Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

By the late sixth century if not before, the boisterous street-walkers had competition from the more tuneful aulētrides. Often called ‘flute-girls’, the double-reeded and frequently double-piped aulos they played was closer in timbre to an oboe or shawm. The Greeks likened it to the buzzing of wasps at the lower end of its range and the honking of geese on the high notes. Pollux the lexicographer put together a list of Attic words used to describe it: ‘wailing, enticing, lamenting’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Along with other music-girls the aulētrides played an important role at the symposium, entertaining the guests with music at the beginning and with sex at the end of the party, but just as often they are to be found out of doors, in the docks of the Piraeus where ‘just past puberty they take a fee and no time at all to sap the strength of cargo men’ or in Athens ‘smiling at you on streetcorners’; clearly it was possible to have sex with a flute-girl without taking her to a party first.

(#litres_trial_promo) Unlike the solipsistic lyre which accompanied poetic introversion and repose, the aulos was usually found providing music for working and moving, more particularly for moving off in the dancing-lines of the procession and the march.

(#litres_trial_promo) It possessed a supernatural power to take over the body; when the aulos played, men forgot themselves. The showpiece orator of the Roman period, ‘Goldenmouthed’ Dio, tells the story of the great flautist Timotheus performing for Alexander. Alexander was so excited by the tones of the music and by the rhythm of the playing that he got to his feet at once and rushed for his weapons like one possessed. Even animals were susceptible to its charms. It was said that the decadent Sybarites made the mistake of acquainting their horses with the sound of flutes and watched helplessly when in mid-battle the cavalry started dancing to the enemies’ tune, waltzing off into the opposite camp. In the ancient world all flutes were half way to being magic ones.

(#litres_trial_promo) The flute was an important element in the symposium, providing the rhythm for the mixing and distributing of the wine as well as the singing, but in many ways this narrow space of horizontal drunkenness was rather restricting for the aulos. One medical writer knew of a man who was thrown into a panic whenever he heard its tone within the andrōn’s narrow confines. It was outside, on the street, that the flute-girls really came into their element, in the kōmos, a conga of revellers that took the drinking-party out into the city on expeditions of riot and debauch.

(#litres_trial_promo)

We hear of ‘training-schools for flute-girls’ where old men like Isocrates thought young men were spending too much time, but Plato implies they could not play very well, and it was not generally for their musical skill that they were so popular.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although a few among them rose to the highest ranks of the courtesans, it seems quite clear that flute-girls were always considered among the cheapest and most despised of hired women. By the fourth century aulētris is used almost as a synonym for ‘cheap prostitute’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Crucially they shared the same space as the ground-beaters, in the Piraeus, on the streets, or under the walls, providing musical accompaniment when the battlements were torn down in 404 after the victory of Sparta.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not long before the ramparts rose again, of course, to provide Athens with seclusion, but for about ten years the city, too, knew what it was like to be on the outside.

The streets could be rough. Fighting over prostitutes was a commonplace of low-life escapades and flute-girls were especially vulnerable to being mauled by competing males. Demosthenes refers casually to a member of the board of archons, the thesmothetai, who had been involved in a punch-up while attempting to carry off a flute-girl. In Wasps Aristophanes stages just such a tug-of-war with a father on one side, his son on the other, and a naked aulētris, stolen from a party, in between. In Achamians he reduces the origins of the Peloponnesian War from a high-minded feud over sacred land to a squalid dispute over pornai, and makes a straightforward equation between naval expeditions, flute-girls and black-eyes.

(#litres_trial_promo) So long as these fights were confined to the symposium, it was a private matter to be sorted out in a private law-suit. On the streets, however, there was a serious problem of public order, and the Astynomoi, a board of ten responsible for keeping the highways of the city open and clear, were empowered by law to sort out disputes peacefully, making sure that the flute-girls and other musicians did not themselves profit from the demand for their services. A maximum fee for the night was set at two drachmas. If more than one man wanted the same woman the matter was setted by drawing lots; she herself was not consulted.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was not an idle statute and we know of prosecution through the heavy-handed mechanism of eisangelia (public impeachment) against men who paid more than the law allowed.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The other duties of the Astynomoi involved disposing of the corpses of those who died in the street and making sure the shit-collectors dumped their shit at a requisite distance from the city walls, and this seems a fair summary of the spatial, administrative and symbolic position of street-women in Athens, occupying the places where bathmen poured the effluent of public baths, where those who needed to might take a casual crap, where the city buried its dead. A street-woman was not just on the streets, she was somehow of the streets as well, a ‘public thoroughfare’ in the words of the poet Anacreon, a public convenience for bodily functions, a ‘cistern’ for collecting the effluent of surplus sexual desire.

(#litres_trial_promo)