On the dietary habits of the Roman Empire as seen by outsiders, Jews and Christians

On the dietary habits of the Roman Empire
as seen by outsiders, Jews and Christians

by Veronika Grimm

Yale University

It needs no great effort to convince the reader that food customs and practices of a given society may contribute significantly to the historical understanding of its life. Food in actuality, its availability, quality and distribution, together with its manifold symbolic meanings have always formed an important part of social intercourse. Food, in addition to being the source of energy for the sustenance of life, is also, as some Greeks so nicely put it, arche kai riza pantos agathou he tes gastros hedone

eating is one of the basic pleasures life offers. Food sharing has always meant inclusion and acceptance in the group; while accusations of disgusting eating habits, just like, and often together with those of unacceptable sexual habits, are well-tried means of social exclusion, employed quite profitably by the morally superior or the gossip-monger for ridiculing, excluding, and showing up their victims.

Despite the veritable sea of food references that even the most cursory search of Greek and Roman literature will turn up, who ate what and when still remains quite uncertain. Eating and drinking habits are described for a great variety of purposes, that range from moral metaphors to character assassination, with little in the way of trustworthy objectivity[1].

In pursuing my somewhat daunting quest for a historical assessment of the dietary habits of the Roman empire I had plenty of occasions to wish for an objective observer, or if this proved impossible, at least for an outsider with open eyes: someone like Lucian's Anacharsis.

As will be recalled, in Lucian's highly amusing dialogue Anacharsis, the barbarian 'outsider', comes to learn Greek wisdom from Solon. The focus of their discussion is on gymnastic training and its lofty role in the education of Greek youth. Under the guidance of Solon Anacharsis observes and thoughtfully ponders the evidence before his eyes, asking the wise man question after question in an effort to remedy his utter lack of comprehension of rationality in what he observes. The contrast of customs for the training of manly courage is made very funny by Lucian, while we do get a vivid picture of Greek gymnastics.

Encouraged by this, I hoped that 'outsiders' to Graeco-Roman culture might provide valuable evidence about its food customs. Jews and Christians of the first few centuries of the Empire were often seen as ´outsiders' to its polytheistic culture. In what follows I shall discuss what we may learn about Graeco-Roman eating and drinking from these sources.

Unfortunately I did not find amongst Jewish and Christian witnesses of the empire an Anacharsis or a Lucian who would so clearly describe and contrast dietary customs. What we have before us, instead, are texts that were written for a variety of purposes, defence, exhortation, propaganda, and others; impartial objectivity was seldom regarded as a cardinal virtue by their authors (neither was a sense of humour, unfortunately). The term 'outsider' itself may raise a lot of questions, but for our purpose here it will describe those who were outsiders to Graeco-Roman polytheistic culture. What, if anything, may be learned from their views about the food habits of this culture? My witnesses on the Jewish side will be Philo, Josephus and early rabbinic literature, and on the Christian side, apologists, like Tertullian.

I shall first discuss the Jews, since they were and remained throughout the period a distinct ethnic group with a distinct religion and, most importantly, a food culture that more or less guaranteed to keep those who adhered to it strictly, as ´outsiders', i.e. as different from the dominant culture. While this statement is seldom questioned, one may still ask just how different Jewish food was from that of their gentile neighbours. The elaborate list of dietary regulations set out in the Pentateuch, presupposes a meat eating population. If, as is often claimed by modern historians, meat was a negligible part of the ancient diet and most people only ate meat on sacrificial occasions,[2] one may wonder why the Law enumerates a large number of animal species, both in the permitted and the forbidden categories, that were definitely not suitable for sacrifice. The Torah distinguished, just as the Greeks did, between thuomena and thereuomena (Xenophon, Anab. 5:3.9), between those animals that were proper for sacrifice and others that were acceptable as food but not for sacrifice. Like other ancient deities, the god of the Jews demanded domestic animals from the herd and from the flock for his altar, but the people of Israel were permitted to hunt and eat also ´the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain sheep', not to mention the locust and the cricket (Lev. 11:22, Deut. 14:5, Deut. 12:15 clearly indicates that the eating of non-sacrificial meat was taken for granted).

Rather than addressing a largely vegetarian society which only ate meat at the occasional sacrifice, the Law appears to confront a human society which in order to obtain its necessary nutrients in a most efficient form would eat, if not regulated, just about anything that moved. The biblical text does not tell us how much meat was available, how often it was eaten and by what classes of people. Meat regulation, however, is the central issue of the dietary laws. There is not one law concerning vegetables or fruit - not even apples, when grown outside the Garden of Eden, are forbidden fruit! This observation may not be trivial in light of the fact that there were other ancient cults that forbade the eating of certain vegetables, e.g. garlic (cult of the Magna Mater) or beans (the Pythagoreans), etc.

The Torah that embodied the core of Jewish religious life gave explicit permission for meat eating, wine drinking and the enjoyment of all the good things of life. In the presence of the Lord your God... you shall eat the tithe of your grain, your wine and your oil, as well as the firstlings of your herd and flock... spend the money for whatever you wish - oxen, sheep, wine, strong drink or whatever you desire. And you shall eat there in the presence of the Lord your God, you and your household rejoicing together. (Deut. 12:15; 14:23-27). It is conceivable that this clear and unequivocal permission in the written Law accounts for the dearth of exhortations to vegetarianism as a way to religious piety amongst ancient Jews. Meat eating seems to have been seldom questioned. Not even the pietist parties or sects are known to have urged vegetarianism. Josephus the historian, aiming to present the Pharisees, amongst whom he counted himself, in the most noble light, claimed that they were like Stoic philosophers who 'despised delicacies in diet' (Antiquities 18:12). Regardless of their sentiments concerning ´delicacies' in diet, the Pharisees ate meat. Essenes, sectarians who regarded themselves as the true Israel, also ate meat, for they believed that they knew better than the Temple priests how to adhere to all precepts of the Law, and observe all the biblical feasts, which, of course, entailed the eating of meat.[3] Even John the Baptist, a miraculously frugal eater, sustained himself on locust, an animal permitted for consumption by the Law! Among ancient Jewish writers whose work is extant the only one who valued alimentary self-denial and a meatless diet very highly is Philo of Alexandria; I shall return to him later, since he is one of our Jewish witnesses here.

