremacist milk-chugging stunt: I’ve spent enough time looking at pictures like the ones described above not to be shocked or even surprised by this twenty-first century trend, even if I’m physically and morally disgusted by it. One thing you quickly learn when you study the history of food and drink is that eating and drinking are intimately tied to the performance of identity. For a Greek man, socially competent wine-drinking was a way to perform a specific gendered and cultural identity – if he didn’t know to mix his wine with water, or if he insisted on filling up on wine while the rest of the group drank slowly, his companions would have some questions. For a segment of American white supremacists, identity performance takes the form of milk-chugging.

And it’s very clearly a performance: in the video shared by the New York Times, a group of bare-chested men stands together, exaggeratedly flexing their muscles before attempting to pound down a half gallon of milk. Others (both men and women) take the “challenge” at home and post the video evidence to YouTube or Twitter for their followers to watch. It’s important to them that people watch, just as it was important for a Greek symposiast to be observed by his companions, because these rituals are ultimately about establishing or maintaining membership in a group to which not everyone is allowed to belong.

For me, this juxtaposition of ancient sympotic drinking and modern milk-chugging is useful because it exposes the recent white supremacist trend as nothing more than a performance – the latest version of a trick human beings have long used to reinforce the legitimacy of the existing in-group and pretend that there’s an objective basis for excluding the out-group. The scientific gloss given to the milk-chugging challenge doesn’t make its claims uniquely valid or worthy of serious consideration, and not only because, as geneticists point out, those claims distort the science. Even without the white supremacists’ (erroneous) claims about genetics, milk comes with a lot of cultural and symbolic baggage that I have to think contributed to the choice to use it as the centerpiece of this racist performance. Like wine did for the Greeks, milk has long occupied a special status in discourses about who is and is not civilized (although whether it was a drink of civilized or uncivilized people has always depended on whom you asked). And in the United States it has been closely tied to ideals of purity since the middle of the twentieth century, even when those ideals are at odds with biological facts.

Milk, in other words, is no less culturally charged for twenty-first century Americans than wine was for the ancient Greeks. As much as the white supremacist milk-chuggers want us to think that their stunt is based in biological fact, it’s really all about cultural perception – to paraphrase the cliché, it’s old wine in a new bottle, only this time the wine is milk. White supremacist groups may have chosen a different beverage to make their point, but their logic is as faulty as that of the ancient Greek man who believed that his habit of drinking wine in the culturally prescribed way made him superior to women and foreigners. We should take their claims no more seriously than we now take the ancient Greek ones.

The Ancient Frat Bro and a History of Legal Disregard of Women

It is one of those times again where the real world and the world of my scholarship are in horrifying sync. This happens when one works on issues of race/ethnicity and gender. For the last year, it has been the horrors of the current administration's immigration policies and the overt racist white supremacy of our justice system. Now, as I put the finishing touches on an article on strategies used in ancient Athenian court cases to steal inheritances from women and children, I find the strategies and even the language of the cases mirrored in the current supreme court confirmation hearing process.

In the ancient court cases I am working with, women are being taken to court by distant relatives of their dead fathers, brothers, or husbands over inheritances. The distant relatives, wanting the estates for themselves, will say ANYTHING to get their way. The women being attacking through the courts are citizen women, usually widows or the only child of a citizen man. But citizenship for women in Classical Athens was not secure or robust. While there were processes for verifying the status of male citizens that could clearly establish their legal rights, there was no equivalent of a birth certificate for women. You had to provide witnesses in the courts to the fact of a woman's citizen status. And in extreme cases (like Demosthenes 43), you had to provide witnesses that a woman even existed!

Beyond having to verify one's existence, there are other standard strategies. Strategies that will seem really familiar to anyone with any experience of sexual assault cases. The most common strategies (found in the legal speeches of Demosthenes and Isaeus) are:

• Impugning the trustworthiness of any potential witnesses to a woman's status
• Suggesting they or an ancestor were foreign--Athenian identity was structured on a racist belief in the purity of the citizen body--foreign women were one of the most feared ways that purity could be corrupted. 
• Suggesting they or their mothers were prostitutes or otherwise women of questionable repute and untrustworthy to know who the father of their children were. Slut shaming 101. 

