London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 4

by Henry Mayhew

The Thebans, a very gross people, made infanticide a capital crime; but allowed the poor to impose on the state, under certain circumstances, the burden of their children. In Thrace, the infant, placed in an earthen pot, was left to be devoured by wild beasts, or to perish of cold and hunger[25].

In Sparta, clandestine infanticide was a crime; but the state often performed what it declared a duty, by condemning weakly and delicate infants to be flung into a pit. In Athens, on the contrary, it was left for desperate women, and cold-blooded men, privately to accomplish the act, exposing their children in public places to perish, or to claim charity from some wayfarer. Frequently the rich had recourse to this, for concealing an intrigue, and left a costly dowry of gold and jewels in the earthen jar where they deposited the victim. The temple steps sometimes received the foundling; but occasionally they were left to die in desert places.

In the flourishing period of the Republic, however, poverty was so rare, indeed so unknown, that it seldom exacted these sacrifices from the humbler people. Infanticide was then left to the wholly unnatural who refused the burden, or the guilty who dreaded the shame, of a child.

But in the female society of that state, there was, as we have said, a sisterhood which exercised no inconsiderable influence on public manners. These were the Hetairæ, or prostitutes, who occupied much the same position which the same class does in most civilized communities of modern times. The youthful, beautiful, elegant, polished, and graceful, commanded, while their attractions lasted, the favours and the deference of wealthy and profligate young men, and, when their persons had faded, sank by degrees, until they dragged themselves in misery through the streets, glad to procure a meal by indiscriminate prostitution, with all who accepted their company. When children were born to them, infanticide usually—especially in the case of girls—relieved them of the burden.

The position the prostitute class of Athens occupied in relation to the other women in the community was peculiar. They entered the temples during the period of one particular festival—and in modern countries the church is never closed against them; but they were not, as among us, allowed to occupy the same place at the theatre with the Athenian female citizen. Yet this was not altogether to protect the virtue of the woman; it was to satisfy the pride of the citizen, since every stranger suffered an equal exclusion from these “reserved seats.” Notwithstanding this, however, the courtezans occasionally visited the ladies in their own houses, to instruct them in those accomplishments in which, from the peculiar tenor of their lives, they were most practised, while it appears that both classes mingled at the public baths.

The Hetairæ, or prostitute class, exercised undoubtedly an evil influence on the society of Athens. They indulged the sensual tastes and the vanity of the young, encouraged among them a dissolute manner of life, and, while the power of their attractions lasted, led them into expensive luxury, which could not fail of an injurious effect on the community. The career of the prostitute was, as it is in all countries, short, and miserable at its close. While their beauty remained unfaded they were puffed up with vanity, carried along by perpetual excitement, flattered by the compliments of young men, and by the conversation of even the greatest philosophers, and maintained in opulence by the gifts of their admirers. Premature age, however, always, except in a few celebrated cases, assailed them. They became old, ugly, wrinkled, deformed, and full of disease, and might be seen crawling through the market places, haggling for morsels of provision, amid the jeers and insults of the populace.

In some instances, indeed, there occurred in Athens what occasionally happens in all countries. Men took as wives the prostitutes with whom they had associated. Even the wise Plato became enamoured of Archæanassa, an Hetaira of Ctesiphon. For many of these women were no less renowned for the brilliancy of their intellectual qualities than for their personal charms. Of Phryne, whose bosom was bared before the judges by her advocate, and who sat as a model to the greatest of ancient sculptors, all the world has heard. Her statue, of pure gold, was placed on a pillar of white marble at Delphi. Aspasia exercised at Athens influence equal to that of a queen, attracting round her all the characters of the day, as Madame Roland was wont to do in Paris. Socrates confessed to have learned from her much in the art of rhetoric. Yet these women, harsh as the judgment may appear, were common whores, though outwardly refined, and mentally cultivated. Instances, indeed, of high public virtue displayed by members of that sisterhood, distinguished among the Hetairæ of ancient Greece, are on record, and sufficient accounts of them have been transmitted to us to show that they were among the male society a recognised and respected class, while by the women they were neither abhorred nor considered as a pollution to the community. Still, prostitutes they were, to all intents and purposes.

The mean, the poor, and faded, were chiefly despised for their ugliness and indigence, not for their incontinence. It was, in the Homeric ages, as we learn from the Odyssey, held disgraceful for “a noble maiden” to lose her chastity. But in Athens, at a later time, chastity in an unmarried woman was not held a virtue, the loss of which degraded her utterly below the consideration of all other classes, or debarred her for ever from any intercourse with the honourable of her own sex. The Hetaira was not, it is true, admitted to mingle freely in the society of young women; but she was not shut out from all communication with them; while among men, if her natural attractions or accomplishments were great, she exercised peculiar influence. Consequently, it appears that in Athens the superior public prostitute had a status higher than that of any woman of similar character in our own day. If we look for a comparison to illustrate our meaning, we may find it in many of the ladies who at various periods have frequented our court—known but not acknowledged prostitutes[26].

In the public judgments of Athens we find, it is true, a penalty or fine imposed on “whoredom,”[27] from which, however, the people escaped by a variation of terms, calling a whore a mistress, as Plutarch tells us. Solon, however, recognised prostitution as a necessary, or at least an inevitable evil, for he first built a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos, which, truly rendered, means Venus the Prostitute; and his view was justified by the declaration that the existence of a prostitute class was necessary, in order, as Cato also thought, that the wives and daughters of citizens might be safe from the passion which young men would, in one way or the other, satiate upon the other sex. Though procurers, therefore, were punishable by law, and the Hetairæ were obliged to wear coloured or flowered garments, it was enacted in the civil code of Athens, that “persons keeping company with common strumpets shall not be deemed adulterers, for such shall be common for the satiating of lust.”

Brothels, consequently, existed in moderate numbers at Athens, and the young men were not discouraged from attending them occasionally. There were also particular places in the city where the prostitutes congregated, and a Temple of Venus, which was their peculiar resort. We find in the poets passages, indeed, advocating the support of whores[28].