The Law permitted meat eating but deemed the indiscriminate use of animal protein as not fitting for the people of Israel. The reasons for this are not known, although many hypotheses have been put forth to account for the choice of permitted meat, ranging from various hygienic to separatist ones. There is not a shred of evidence for the hygienic claims; a lot to be said, however, for the separatist one. Whether it was knowingly intended by the framers of the Law or not, the dietary rules of the Jews have kept the observant from eating meat prepared by non-Jews, and this to a greater or lesser degree, has always separated the Jews from the surrounding world. The Jews, in terms of diet, were 'outsiders' to Greco-Roman culture and apparently this was their own choice. Disdainful or downright hostile Graeco-Roman writers often present the Jews as misanthropes, who are unwilling to share the pleasures of the table with their neighbours. Few of these writers show any depth of interest or understanding of Jewish customs, even to make the obvious distinction, one which is supported by ample evidence, that while the Jews may not have felt free to eat meat at the gentile's table, they did extend hospitality to strangers, who were free to eat Jewish food, which, while restricted to a narrower range of flesh food by the exclusion of pork and shellfish, may not have been otherwise much different from their own.

Hostility and disdain on the part of some did not prevent others from showing interest in the Jews. Various strands of ancient evidence also testify to a considerable curiosity and attraction that Judaism evoked in peoples coming in contact with the Jews. A large part of the voluminous efforts of the two surviving Jewish writers of the empire, Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, is devoted to the exposition and explanation of Judaism and Jewish customs to all who wanted to know. Both were eager to arouse the interests of those whom they considered to be the best class of gentiles and they hoped to win them at least as a sympathetic audience. Philo's intended public was an educated Greek upper-class, brought up on philosophy; while Josephus hoped to appeal to the gravitas and auctoritas of a Roman elite. Both aspired to make Judaism into a philosophy, admirable, and ideally useful for the teaching of self-restraint and other Stoic virtues. Each in his own way tried to elucidate the moral superiority of Jewish law, while both kept quite clear of outright criticism of the empire.

For the topic under consideration, i.e. food customs, Philo is the more interesting of these two writers. But to what extent can he be considered, on the one hand, as an 'outsider' to Hellenistic culture, and on the other as a reasonably objective reporter of food customs? Philo was a wealthy Alexandrian Jew, who had the benefit of the best of Greek education and Hellenistic culture (De congressu quaerandae. 148; De specialibus legibus 230). He seems to have been thoroughly familiar not only with literature but also with athletics, theatres and concerts, all of which he appears to have valued and enjoyed. His social standing, wealth and education made him eminently suitable even for the task of leading a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor in Rome.

Philo was hardly an outsider; he was thoroughly steeped in the Greek culture of his city, Alexandria and equally deeply and passionately committed to Jewish religion. His lifelong aim was to unite these two in a harmonious union. With the tool of allegorical interpretation, invented long before his time to give new meaning to the Homeric pantheon, he tried to invest the Jewish Scriptures with the spirit of Platonic theology and Stoic ethics.

Philo's ethical writings reflect a radically dualistic, conception of the universe, coupled with a darkly pessimistic world-negating asceticism according to which the 'flesh' is a hindrance to the spirit (De gigantibus 29-33), the soul dwells in the body as in a tomb, the body a ´the dwelling place of endless calamities' (Quis rerum divinarum heres 68, 85, 273; De somniis 1:139; Quod Deus immutabilis sit 111-115; De ebrietate 101; De Abrahamo 9; De confusione linguarum 177, and other places). This view of soul and body reveals an attitude much more congenial to Pythagorean or Platonist dualism, than it is to Biblical Judaism, which Philo aimed to explain to his readers. Added to his devotion to Platonic dualism, Philo's thought is gripped by an obsessive concern with personal piety; allegorising the Law did not release the Jew from the keeping of its literal meaning. Philo insisted on the meticulous observance of the letter of the Mosaic law as the infallibly revealed will of God.

The control of the 'passions' and the disdain for the pleasures of the flesh, often with strong misogynist, undertones were common moralising topoi, shared by Cynics, Stoics, and Platonists in the Hellenistic world. In Philo's religious piety these attitudes, which are not characteristic of Biblical Judaism, are even more exaggerated; the 'passions' were not only to be kept under control but were to be eliminated and the body rejected. The chief amongst the Stoic 'passions' against which he struggled most were not anger, or fear or grief, but the desires of 'the belly and what is underneath it'. The amount of space and emphasis that the dangers of gluttony receive in Philo's work reveal an obsessive fear of overeating and fatness which is remarkable and rare in ancient Jewish sources (De specialibus legibus I.148; II.50, 193-196; III.9-11; De opificio mundi 158-159; Quod deterius potiori insidiatur. 101-103, 135-137, 156-159. De vita contemplativa 74 and countless other places). For Philo the pleasures of the table will inevitably make man a glutton and a drunkard, ´while they also stimulate and stir up the stings of sexual lusts' (De opificio mundi 158). As Philo sees it, the purpose of the dietary laws handed down by Moses was to train his people in self-control and frugality. For this purpose he forbade the eating of those creatures whose flesh were the fattest and tastiest. Especially pig's meat and shell-fish, as he assures us, since all who eat these agree that these are the most delicious meats (De specialibus Legibus IV 100).

Philo preached ceaselessly against the pleasures of the senses, against gluttony, and venery. Dinner-parties were all occasions for drunkenness and debauchery. This firmly held view often caused him difficulties when discussing the many feasts in the Bible. For example, he goes out of his way to distance the Passover feast, ordered by the Torah, from the usual dinner parties. This dinner, he insists, is quite different: The guests assembled have been cleansed by purificatory lustrations, and are there, not as in other festive gatherings, to indulge the belly with wine and meat, but to fulfil with prayers and hymns the custom handed down by their fathers. (De specialibus Legibus II 148). Fancy cooks and pastry makers come in for special odium, together with steaming meats, wicked sauces and lethal honey-cakes. All of these were ancient literary topoi, with a long and lively history in comedy and satire. With Philo the humour was missing, replaced by an uncompromising sanctimonious earnestness. With his veritable phobia of the evils of overeating, it is surprising how little in way of direct comment on Graeco-Roman diet there is in Philo's writing.

Moreover, in all his censure of luxurious eating habits, it is never quite clear whose habits is he talking about. An exception to this is when he compares the Day of Atonement of the Jews and the Greeks' 'holy month', as two religious practices equivalent in solemnity. The Jewish celebration, he argues, is highly superior in piety since the Jews, frugally, eat and drink nothing for a whole day, while the Greeks do not fast at all during their 'holy month' but celebrate with lavish food and drink (Vita Moses 2:23-24).

In most other places where Philo denounces luxurious dining habits and all that pertains to them, it is far from clear at whose habits he is aiming, whether Greeks, Egyptians, Romans or humanity at large; and often it is hard to escape a nagging suspicion that if he is talking about anything real and not just repeating old literary clichés, than he is talking about his well-to-do fellow Alexandrian Jews.