All of these tactics appear in the Athenian courts. All of those tactics are on display every day in media reports about our judicial system, especially when it comes to trying to hold white men (especially powerful white men) accountable for their actions. All of them have been on display in the past and now in supreme court confirmation hearings. Anita Hill withstood it. Christine Blasey Ford is dealing with it now. 

The current nominee for the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, has been credibly accused of sexual assault. Yesterday, the accuser Christine Blasey Ford gave testimony at the hearings. Dr. Ford's story resonated with everything I remember from my own high school experiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s--I quit drinking my junior year in high school and had to stop attending all the parties because being fully aware of what was surrounding me made me disgusted. The atmosphere Dr. Ford described resonated with my high school reality--even at a large public high school. Rich kids are rich kids regardless of what school they attend and our school in San Diego had plenty of them. The calendar of young Kavanaugh also fits this world--July 1, 1982 is a day everyone should be looking into more.

It also resonated with everything I have learned of college frat parties and rape culture on college campuses. Kavanaugh's demeanor and testimony hit me hard as it brought back two very specific cases I've read. Almost anyone with experience with college sexual assault situations can tell you: He was lying (about the drinking, about what he can and can't remember). He was trying to bully his way to deniability. He probably also had a serious alcohol problem, but can't admit it (he actually cried while talking about how much he liked beer in high school).

That he became a lawyer should not surprise anyone since almost every case we see is that privileged white men who are part of this alcohol fueled sexual assault system (and it is a system) love to try to use legal language and lawyers to protect their privileges. They pretty much always sue and are at the heart of why women don't report on college campuses--they will use the law courts to out their accusers and traumatize and terrorize them as much as they can. There is a lawyer in the town I live in whose entire job seems to be to represent male students who have been expelled for sexual assault. His tactics are no different than we see in the ancient texts. And its goal is to silence women.

Watching the hearings yesterday reminded me that when a woman speaks, whether it is to report or recount the assault or as a questioner, or as an expert witness, or as  judge--the most common tactics are still those used in antiquity.

I am confident that Kavanaugh will get confirmed--that's how power works and there are still too many people who allow it to continue because they imagine they have some access to that power. Or because they may talk about justice, but there is no justice for the non-white, non-men in our world. The identity politics of being a man, being white, being rich, were all on display yesterday. The right to be angry, the right to cry about beer while saying they never blacked out while drunk ("just vomited and fell asleep"). The privilege of having one's "life destroyed" if they don't get to sit on the supreme court. A Marist poll out today shows that 54% of Republicans think Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if he did commit sexual assault. Women aren't fully human to them.* And we continue to let the law be used to ensure it.


*This is a short post and so I've left a lot out that could be added. The issue of race and the ways non-whites in this country are brutalized by the legal system needs to be kept to the front of our minds. Anita Hill's treatment was and is still discounted by white women because of anti-blackness. There is some really good writing being done on that already. I will link them up later. 

On Being a [Foreign] Woman in Classical Athens

It's International Women's Day and so I want to celebrate it by writing not about powerful women in antiquity, but about two not-so-powerful women whose lives were marked not just by the fact of their being women, but, more importantly, by the fact of them being non-citizen or "foreign" women. I say "more importantly" because if it weren't for this foreignness, their non-citizen status, their lives would have been fundamentally different. Because of their foreignness, they were a twice oppressed class. If they were economically poor in addition to being women and foreign, it was a triple oppression. (You can read more about other of these women in a previous post).

Some of you will recognize the women in this post from my book Immigrant Women in Athens. Others, may recognize them from classes you have taken or other scholars' writings on them. They don't make it very far, however, into the popular imagination. We know of them because they were prosecuted in court, a function, I argue, of prejudices due to their foreignness.

***

Sandys' famous painting of Medea

could just as easily be of a woman 

like Theoris.

