All women in Greece who prostituted themselves were forbidden to take sacred names; yet of Nemeas, Athenæus says: “And we may wonder how it was that the Athenians permitted a courtesan to have such a name, which was that of a most honourable and solemn festival.”[252]
Of Glycera it is related that Harpalus issued an edict that no one should present him with a crown, unless the donor at the same time presented one to her. He erected a statue to her and permitted her to dwell in the palace of Tarsus where he allowed her “to receive adoration from the people”; he permitted her also to bear the title of Queen, and “to be complimented with other presents which are only fit for your own mother and your own wife.”[253]
Timotheus, who was a general of very high repute in the Athenian army, was the son of a courtesan; we are informed, however, that she was “a courtesan of very excellent character.”[254] The great Themistocles is said to have been the son of Abrotonum, a “courtesan.”
It is recorded that in response to an order issued by the people, Praxiteles made a solid gold statue of one of the hetairai, which was consecrated in the temple of Delphi. Certainly the deathless models of Greek art formed by Praxiteles and Phidias are not representations of coarse and sensualized womanhood.
That these women were a power in Athens during the Periclean age may not, in view of the facts recorded in relation to them, be disputed. Of them it has been said:
None but they could gather round them of an evening the choicest spirits of the day, and elicit, in the freedom of unrestrained intercourse, wit and wisdom, flashing fancy and burning eloquence. What wonder that the hetairai should have filled so prominent a part in Greek society! And how small a compensation to virtuous women to know their rivals could not stand at the altar when sacrifice was offered, could not give birth to a citizen.
In this acknowledgment of the exalted position occupied by the Greek hetairai the author, like most writers upon the subject of the sexual relations, measures virtue not by its antithesis to vice, but by the established masculine standards which have been set up for women to conform to. A Greek wife’s life may have been one continuous scene of subjection to the lowest appetites of a master for whom she may have had not the least degree of respect or affection, and who regarded her only in the light of an instrument for his convenience and pleasure; still such an one would doubtless be accounted as a “virtuous” woman in contradistinction to one of the hetairai whose position enabled her to control her own person and who was able to exercise her own will-power in protecting it against the excesses of Greek men. It is evident that this class of women more than any other in Greece was able to direct its movements and manage its activities, and, therefore, if we bear in mind the characters correlated in the female constitution with the maternal instinct, we may be assured that among the entire population of Athens, the lives of these women were the most pure and the least addicted to excesses.
Aspasia, the philosopher and statesman; Hipparchia, practical professor of Cynic philosophy and one of the most voluminous and esteemed writers of her time; Thargelia, the Milesian, whom Xerxes employed at the court of Thessaly, and many others scarcely less renowned, prove that through the exercise of that personal freedom enjoyed by the hetairai, women had at length risen to that position in which they were able to exert a powerful influence, not only on the affairs of state, but upon the intellectual development of the Athenians and the entire world. To say that these women have been written about in an age in which male power and male influence have been in the ascendency, is to say that they have been misunderstood and their movements misinterpreted.
Because of the efforts put forth by scholastics for two thousand years to belittle or annul the importance of the services rendered by the hetairai, they will doubtless for some time continue to be judged not by their intellectual vigour nor by what they accomplished, but by the social position into which, through the exigencies of masculine domination, they had been jostled. The fact has been observed that less than two centuries prior to the age of Aspasia and Socrates, Solon had given to the calling of prostitution the sanction of religion and law; that he had purchased a sufficient number of young slaves from surrounding countries to satisfy the demands of the men of Greece; and that he had made the calling of these girls a source of public revenue for which services he had received the title of “Saviour of the State.” We would scarcely expect, therefore, to find chastity among the prominent virtues of the Periclean age. I wish to emphasize the fact that by the conditions of society at that time, the class designated as hetairai, although they were in a certain sense free, were practically prevented, no matter what may have been their natural inclinations or aspirations, from rising to a higher plane of moral action, and furthermore that the existing conditions were wholly the result of the supremacy gained by the lower propensities over the higher forces developed in human nature. Had these gifted women accepted the position of wife, ignorance and seclusion would have been their portion, while their sexual degradation would have been none the less complete or perfect; indeed it would have been all the more intolerable, for the reason that the degradation of their persons, which in the position of hetairai was sued for as a privilege, in the position of wife would have been claimed as a right.
By most writers upon this subject the fact seems to have been overlooked, or, if observed, has not been acknowledged, that licentiousness among women during a certain period of Greek life, about which so much has been written, was governed wholly by the demands of their masters; in fact, throughout the history of mankind since the ascendency of the male over the female has been gained, the class which has controlled the means of support, and within which has resided all the power to direct the activities of women, has ever regulated the supply of victims to be offered upon the altar of lust; and in all these regulations may be observed such an adjustment of women’s “duties” to the “necessities” of the male nature, that no alternative has been left them but submission.