A similar unwillingness to comment in detail on the diet of their non-Jewish neighbours faces us in Rabbinic literature. While clearly they regarded gentiles as idol-worshippers, who eat meats unfit for a Jew, the rabbis of the Mishnah, worried mostly about idolatry and possible Jewish involvement in it, inadvertently, through daily interaction with non-Jewish neighbours. Consequently, the rabbis advise in the Mishnaic tractate, Avodah Zarah, that for three days before festivals of gentiles, Jews should not do business with those whose houses and shops are decorated with garlands. In addition to the public festivities, the rabbis also warn against doing business with individuals on their private family holidays, the day they celebrate the shaving off the beard, on the day someone in the family returns safely from a sea voyage, or on the day someone got out of prison. On this and other similar occasions when the gentile makes a banquet, presumably involving sacrificial offerings, Jews should not interact with them. The same tractate of the Mishnah discusses what Jews can or cannot buy from gentiles; again the discussions concern items that may be suspected to have been involved in 'idol-worship', or where there is clear indication that Jewish dietary laws are transgressed. For example, while a Jew may buy milk from a gentile (especially if he saw it being milked), he may not buy cheese because the gentiles use animal rennet to curdle it. While most of the discussion in Avodah Zarah lets Jews carry on commerce with gentiles and generally reflect a busy interchange between Jews and gentiles (even eating together! Avodah Zarah 5:5), some hints of hostile suspicion are here and there revealed, as the following short discussion between the rabbis indicates, where alternately one gives the principle, the other states the reason for it: A. They do not leave cattle in the gentile's inns,
B. Because they are suspect in regard to bestiality.
C. And a woman should not be alone with them,
D. Because they are suspect in regard to fornication.
E. And a man should not be alone with them,
F. Because they are suspect in regard to bloodshed.
G. An Israelite girl should not serve as a midwife to a gentile women.
H. Because she serves to bring forth a child for the service of idolatry (Avodah Zarah 2:1). To sum up so far, our Jewish witnesses did not write about Graeco-Roman food customs as a Herodotos, Strabo or Pliny the Elder would write about the exotic habits of strange peoples. They lived in the empire, Josephus and Philo endeavouring, each his own way, to make Judaism respectable in the eyes of those Greeks or Romans whom they considered important. The rabbis of the Mishnah paid attention to gentile ways only as far as these may have impinged on what they saw as their job, the regulation of Jewish daily life. Pagan customs in themselves had no great interest for them.

Turning now to our other group of 'outsiders', we run into the already familiar problem at the outset: when and to what extent were Christians 'outsiders' to Graeco-Roman culture? The first Christians, indeed, as the New Testament assures us, were Jews with Jewish food customs, but they soon received through the medium of Peter's vision, as related in the Acts of the Apostles, dispensation from Heaven to indeed eat just about everything that moved: He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down... In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, "Get up Peter; kill and eat." When he protested that the creatures were not kosher, the same voice assured him three times: What God has made clean, you must not call profane (Acts 10:9-16). The rejection of the Jewish food restrictions opened the proselytising mission to the gentiles. Christian missionaries could bring the message to the cities of the far-flung empire and discuss it in convivial meetings in dinner-parties, as long as they did not eat blood or meat that was sacrificed to idols. Again it has to be pointed out that the argument against the Jewish food laws, raised by the mission to the gentiles, would not have arisen if the diet of these was mainly vegetarian. Jewish food restrictions hampered conviviality only with meat-eating gentiles. With the rejection of Jewish dietary laws, newly converted Christians had no need to change their dietary habits, maybe with the exception of not buying sacrificial meat.

Early Christian apologetic writings, aimed to allay the senseless suspicion, distrust and hostility of pagans directed against them for being Christians, emphasise that Christians share the same daily habits with their pagan neighbours; as the Greek Epistle to Diognetus (an apologetic written c.200), puts it: Christians... conform to ordinary local usage in their clothing, diet, and other habits... they take their full part as citizens... Like other men, they marry and beget children, though they do not expose their infants. Any Christian is free to share his neighbour's table, but never his marriage bed (Epistle to Diognetus, 5). Tertullian, one of the first great Latin Christian writers, in his Apologeticus, agrees; Christians are human beings who live alongside their pagan neighbours, not as outsiders, but using the same forum, the same meat market, baths, shops, factories, inns and market days. There are some reservations; Christians do not recline to eat in public at pagan celebrations as the Liberalia, but wherever they dine, they use the same supplies as their neighbours (Apol. 42).

The similarity of Christian and pagan convivia impressed him too, and just like Philo in the case of Jewish festive meals, Tertullian too feels that he has to accentuate the differences, and his argument quaintly echoes that of the Alexandrian Jew: Christians come together in a good cause to help the needy, not like the parasites who sell their freedom to fill their bellies. Christians pray first and purify themselves, eat and drink frugally, not like gluttonous pagans, and so on (Apol. 9:39).

If the protestation of common customs did not bring the pagans closer nor allay their baseless accusations of immorality and bad citizenship, then the best strategy was to attack the pagans and turn the accusations back on them. In the Apologeticus, Tertullian's oration in defence of Christian innocence is turned into a scathing attack on the life and customs of polytheistic society. But was he describing Carthaginian society as he saw it around him? I think not. He scoured the literature from Herodotos to Aulus Gellius for evidence of outrage and moral degradation. By throwing at his pagan contemporaries all the atrocities that centuries of Greek and Latin literature had dreamed up, Tertullian endeavoured by comparison to make the moral superiority of the Christians self-evident.

Communal food practices of the Christians were viewed with suspicion by non-Christians, nasty rumours often circulated about their banquets, not stopping short of lurid accusations of cannibalism and incestuous orgies as being the banquets' main attraction. To refute these Tertullian turns the accusation back on the accusers. He deplores the luxury and wastefulness of contemporary eating habits. Tertullian's intended audience, just like Philo's, would, of course, be thoroughly familiar with the image of the rich banquet as the conventional sign of contemporary decadence. They would all have often heard from the mouth of any aspiring social critic about a long-past, frugal golden age 'before Lucullus introduced luxury to the Romans'; and that this luxury with fancy banquets prepared by professional cooks brought with it nothing but effeminacy and all kinds of corruption. Following this tradition Tertullian too contrasts present-day decadence with the moral fortitude of a legendary past, by appealing to the great days of Rome when sumptuary legislation, like the Lex Fannia, promulgated before the third Punic War, prevented excess. Where have those laws gone that limit luxury? The laws that forbade more than 100 asses to be allowed for a banquet or more than one fowl to be set on the table and that fowl not fattened either... Now not only senators but freedman and slaves give "centenary" banquets [costing 100,000 sesterces]' (Apol. 6), - while pagan festivals make the city look worse than a tavern and the celebrants care for nothing but to make mud with wine, to rush about in droves for outrage, impudence and the incitements of lust... all under the pretext of religion, which becomes ´an occasion for indulgence' (Apol. 35).