THEORIS was from the island of Lemnos. Although Esther Eidinow has suggested she might be a citizen due to Athens' long history of controlling Lemnos, it is unlikely that she would be recounted as "of Lemnos" is she were an Athenian citizen. What we do know, however, is that she was executed along with her offspring for the manufacture and distribution of pharmakia. We learn about her in an aside in a speech by the orator Demosthenes (25.79-80):

He is the full brother of this man on his father and mother’s side and his twin in addition to the rest of his misfortunes.  This man--I will not talk about the rest--but on his account you put to death the repulsive Theoris from Lemnos, the pharmakis, and all her family.  [80] He took these medicines and chants from the handmaid who later informed on this woman from whom this slanderer begot children, the use of charms, and quackery, and (he claims) the ability to heal epileptics, although he himself is culpable of all wickedness.

Here we can vividly witness the precariousness of this foreign woman’s life. We do not know her precise situation, but she was apparently condemned for witchcraft after selling drugs to the brother of Aristogeiton, who then resold them as a cure for epilepsy. She was called a pharmakis, a word often translated as witch, but it probably had a wide range of meanings and is literally something like “druggist” or “pharmacist.” Derek Collins has argued that Theoris was not a witch at all, but something akin to a folk healer (which I agree was most likely the case) whose remedy must have gone wrong and killed an Athenian citizen. Her punishment was extreme. She and her children were executed. 

There is no mention that she had a spouse; she may have been an independent metic ("immigrant") woman with children who earned a living by making and selling remedies and potions of various sorts. The Athenian jury must have determined that her actions were intended to harm or kill, thus the resulting death sentence. We do not know what representation she had in the court. If she was a simple folk healer (akestris) or herbalist (rhizotomos) who sold remedies or even erotic potions to customers, then it is difficult to believe that she intended for anyone to die. In the fourth century BCE, making drugs and selling them was not illegal. It was possible, however, to be taken to court if you sold a drug that went wrong. 

Was Theoris dabbling in magic and seeking to harm citizens with her potions, as her conviction and some stereotypes of foreign women suggest? It is not uncommon to hear slaves or “prostitutes” accused of selling or using love potions in court cases or in comedy. In some ancient cases, we hear of them killing by poison, thinking (Deianira-style) it is a love potion. The associations of harmful magic and drugs with mythical foreigners like Medea and Circe also encourages us to consider that Theoris’ condemnation resulted from prejudice against foreign women. Theoris may also have been a priestess of sorts. Either way, it didn't end well for her or her children.

***

Theano, citizen wife, remembered on her tomb.

NEAIRA is another fairly well-known, but not well-to-do foreign woman in Classical Athens. She is known best from a speech once attributed to Demosthenes ([Dem.] 59) in which she was accused of pretending to be an Athenian citizen when she was supposedly really a sex worker illegally married to an Athenian citizen and passing of her foreign daughter also as a citizen. Most scholars have accepted that she was a sex worker (calling her a hetaira) and many even accept the charges of illegal marriage. I am (not unusually) an outlier on this. 

Neaira, to me, perhaps best exemplifies the way prejudices impact foreign women’s lives in Athens and the violence to which they could be subjected without recourse in law. She also exemplifies for me the way scholars continue to allow those prejudices to do violence to her. Centuries later, we believe her accuser not because he proves his case, but because we buy into his biases and his story.

Apollodoros, the accuser and a political enemy of her guardian Stephanos, attacks her on charges of 1. pretending to be a citizen, 2. living in marriage with an Athenian citizen, and further, 3. attempting to pass off her own children as citizens. The speech, however, is only minimally interested in proving these charges. Instead, Apollodoros devotes the bulk of his time to weaving a sordid tale of Neaira's life from a childhood as a brothel slave to her days as a supposed sex worker in Athens itself, though the events he recounts mostly took place decades, before this case is taken to court. Neaira’s situation and the case presented against her has been much discussed by scholars--no surprise given how salacious the details are and how much of a supposed insight the speech gives us into the lives of sex workers. It is a story intended to make the jury unsympathetic to the accused, but one that demonstrates as well the violence that a foreign woman was subjected to (not to mention the prejudices). 

