"By Jove, we are not painted with vermilion,
Nor with dark mulberry juice, as you are often:
And then, if in the summer you go out,
Two rivulets of dark, discolored hue
Flow from your eyes, and sweat drops from your jaws
And makes a scarlet furrow down your neck,
And the light hair which wantons o'er your face
Seems gray, so thickly is it plastered o'er."
The secret mysteries of hetairism, which were celebrated chiefly by the Lesbian and Samlan hetæræ and which occasioned a hetasra literature, prepared in part by such members of the craft as Philænis, Elephantine, Niko, and others, constitute an important aspect of our subject, which must be briefly noticed. Suffice it to say that the women of pleasure of Lesbos and Samos excelled in the invention and practice of shameful, unnatural arts, and that the lasciviousness of the Lesbian courtesans led to the loathsome form of lust known as "Lesbian love," which has become proverbial.
Plutarch expressly distinguishes from the hetæræ a class known as "emancipated women," whose preeminent virtue, however, was certainly not modesty. To this class belonged many of the flower girls, wreath weavers, painters' and sculptors' models, who earned a living by means of their good looks, though they did not follow a life of shame. The best known representative of this class was Glycera, whom Goethe has immortalized. She was a native of Sicyon, and supported herself by the sale of flower wreaths, which she knew how to make most artistically, for use at banquets, funerals, and for adornment of the door of one's sweetheart. The painter Pausias, likewise a native of Sicyon, loved her passionately and used to enter into competition with her, whether she could wreathe flowers more artistically than he himself could paint them. He painted a portrait which represented her seated with a flower wreath; it was so excellent that the Roman general Lucullus, after the Mithridatic War, when he was making a collection of statues and paintings, paid two talents for a copy.