Is this a description of actual events in Carthage, an outdoor banquet in celebration, for example, of the victory of Septimius Severus, or is it a literary allusion, a borrowing from Tacitus (Ann. 15:37), or some other writer with a healthy dose of aristocratic disdain for popular fiestas? Tertullian, like his contemporaries, orators and writers of the Second Sophistic, enjoyed writing literature on literature. The well-worn characters and situations of classical Greek and Roman writing, familiar to the audience from childhood through a shared education, appeared more 'real' to them than real life. Ostentatious and expensive banquets, together with the nostalgic comparisons with an earlier age of frugal self-control, were used by Tertullian for the same purpose that these served for many other, non-Christian orators of antiquity: that the Trimalchios and their guests should be made to blush with shame under the stern gaze of an ancient Cato! a topos ages old and familiar to all.

But Tertullian's aim was not simply to deplore the useless luxury of his contemporaries. He had a more important task, to prove the innocence and moral superiority of Christian customs by once and for all clearing his fellow Christians from accusations of secret orgies, cannibalism and infanticide. Here again the best defence he thought was attack. As was his custom, he ransacked the literature for cases of human blood-drinking and conveniently found various instances of it in Herodotos, Sallust, Pliny the Elder and others. Armed with these 'facts' as evidence for the prevailing customs of his contemporaries, he confronted the enemies of the Christians (Apol. 9:9-12). How could those who themselves are in the habit of drinking human blood, and who 'demand the paunches of bears stuffed with the crude undigested entrails of men as delicacies', accuse Christians of killing and eating children, when Christians do not include even animal's blood in their diet. (Apol. 9:13, echoing the Apostolic decree of Acts 15:20,29). Tertullian even suggests to the magistrates a new test to flush out Christians; just offer them what seems to have been ordinary food, eaten by all, the blood sausage, a kind of black pudding - Christians will refuse to eat it!

The texts briefly reviewed here do not provide any deep insight into Graeco-Roman daily dietary practice, with the exception of casting serious doubt on claims that the ancient Mediterranean food cultures were largely vegetarian. The rhetoric about food rather reveals the views of each writer about his own and his group's status in the larger society. In that sense they may indeed separate ´insiders' from ´outsiders'.

References to food practices were used by our witnesses not for objective description but to express certain attitudes, invitation to closeness and friendliness or the opposite - distance, distrust and hostility. Our Jewish witnesses, having indeed distinctly different food habits from their neighbours, did not want to appear as hostile 'outsiders'. But they could not say when wanting to assume a friendly stance, 'look we are all the same we eat the same food, etc.' so what do Jews who wanted to be accepted, like Philo or Josephus, say? They say, 'Look, the very thing that appears strange to you in us, our food laws, teach your best values, the virtues taught also by your own philosophers!' The Christians, who most likely shared the same food culture with their pagan neighbours, said so when wanting to be accepted. When, either in self-defence or due to mutual hostility, they wanted to distance and exclude pagans as enemies, then suddenly the eating habits of their neighbours become an object of odium, wasteful, disgusting, sometimes even horrifying. That most of the accusations of horrid food habits were not based on any real evidence is probably supported by the fact that when the pagans were not the prime target of propaganda anymore, the same accusations of filthy eating and sexual habits were hurled by Christians at other Christians with whom they had doctrinal differences.


[1] In recent literature on food in antiquity Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table, Oxford 1993, is noteworthy for its analysis of the many metaphorical uses of representations of food in Roman literature. My own book, From Feasting to Fasting, The Evolution of a Sin, Routledge 1996, is a study of attitudes to food and fasting in the varied and changing cultures of the late antique Roman Empire.
[2] R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology, 2nd ed. 6 vols. 1964 vol. 3 p. 86; G. Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E., 1989 pp. 25, 27-34. Similarly for Greek society see Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, transl. Paula Wissing 1989 pp. 3, 5, 11.

[3] Josephus in Bell.Jud. 2:132-133 describes their food habits as involving two daily communal meals where the baker (sitopois) places the bread and the cook or butcher (mageiros) places the meal in front of them. Josephus also mentions among their occupations the tanning of animal hides. It may be assumed, in the face of no contrary evidence, that the meat of some of these animals was consumed by the community. Archaeological finds of animal bone deposits around the Qumran camp provide additional support for the accepted view that the Dead Sea community ate meat. (R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1973 p. 12-13). For the Essenes and the Qumran community see Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 175 B.C. - A.D. 135, 1986 vol. 2 Appendix B. On food and purity concerns of the Essenes see Sanders, Judaism, Practice and Belief 63 BCE - 66 CE, 1992 pp. 352-361.

Book Review | Dreams and Suicides

Dreams and Suicides

Review by Jonathan Walters

Trinity College
Dublin
Dreams and Suicides: the Greek Novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire by Suzanne MacAlister, Routledge, London, 1996, 235 pp. Hb ISBN: 0 415 07005 8 [[sterling]]40

The ancient Greek novel is a curious genre. It is a creation of the post-classical period, was not discussed by ancient literary critics or theorists, and had no place in the classical 'canon' of Greek literature. It is uncertain when this type of literature was first created, and though there is scholarly consensus that the surviving examples all date from the Christian era, their precise dating is a subject of controversy and their authors are otherwise unknown. Only five complete examples are extant, together with fragments of a number of others. Although the Greek novel had considerable impact on European vernacular literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it has not, by and large, been the object of much study by classical scholars until recently, this marginal position mirroring its extra-canonical status. It is only in the last decade or two that more attention has been paid to these works of fiction, and their value as literature and as source-material for the study of Greek society and culture in the period of the Roman Empire is now being more widely recognised. Even less attention is paid to a number of novels written in Greek, in imitation of these predecessors, in twelfth-century Byzantium, an aspect, no doubt, of the neglect of Byzantine studies in academia by comparison with the Greco-Roman world.

These novels, both those of the early Christian era and their Byzantine imitations, share a number of plot features: at their heart is a heterosexual romance, where the couple are destined for marriage, but have to overcome trials and difficulties in order to achieve their happy ending. Connected with these plot features are other common elements: Chance plays a major role in the unfolding of the action, and both hero and heroine are characterised as, by our standards, curiously passive and prone to despair. It has also been noted that it is characteristic of the Greek novel that, though it takes place in a world which is recognisably that of the post-classical Greek-speaking bourgeoisie of the eastern Mediterranean, it concentrates on what has been described as 'atomized individuals', whose links with the wider community, with civic life for instance, are downplayed in favour of an emphasis on their validation as private individuals, a validation which is achieved by the successful attainment of a love-marriage. The world of the novel is, manifestly, a very different one from that of classical Greek literature.