I think we can believe that Neaira was likely a sex worker when she was a slave--all slaves were technically able to be prostituted without restrictions--but after buying her freedom, she seems to have been uninterested in continuing that trade. As an independent woman, however, she was dependent on the goodwill of men, and particularly citizen men, for her safety particularly since she had no male relatives to properly represent her in court. 

After buying her freedom, she came to Athens with the citizen Phrynion (he had lent her some of the money she needed to buy her freedom). According to the speech, she ran away from Phrynion to Megara soon after, where Stephanos later met her. She left because Phrynion, Apollodoros tells us, treated her like as if she were his private prostitute and, beyond that, permitted her to be raped in his company, possibly even gang rape. Even Apollodoros is unable to hide the fact that Neaira was brutally abused and was horrified at this treatment of her person (he tells us that she had expected that Phrynion loved her, but was instead treated with ‘wanton outrage’).  

After she fled Phrynion, she secured the guardianship of Stephanos. Phrynion, however, attempted to have her enslaved to him by accusing her of being an escaped slave. Stephanos stood with her in front of officials and she was granted the status of a free, independent metic. Maybe they formed a relationship. Maybe, as I have considered previously, he hired Neaira to take care of his two children after their mother had died (not an uncommon occurrence in antiquity). Maybe she actually once was "just the nanny." Whether they had a more intimate relationship later wasn't illegal (unless it was marriage), but it might have angered those who thought foreigners shouldn't mix with citizens. 

And yet, the treatment Neaira was subjected to by Phrynion and his friends seems to have been justifiable in Apollodoros’ estimation in no small part because of Neaira’s former status as a slave and her supposedly sordid life as a sex worker and her status as a foreigner in the city.  He expects his audience to assume the worst of her, to assume she is still a sex worker, to assume that she would steal citizenship. He also hopes that the jury will believe that the children of Stephanos are his by Neaira and so not citizens (we don't know their ages and no wife is mentioned). And the penalty to Neaira if the case succeeded? She would be sold into slavery. 

It isn't a coincidence that Apollodorus ends his speech with an appeal to the jury in the name of protecting their citizen wives and daughters. He wants to divide this foreign woman Neaira from those other, "proper" women in their lives. Neaira isn't a “whore” and corrupt and deserving of enslavement because she is a woman, but because she's foreign. And the prejudices against her run deep. 

Some (most)  scholars believe Apollodorus. I do not. We don't know how this case turned out. But we do know that he was a notorious liar. He was banned from prosecuting others in the courts, including his step-father. In his attacks on his step-father, he also accused his own mother of complicity in murder (of his father!) and implied that his brother was the child not of their father but of his mother in adultery with his step-father. He did this without proof, without any shame. And the Athenians got so tired of his frivolous lawsuits against his step-father, that they banned him from continuing them. 

Given this background, why should we believe him in this one case? Why does he and not Neaira deserve the benefit of the doubt? Why is it that even feminist scholars continue to believe him and not read between the lines and see his biases and question what has long been regarded as truth? Why is it that we can't see that her foreignness here is more important than her being just a woman? Because if she wasn't foreign, she could been Stephanos' wife. And any charges that she was illegally married would be moot. If she was a citizen of some city, she would never have been in a brothel as a slave, having to buy her freedom and make a new life for herself somewhere else on her own. 

***

Both Neaira's and Theoris' lives were defined by their being women in many ways. But their experiences as we know of them were fundamentally impacted (for the worse) because they were foreign. Had they not been foreign women in Athens, they would likely not have even made it into the historical record, because their lives would have been like most other citizen women's--safe from prosecutions, safe from the need for or charges of sex work, safe from violence, safe from sale into slavery, safe from execution. Their children would have also been safer and not marked out for the same violence their mothers experienced.  