Dr MacAlister chooses to investigate this world through two common plot elements, dreams and suicide (or suicidal intention). She uses these two features of the novel to point up an overall emphasis in these works on the characters' sense of helplessness in the face of an all-controlling Chance whose workings they cannot fathom, and their anxieties in this situation. In her analysis of the place of dreams in the plots of the ancient Greek novels, she makes use of ancient dream interpretation. In considering suicide, she takes as her starting-point Durkheim's work on suicide and its connection with an individual's relationship with his or her society, and the strength or weakness of the links between individual and community. In the latter case it could be argued that she adopts too uncritically what has become something of a cliché about the Greek world in the post-classical periods, that, compared with the satisfyingly tightly ordered world of the classical polis, later Greeks felt alienation and therefore anxiety in a vastly bigger world. That may indeed be so to some extent, but we should not forget the strength of civic life in cities throughout the Greek world down to the third century CE. We should also remember that other Greek literature of the time seems less concerned with this supposed atomization, and indeed in its affirmation of the Greek heritage can be seen as strengthening individuals by providing them with a coherent cultural map into which they can place themselves. However, such questions lead on to the unresolved issue of the readership of such novels, and the nature of the relationship between the novel and other, more canonical forms of contemporary literature.

One of the most interesting aspect of Dr MacAlister's book is that it deals both with the ancient Greek novel, and with the imitations produced in Byzantium in the twelfth century. The latter have been subject to a rather superficial judgement which minimises their importance and interest, treating them merely as aspects of an archaising culture. As she points out, this hardly does justice to the social and cultural changes of the intervening millennium: imitation in the twelfth century is something very different, however seemingly slavish it may be, from a similar-seeming production of the second century. The major difference on the ideological, and therefore cultural, level, is of course the impact of Christianity. A world-view imbued with Christianity must necessarily place the individual in a very different relationship with the cosmos from that of pagan culture. MacAlister examines this difference in relation both with dreams and with suicide (a very different matter from pagan times in a society with a strong belief in the afterlife, and in which suicide is seen as a mortal sin). In so doing, she puts the Byzantine novels in their immediate context, a context which gives significantly different meaning to seemingly similar elements in the novels. If the earlier Greek novels appear to deal with one set of contemporary anxieties, their Byzantine successors can be read as implicit comment on a very different set of problems.

This work performs a valuable service for those interested in the relationship between earlier and later Greek novels, focusing on two important structural elements in them to do so.

Article | Brothels, Baths and Babes

Brothels, Baths and Babes
Prostitution in the Byzantine Holy Land

Claudine Dauphin[1]


Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Paris

Graeco-Roman domestic sexuality rested on a triad: the wife, the concubine and the courtesan. The fourth century BC Athenian orator Apollodoros made it very clear in his speech Against Neaira quoted by Demosthenes (59.122) that 'we have courtesans for pleasure, and concubines for the daily service of our bodies, but wives for the production of legitimate offspring and to have reliable guardians of our household property'. Whatever the reality of this domestic set-up in daily life in ancient Greece,[2] this peculiar type of 'ménage à trois' pursued its course unhindered into the Roman period: monogamy de jure appears to have been very much a façade for polygamy de facto.[3] The advent of Christianity upset this delicate equilibrium. By forbidding married men to have concubines on pain of corporal punishment, canon law elaborated at Church councils took away from this triangular system one of its three components.[4] Henceforth, there remained only the wife and the courtesan.

If we are to believe the Lives of the holy monks of Byzantine Palestine, the Holy Land (in particular the Holy City of Jerusalem, the aim of pilgrimages at the very heart of Christianity) was replete with 'abodes of lust' and prostitutes tracked down the monks in their secluded caves near the River Jordan. Thus, we are faced with a paradox: the coexistence of holiness and debauchery, of Christian asceticism and lust. Lest we forget that virtue is meaningless without vice, that holiness cannot exist without lewdness, a fifth century AD Gnostic hymn from Nag-Hammadi in Middle Egypt proclaimed: 'I am She whom one honours and disdains. / I am the Saint and the prostitute. / I am the virgin and the wife. / I am knowledge and I am ignorance. / I am strength and I am fear. / I am Godless and I am the Greatness of God'.

In the Old Testament, Jerusalem appeared as a Prostitute in dire need of purification through divine punishment (Ez. 16 and 23). Her degradation contrasted with her original faithfulness: 'How the faithful city has become a harlot, she that was full of justice!', the prophet Isaiah (1:21) lamented. St John applied the epithet Prostitute 'clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, bedecked with gold, with jewels, and with pearls!' (Rev. 18.16-17) to the idol-worshipping Great City, Babylon, Rome and ultimately to any great urban concentration. A similar opinion was held by the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud in the fifth century AD who considered that a bachelor who succeeded in remaining chaste in a large city was without any doubt an excessively pious man. Likewise, the monks of Nitria (modern Wadi Natrun), of the Kellia and of Scetis in Egypt and those of the Judaean Desert in Palestine, considered that the city was par excellence a den of iniquity, of temptation and of sin. Harbours with international maritime trade links such as Alexandria and Beirut, and the universal Christian capital Jerusalem, both provided their innkeepers and harlots with a cosmopolitan clientèle of residents, travellers and pilgrims.

Free prostitution

In the streets

Byzantine erotic epigrams, notably those of Agathias Scholasticus in the sixth century, generally describe encounters with prostitutes in the street.[5] The winding, dark alleyways of the Old City of Jerusalem were particularly appropriate for soliciting by scortae erraticae or ambulatrices. These lurked under the high arches which bridged the streets of the Holy City and walked up and down the cardo maximus. In the small towns of Roman and Byzantine Palestine, however, it seems that the squares (not the streets) were the favourite hunting-grounds of prostitutes. Rabbi Judah observed: "'How fine are the works of this people [the Romans] ! They have made streets, they have built bridges, they have erected baths !'. Rabbi Yose was silent. Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai answered and said, 'All what they made, they made for themselves; they built market-places, to set harlots in them; baths to rejuvenate themselves; bridges to levy tolls for them'" (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33b).

At home

Some harlots worked at home, either on their own account, such as Mary the Egyptian whose Life was written down in the sixth century by Sophronios, the last Patriarch of Jerusalem before the Arab Conquest, or for a pimp. On the evidence of the legislation of Emperor Justinian in the mid-sixth century, in particular Novella 14 of 535, it is clear that providing housing was part of the deal which the pimps of Constantinople struck with the fathers of the young peasant girls whom they bought in the capital's hinterland. Housing did not necessarily mean a house, and was frequently only a shack, hut or room. Byzantine prostitutes were relegated to 'red light districts' in the same way that the prostitutes of Rome lived and worked predominantly in Subura and near the Circus Maximus, thus to the north and south of the Forum. In the late sixth-century Life of John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria, Leontios of Neapolis describes a monk coming to Tyre on some errand. As he passed through 'the place', he was accosted by a prostitute who cried out: 'Save me, Father, like Christ saved the harlot', this referring to Luke 7:37. These districts were generally the most destitute areas in town. The Babylonian Talmud (Pesahim 113b) relates how Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Hoshaia, both poor cobblers in the Land of Israel, dwelt in a street of harlots for whom they made shoes. The prostitutes were so impressed by these rabbis' chastity (for they would not even lift their eyes to look at the girls) that they took to swearing 'by the life of the holy rabbis of Eretz Yisrael'!

In tavernae

In city inns (tavernae) as well as in the staging posts for change of mounts (mutationes) or overnight stay (mansiones) along the official Roman road network (the cursus publicus), all the needs of travellers were catered for by the barmaids. They served them wine, danced for them and often led them upstairs to the rooms on the upper floor. In fact, according to the Codex Justinianus, a barmaid could not be prosecuted for adultery, since it was presumed that she was anyway a prostitute (CJ 9.9.28). In order to prevent Christian travellers from falling prey to sexual dangers of this sort, ecclesiastical canons forbade the clergy to enter those establishments. Soon, therefore, ecclesiastical resthouses (xenodochia) and inns specifically for pilgrims (pandocheia) run by members of the clergy, sprang up along the main pilgrim routes.

Institutionalised prostitution

Brothels

Prostitution was also institutionalised under the form of brothels which Juvenal called lupanaria (Sat. 11.172-173) and Horace fornices (Ep. 1.14.21). These, John Moschus described in his sixth-century Spiritual Meadow as a 'house of prostitution' in Jericho or even more vaguely 'an abode of lust' in Jerusalem (Prat. Spir. 17). The prostitutes who were employed in these establishments were slaves and the property of a pimp (leno) or of a 'Madam' (lena). The very name of the prostitute in Tyre who called out to a monk to save her - Kyria Porphyria - is telling. She was so used as a 'Madam' to boss other women, that once she had been reformed and had convinced other harlots (presumably her former 'girls') to give up prostitution, she organised them into a community of nuns of which she became the abbess - the mirror image of her brothel.

A Byzantine brothel has recently been unearthed in the course of excavations at Bet She'an, ancient Scythopolis, capital of Palaestina Prima.[6] At the heart of this thriving metropolis, a Roman odeon founded in the second half of the second century was partly destroyed in the sixth century. Byzantine Baths adjoined it to the west. To the south-west, the second row of shops of the western portico of the impressive Street of Palladius was also dismantled to make way for a semi-circular exedra (13x15m). Each half of the exedra comprised six trapezoidal rooms with front doors. Some of these rooms also opened onto a corridor or a hall at the back of the building. In one room, a staircase led to an upper storey. Some rooms had niches with grooves for wooden shelves. The apses at both ends of the exedra and in the centre of the semi-circle, as well as the façades of the rooms were revetted with marble plaques, most of which are now lost, there only remaining holes for the nails which held these plaques in position. The inner faces of the walls of these rooms exhibited two coats of crude white plaster.

The floor of most of these rooms was paved with mosaics depicting geometric motifs enclosing poems in Greek, animals and plants, and lastly, in an emblema, a magnificent Tyche crowned by the walls of Scythopolis and holding a cornucopia. The mosaic pavements of some rooms had been subsequently replaced by bricks or a layer of crushed lime. Traces of crude repairs in the mosaics and the insertion of benches in other rooms indicated that the building had undergone various stages of construction. A semi-circular courtyard (21x30m) stretched in front of the twelve rooms. Towards the street, it was closed off by a set of rooms which incorporated the shops previously at the northern end of the portico of the Street of Palladius, whilst putting them to a different use. This row of rooms which was probably interrupted by the main entrance into the complex, opened onto a portico with an opus sectile floor of black and white marble. Two steps running for the entire length of the portico enabled access from the street. The portico and the rooms had a tiled roof. The exedra was demolished at the end of the sixth century or in the early seventh century.

The cabins of the Bet She'an exedra are reminiscent of the cells of the Pompeii lupanarium which consisted of ground floor rooms, each equipped with a stone bed and a bolster. An external staircase provided access to the first floor balcony onto which opened five more spacious rooms. At Bet She'an, the back doors of some rooms on the ground floor enabled clients who were keen to remain anonymous, to enter an abode of lust without being seen from the main street and thus to surreptitiously satisfy their sexual fantasies.

The portico where the girls strolled in the hope of attracting passers-by from the Street of Palladius, as well as the neighbouring Byzantine Baths were part of a fascinating network: soliciting at the Baths, in the portico and in the exedra courtyard, followed by sex in the cabins; and at the back of the building, an entrance-and-exit system for supposedly 'respectable clients'.

Hierarchy and regulations in prostitution

There were two categories of Byzantine harlots: on the one hand, actresses and courtesans (scenicae), on the other, poor prostitutes (pornai) who fled from rural poverty and flocked to the great urban centres such as Constantinople and Jerusalem. There, even greater destitution pushed them straight into the rapacious hooks of crooks and pimps.

Actresses and courtesans

The scenicae were involved in a craft aimed primarily at theatre-goers. It has been described as a 'closed craft', since daughters took over from their mothers. The classic example is that of the mother of the future Empress Theodora who put her three young daughters to work on the stage of licentious plays. The poet Horace described in his Satires (1.2.1) Syrian girls (whose name ambubaiae probably derived from the Syrian word for flute, abbut or ambut) livening up banquets by dancing lasciviously with castanets and accompanied by the sound of flutes. Suetonius simply equated these with prostitutes (Ner. 27). That is why Jacob, Bishop of Serûgh (451-521) in Mesopotamia warned in his Third Homily on the Spectacles of the Theatre against dancing, 'mother of all lasciviousness' which 'incites by licentious gestures to commit odious acts'. A sixth-century mosaic in Madaba in Transjordan depicts a castanet-snapping dancer dressed in transparent muslin next to a satyr who is clearly sexually-roused.[7]

According to Bishop John of Ephesus' fifth-century Lives of the Eastern Saints, Emperor Justinian's consort was known to Syrian monks as 'Theodora who came from the brothel'. Her career proves that Byzantine courtesans like the Ancient Greek hetairai could aspire to influential roles in high political spheres. Long before her puberty, Theodora worked in a Constantinopolitan brothel where, according to the court-historian Procopius of Caesarea's Secret History, she was hired at a cheap rate by slaves as all she could do then was to act the part of a 'male prostitute'. As soon as she became sexually mature, she went on stage, but as she could play neither flute nor harp, nor even dance, she became a common courtesan. Once she had been promoted to the rank of actress, she stripped in front of the audience and lay down on the stage. Slaves emptied buckets of grain into her private parts which geese would peck at. She frequented banquets assiduously, offering herself to all and sundry, including servants. She followed to Libya a lover who had been appointed Governor of Pentapolis. Soon, however, he threw her out, and she applied her talents in Alexandria and subsequently all over the East. Upon her return to Constantinople, she bewitched Justinian who was then still only the heir to the imperial throne. He elevated his mistress to Patrician rank. Upon the death of the Empress, his aunt and the wife of Justin II (who would never have allowed a courtesan at court), Justinian forced his uncle Justin II to abrogate the law which forbade senators to marry courtesans. Soon, he became co-emperor with his uncle and at the latter's death, as sole emperor, immediately associated his wife to the throne (Anecd. 9.1-10).