I've spent the better part of 5 years living with these women as my research subject and daily I am struck by how relevant they are to our world. Because we aren't all "just women" or even "women first." We are variably white women, women of color, citizen women, immigrant women, wealthy women, not so wealthy women, tenured women, contingently employed women, well supported women, or women with little to no support networks to speak of (to name only a few variations). All this variety can't be hidden under the name "women" alone. The permutations of our existences matter, these other identities shape our experiences as women. Some women live closer to power, have better access to justice. Others do not. To pretend that the lack of access that being a person of color or immigrant or not wealthy doesn't mean as much as being woman alone is a mark of one's access to power--the closer you are, the less those other permutations of womanhood matter. It's a truth of privilege not just now, but in the past, too.

Immigrants and Cruelty

Tomb of Eirene from the city of Byzantium, buried in
Piraeus, Athens. Her name is recorded in both Greek
and Phoenician script. 4th century BCE.
Photo by Rebecca Kennedy. 

There are days when my scholarship and teaching resonate with the modern world more than others. Today is one such day. Yesterday, Pres. Trump rescinded the executive order known as DACA, passed in 2012 to protect so-called "Dreamers," non-citizen residents of the US who were brought here as children and who have lived their entire lives here. DACA created a pathway for them to get work permits, legal identification, attend college, and generally participate in everyday life without fear of deportation to places they have never known. DACA isn't perfect--they had to register and re-register every 2 years. And it was only a deferment of possible deportation.

Although there is some talk of Congress acting to pass legislation that will replace the executive order, history suggests to me that there are enough members of Congress for whom the cruelty of deporting these individuals is "just business" that no law will come. AG Jeff Sessions seemed particularly pleased at the announcement. Because sometimes, let's be clear, what is morally right and what is legal are not the same thing; sometimes what is legal is morally reprehensible. This is especially the case when it comes to treatment of immigrants in democratic societies.

In my Eidolon article, "We Condone It by Our Silence," I laid out some of the laws Classical Athens had in place for treatment of immigrants. Its strict citizenship policy and its requirements that resident immigrants (known as metics) register every year with the city and pay an immigrant tax are well documented. The registration policy is actually quite similar to DACA, except that it was the universal policy for immigrants as there was no differentiation between "legal" and "illegal"immigrating, only a failure to register once you did. And failure to register meant sale into slavery--the "deportation" of the ancient world. It didn't matter how long you lived in Athens, even if you were born there and your grandparents were born there--you could rarely become a citizen. To register, you had to have a sponsor. The sponsor had to be a citizen (male, over the age of 30). If you were a man or a family immigrating, you paid 12 obols a year. If you were a single woman, you paid 6. I wrote a book on the women who fall into this latter category, and it is those women I am thinking about today.

We don't know a lot of women from Classical Athens--they weren't permitted to participate in politics and when they appear in court cases or histories, they are often left unnamed. We do see some of the names of metic women, though, in courtroom speeches. They are often being maligned or mistreated. We also see their names on tombstones, where we know they were immigrants because they recorded their city of origin. These women's lives often go unrecognized in our histories or, when they are mentioned, they are discussed as if the slanders of their male citizen attackers are truth. What I want to do in the rest of this post is simply describe a few of their experiences. Like the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in this country whose lives are being upended by the DACA decision, that these women were real people with real lives is too often forgotten or ignored.

Zobia: An immigrant woman in Athens, who had the misfortune of being involved with a citizen man named Aristogeiton. She lent him a cloak and some money one day and upon request for repayment, he seized her and dragged her to the court, seeking to denounce her as an unregistered immigrant. Lucky for her, the tax collector vouched for her as did her sponsor and denied Aristogeiton a chance to make money from selling her into slavery.

Aristogeiton's non-citizen sister: We don't know her name, but we are told a court case against him that he denounced her as an unregistered metic and sold her into slavery. Their brother may have intervened, but we don't know the outcome.

Theoris: Theoris was a n immigrant from Lemnos who seems to have made a living selling medicines and love charms. She got involved with Aristogeiton, who got caught selling fake epilepsy cures, and he offered up Theoris as to blame and as a witch. She and her entire family (including children) were executed for witchcraft.