Poor prostitutes

Only a few courtesans could climb the social ladder in this phenomenal way. Most prostitutes who worked in brothels and tavernae and are described as pornai, were slaves or illiterate peasant girls like Mary the Egyptian who later became a holy hermit in the Judaean desert. Because neither hetairai nor pornai had any legal status, and since hetairai were also slaves belonging to a pimp or to a go-between, the distinction between courtesans and pornai was based entirely on their different financial worth. This aspect of the trade was inherent in the Latin name meretrix for prostitute, meaning 'she who makes money from her body'.

Three types of prices should be taken into consideration: the price for buying, the price for redeeming and the price for hiring. The peasants of the Constantinopolitan hinterland sold their daughters to pimps for a few gold coins (solidi). Thereafter, clothes, shoes and a daily food-ration would be these miserable girls' only 'salary'. To redeem a young prostitute in Constantinople under the reign of Justinian was cheap (Novell. 39.2). It cost 5 solidi, thus only a little more than the amount needed to buy a camel (41/3 solidi) and a little less than for a she-ass (51/3 solidi) or a slave-boy (6 solidi) in Southern Palestine at the end of the sixth century or in the early seventh century. That women could be degraded to the extent of being ranked with beasts of burden tells us much about Byzantine society.

In Rome and Pompeii, the services of a 'plebeia Venus' cost generally two asses - no more than a loaf of bread or two cups of wine at the counter of a taverna. Whereas the most vulgar kind of prostitute would only cost 1 as (Martial claimed in Epig. 1.103.10: 'You buy boiled chick peas for 1 as and you also make love for 1 as'), R. Duncan-Jones notes that the Pompeian charge could be as high as 16 asses or 4 sestercii.[8] In early seventh-century Alexandria, the average rate for hiring a prostitute is provided by the Life of John the Almsgiver. As a simple worker, the monk Vitalius earned daily 1 keration (which was worth 72 folleis) of which the smallest part (1 follis) enabled him to eat hot beans. With the remaining 71 folleis, he paid for the services of a prostitute which being a saint, he naturally did not use, for his aim was to convert them to a Christian life.

Lack of clients over several days meant poverty and hunger. Thus a harlot in Emesa, modern Homs in central Syria, had only tasted water for three days running, to which St Symeon Salos remedied by bringing her cooked food, loaves of bread and a pitcher of wine. On days when she earned a lot, Mary the Egyptian prostitute in Alexandria ate fish, drank wine excessively and sang dissolute songs presumably during banquets. In denouncing the Byzantine courtesans' obscene lust for gold, the sixth-century rhetor Agathias Scholasticus echoed the authors of the fourth-century BC Athenian Middle Comedy. In particular, the poet Alexis claimed that 'Above all, they [the prostitutes] are concerned with earning money'.[9] Sometimes a prostitute's jewellery was her sole wealth. When in 539, the citizens of Edessa, modern Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, decided to redeem their fellow-citizens who were held prisoners by the Persians, the prostitutes (who did not have enough cash) handed over their jewels (Procop. De Bell. Pers. 2.13.4).

It is probably because prostitution could occasionally be very lucrative and thus beneficial through taxation, that the Christian Byzantine State turned a blind eye. Since the Roman Republic, according to Tacitus (Ann. II.85.1-2), male and female prostitutes had been recorded nominally in registers which were kept under the guardianship of the aediles. From the reign of Caligula, prostitutes were taxed (Suet. Cal. 40).

Christianity's condemnation of any type of non-procreative sexual intercourse brought about the outlawing of homosexuality in the Western Empire in the third century and consequently of male prostitution. In 390, an edict of Emperor Theodosius I threatened with the death penalty the forcing or selling of males into prostitution (C.Th. 9.7.6). Behind this edict lay not a disgust of prostitution, but the fact that the body of a man would be used in homosexual intercourse in the same way as that of a woman. And that was unacceptable, for had St Augustine not stated that 'the body of a man is as superior to that of a woman, as the soul is to the body' (De Mend. 7.10)?

In application of Theodosius' edict in Rome, the prostitutes were dragged out of the male brothels and burnt alive under the eyes of a cheering mob. Nevertheless, male prostitution remained legal in the pars orientalis of the empire. From the reign of Constantine I, an imperial tax was levied on homosexual prostitution, this constituting a legal safeguard for those who could therefore engage in it 'with impunity'. Evagrius emphasises in his Ecclesiastical History (3.39-41) that no emperor ever omitted to collect this tax. Its suppression at the beginning of the sixth century removed imperial protection from homosexual prostitution. In 533, Justinian placed all homosexual relations under the same category as adultery and subjected both to death (Inst. 4.18.4).

Already in 529, Justinian had attempted to put a curb on female child prostitution by penalising all those engaged in that trade, in particular the owners of brothels (CJ 8.51.3). In 535, he invalidated the contracts by which the pimps of Constantinople put to work peasant girls whom they had bought from their parents (Novell. 14). The prostitution of adult women, however, does not appear to have unduly worried the imperial legislator. The punishment inflicted on pimps who ran the child prostitution network, varied according to their wealth and respectability. Paradoxically, Byzantine administration considered the job of Imperial Inspector of the Brothels as eminently honourable, so much so that in 630 the Bishop of Palermo was appointed to this post.

The recruiting of prostitutes

The evidence of Justinianic legislation brings to light a change in child prostitution from Roman times when paedophilia focused on small boys much praised notably by Tibullus (Eleg. 1.9.53), to the Byzantine period when little girls found themselves at the centre of a prostitutional web. Some of the peasant girls recruited by pimps in the hinterland of Constantinople, were not even ten years old. St Mary the Egyptian admits that she left her parents and her village at the age of twelve and went to Alexandria where she lost both her virginity and her honour by prostituting herself (and enjoying it - which in the eyes of prudish Byzantines was the ultimate sin).

Abandoned children supplied to a large extent the prostitution market. Justin Martyr had observed that nearly all newborn babes who had been exposed, 'boys as well as girls, will be used as prostitutes' (1 Apol. 27). This entailed the risk of incest which obsessed Christian theologians: 'How many fathers, forgetting the children they abandoned, unknowingly have sexual relations with a son who is a prostitute or a daughter become a harlot?', asked Clement of Alexandria (Paed. 3.3).