The Nurse: In a speech attributed to Demosthenes (Against Evergus and Mnesibulus), we learn of an old former nanny, who had once been the speaker's family slave. We don't know her name, but we know how she died. The speaker's father freed her and she married and lived in Athens. After the death of her husband, in her old age, she returned to live with speaker, whom she had cared for when he was a child. In a dispute over a debt, the nurse was attacked by men attempting to rob the home. She was injured and died a few days later. The speaker was distraught, not just because she died, but because there was nothing he could do to punish the men who killed her. She wasn't his slave anymore and she wasn't his relative, so, according to the laws, she had noone to prosecute for her murder. Her death, the death of a former slave and metic, was not considered valuable enough in law to hold anyone accountable.

I am reminded of these immigrant women and more in Athens when I read of women dropping charges of domestic abuse for fear of deportation. Or women being granted sanctuary in a churches to avoid being deported and separated from her citizen children. The callousness of those who support the end of DACA, who will never be impacted by it personally, who say "just deport the whole family."  The idea that these women, because they were "immigrants," were somehow worth less than others, makes me angry. It should make us angry to see it still happening now.

All the talk of progress and here we are where the Athenians were 2500 years ago, treating some people as if they are as much cattle. What did they do to deserve this treatment? This disregard? What makes our nation so frightened of them? Or our land so limited and small or poor that we can't possibly house them? Aristogeiton preyed on these women because he could, because he clearly kept getting away with it. The court cases where these crimes are listed are not about those crimes, but about other offences against citizen men. The men who killed the nurse also got away with it. Immoral men still get away with hateful acts especially when they prey on non-citizens, those deemed somehow less worthy of human status. And I'm angry. And sad.

CONSENT AND RAPE: IS IT A MODERN THING? NO.

I was involved recently in a Facebook blowout, one of those “Someone Was Wrong on the Internet” moments where I had to take a deep breath and walk away in the realization that nothing I said, no evidence I brought out, would convince the interlocutor (who was mansplaining one of my areas of expertise to me) that he was not correct. What was the issue? Commenting on an article in Teen Vogue (leaders of the modern resistance) about  how sex with slaves was always rape, he threw out the “x is a modern idea” trope, i.e. consent doesn’t really apply in the past because we modern PC types invented it. That isn’t true. Ancient laws for both rape and adultery dating back as far as the Gortyn law code (6th century BCE) clearly factor consent--either of the women, if free, or the owner, if a slave--into what sort of crime has been committed [EDIT TO ADD: a colleague pointed out that Hammurabi's law code also contains this type of law]. If no consent was given by the woman (or even the slave in some instanced), the crime was hubris, i.e. rape. In fact, the idea of rape itself can only exist in a world where it is assumed that sex needs to be agreed upon by the parties involved.

So, let's start with the obvious: there is a difference between rape and not rape. In ancient Greece, rape typically fell under laws associated with hubris--the outrage against or abuse of another person intended to cause shame. I know, I know. Everyone thinks the word means arrogance, but that is its least common usage in Greek texts! Anyway, point being, the Greeks placed having sex with someone against their will under the category of hubris. They didn't have a single specific word for "rape", as far as I can tell. Athenian texts just use hubris. The Gortyn law code uses κάρτει (for κρατέω), which means to "force", "conquer", "control", or "seize"  or δαμάζω, "to subdue"  or "tame".  Either way, implicit in both words is the idea that rape is done without the person's consent. That there are laws against it, therefore, mean that the Greeks had a concept of consent. Otherwise, sex is just sex, regardless of whether the object of one's affections agrees to have it or not. And I say "object of affection" because men and women alike could be raped according to the law.

The Romans aren't much different. In fact, both the words for "rape" and "consent" are Latin! Rapio means to seize or take something/someone through violence. If someone has been "rapio-ed", they have been "ravished" or "raped". The Romans also used other words--in the story of Lucretia's rape by Sextus Tarquinius, he is said to "capture her by force" (per vim capit, 1.57.10). Capio has both neutral and violent connotations, but means essentially the same thing as rapio and κρατέω in its violent uses. And the story of Lucretia really gets at the heart of the issue of whether or not consent was "a modern idea" only. I'll quote some of the story (in English translation; you can read it in full here):

A few days afterwards Sextus Tarquinius went, unknown to Collatinus, with one companion to Collatia. He was hospitably received by the household, who suspected nothing, and after supper was conducted to the bedroom set apart for guests. When all around seemed safe and everybody fast asleep, he went in the frenzy of his passion with a naked sword to the sleeping Lucretia, and placing his left hand on her breast, said, ‘Silence, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquinius, and I have a sword in my hand; if you utter a word, you shall die.’

When the woman, terrified out of her sleep, saw that no help was near, and instant death threatening her, Tarquin began to confess his passion, pleaded, used threats as well as entreaties, and employed every argument likely to influence a female heart. When he saw that she was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death, he threatened to disgrace her, declaring that he would lay the naked corpse of the slave by her dead body, so that it might be said that she had been slain in foul adultery. By this awful threat, his lust triumphed over her inflexible chastity, and Tarquin went off exulting in having successfully attacked her honour.

While some might say that she "consented", because she finally agreed after being threatened with death and with shame to let him rape her, Livy is very clear (as is the rest of Roman tradition) that she was forced against her will, that she did not consent, and, therefore, it was not adultery, but rape. Lucretia committed suicide (1.58)--her body was "violated" (violatum), but her soul was innocent (animus insons), and death was her proof of innocence (mors testis erit). She was innocent of a crime (adultery), but was too chaste to allow anyone to slander her as if she had. History has proven Lucretia's fears that she would not be believed otherwise, but with her death, she began a revolution. How so? Because sex by force was not just sex to the Romans. It was rape.

On one last note, we can muddy the waters here even more for those who say that consent is a modern idea only--adultery. In the laws of most Greek city-states in antiquity, the woman was not held responsible for adultery. One of the most well-known cases attesting to this is that of Euphiletus again the adulterer Eratosthenes, preserved in Euphiletus' speech written by Lysias. In Attic law, essentially, a woman was not considered mentally competent enough to consent to non-marital sex (whether she consented to marital sex is not at issue). Athenian law allowed Euphiletus to kill Eratosthenes on the spot if he caught him with his wife (or daughter or mother or household member). The wife, on the other hand, couldn't be harmed other than she would be divorced and sent back to her father (or brother). She was considered incapable of consenting to seduction legally, but the divorce implied that she did consent. 

If the perpetrator is committing adultery (seduction), then he can be killed on the spot. If he is raping her, he is committing hubris and is NOT legally able to be killed on the spot. The woman's CONSENT matters--even if she is not legally considered adult enough to be responsible for giving it under the strain of seduction. And, although a colleague of mine once said that he was sure women divorced for adultery were stigmatized, we have evidence that shows they still were remarried (the law just stipulated that they had to wait about 10 months before doing so).

The Gortyn law code is similar--the adultery law stipulates that if "someone" (always a man) is caught in adultery with women of various statuses, the man is punished. No punishment at all is given for the women in the laws. What this implies is that adultery is a crime of consent--the consent of whoever the male legal representative (kurios) is of the woman--father, husband, brother, owner (for slaves). So, adultery, like rape, involves consent. The difference is that the women must consent to avoid it being rape, the kurios must consent to avoid adultery. And, just on an aside--the Gortyn law code also stipulates that in cases of "he said, she said" involving slaves, the female slave is believed over whoever rapes her. This is, of course, intended to protect her owner's property (her), but it is still a pretty amazing stipulation.

What can we say about the notion that "consent is a modern idea"? Well, I think it is pretty clear that if there are laws differentiating rape from sex and laws concerning adultery, there is inherently a concept of consent. The problem for my FaceBook interlocutor, it seems, is a confusion over the notion of "affirmative consent" and simple consent. Affirmative consent--the idea that a woman must say or indicate "yes" explicitly at every stage of a sexual interaction--is modern, consent is not. To use one of my students' favorite (inaccurate) trite phrases, "since the beginning of time", laws have distinguished rape from not rape by asking the question "did they consent?". So, in answer to the question "Is consent a modern idea?", the answer is clearly "no".