The patristic and rabbinic ban on birth-control except for abstinence post partum and whilst breast-feeding, as well as the failure both to enforce adherence to the ecclesiastical calendar in marital intercourse or complete abstinence as advocated by Lactantius (Divin. Inst. 6.20.25), resulted in an increase of unwanted infants who joined the small victims of poverty on the Byzantine prostitution market. In 329, Constantine I decreed that a newborn could be sold by its parents in the event of dire poverty. A law of 428 cited poverty again as the main reason for the exploitation of poor girls by pimps. A century later, the Byzantine historian Malalas emphasised that it was only the poor who sold their daughters to pimps (Chronogr. 18). It was also out of want and hunger that a desperate Christianised Arab woman offered her body to Father Sissinius, a hermit who lived in a cave near the River Jordan at the end of the sixth century. When Sissinius asked her why she prostituted herself, her answer was limited to a pathetic: 'Because I am hungry' (Mosch. Prat. Spir. 136). Likewise, during the 1914-1918 war in Palestine, hunger forced adolescent girls to sell themselves to the German and Turkish troops.

Prostitution, Baths and illness

Famous courtesans and common harlots, all met in the public Baths which were already frequented in the Roman period by prostitutes of both sexes. Some of these baths were strictly for prostitutes and respectable ladies were not to be seen near them (Mart. Epigr. 3.93). Men went there not to bathe, but to entertain their mistresses as in sixteenth-century Italian bagnios. The fourth-to-sixth-century Baths uncovered in Ashqelon in 1986 by the Harvard-Chicago Expedition appear to have been of that type. The excavator's hypothesis is supported both by a Greek exhortation to 'Enter and enjoy...' which is identical to an inscription found in a Byzantine bordello in Ephesus, and by a gruesome discovery.[10]

The bones of nearly 100 infants were crammed in a sewer under the bathhouse, with a gutter running along its well-plastered bottom. The sewer had been clogged with refuse sometime in the sixth century. Mixed with domestic rubbish - potsherds, animal bones, murex shells and coins - the infant bones were for the most part intact. Infant bones are fragile and tend to fragment when disturbed or moved for secondary burial. The good condition of the Ashqelon infant bones indicates that the infants had been thrown into the drain soon after death with their soft tissues still intact. The examination of these bones by the Expedition's osteologist, Professor Patricia Smith of the Hadassah Medical School - Hebrew University of Jerusalem, revealed that all the infants were approximately of the same size and had the same degree of dental development. Neonatal lines in the teeth of babies prove the latters' survival for longer than three days after birth. The absence of neonatal lines in the teeth of the Ashqelon babies reinforces the hypothesis of death at birth.

Whilst it is conceivable that the infants found in the drain were stillborn, their number, age and condition strongly suggest that they were killed and thrown into the drain immediately after birth.[11] Thus, the prostitutes of Ashqelon used the Baths not only for hooking clients but also for surreptitiously disposing of unwanted births in the din of the crowded bathing halls. It is plausible that the monks and rabbis were aware of this and that this (and not only the fear of temptation) was their main reason for equating baths with lust.

In the eyes of the pious Jews of Byzantine Palestine, any public bathhouse which was not used for ritual purification (mikveh) was tainted with idolatry, not only because it belonged to Gentiles, but also because a statue of Venus stood at the entrance of many bathhouses. The statue of Venus greeting the users of the Baths of Aphrodite at Ptolemais-'Akko which the Jewish Patriarch Gamaliel II regularly frequented, was invoked by Proclus the Philosopher to accuse Gamaliel of idolatry. The Patriarch succeeded in clearing himself of this charge by demonstrating that the statue of Aphrodite simply adorned the Baths and in no sense was an idol (Mishna, Abodah Zarah 3.4).

Nevertheless, Venus which Lucretius (4.1071) had dubbed Volgivaga - 'the street walker' - was the patron of prostitutes who celebrated her feast on 23 April late into the Byzantine period. This, too, must explain the intense hostility of some rabbis towards the public baths of the Gentiles over which the goddess ruled both in marmore and in corpore. Since Biblical times, lust had always been intimately associated with the idolatrous worship of the ashera - a crude representation of the Babylonian goddess of fertility Ishtar who had become the Canaanite, Sidonian and Philistine Astarte and the Syrian Atargatis (1 Kgs 14.15) - as well as with the green tree under which an idol was placed (1 Kgs 14.23; Ez 6.13). Had the prophet Jeremiah (2.20) not accused Jerusalem of prostituting herself: 'Yea, upon every high hill / and under every green tree, / you bowed down as a harlot'?

Prostitution and sin

Satisfying sexual temptation and thus transgressing a ban inevitably brought about divine punishment of which leprosy was the embodiment par excellence. Relentlessly niggled by the 'spirit of impurity', a monk left his monastery of Penthucla in the lower Jordan Valley and walked to Jericho in order 'to satisfy his evil yearning' writes John Moschus (Prat. Spir. 14). "When he entered into the house of prostitution, he was at once completely covered in leprous spots; and having realised how awful he looked, he immediately returned to his monastery, giving thanks to God and saying: 'God has inflicted on me this illness, so that my soul would be saved'".

Syphilis

In fact, he had most likely not caught leprosy (which is not transmitted by sexual contact) but venereal syphilis, just like Heron, a young monk of Scetis who, 'being on fire', left his cell in the desert and went to Alexandria where he visited a prostitute. Palladius' narrative in the Lausiac History 26 continues thus: 'An anthrax grew on one of his testicles, and he was so ill for six months that gangrene set into his private parts which finally fell off'. According to the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 33a), Rabbi Hoshaia of Caesarea also threatened with syphilis 'he who fornicates'. He will get 'mucous and syphilous wounds' and moreover will catch the hydrocon - an acute swelling of the penis. These are precisely the symptoms of the primary phase of venereal syphilis.

There are, of course, two conflicting theories concerning syphilis. According to the Colombian or American theory, syphilis (Treponema pallidum) appeared for the first time in Barcelona in 1493, brought back from the West Indies by the sailors who had accompanied Christopher Columbus. On the other hand, the unicist theory claims that the pale treponema has existed since prehistoric times and has spread under four different guises: pinta on the American continent, pian in Africa, bejel in the Sahel, and lastly venereal syphilis which is the final form of a treponema with an impressive gift for mutation and adaptation.

The latter hypothesis is supported by a recent discovery of great importance made by the Laboratoire d'anthropologie et de préhistoire des pays de la Méditerranée occidentale of the CNRS at Aix-en-Provence. Lesions characteristic of syphilis have been detected on a foetus gestating in a pregnant woman who had been buried between the third and the fifth centuries AD in the necropolis of Costobelle in the Var district. Bejel is still endemic amongst some peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. A few cases have been recorded archaeologically on skeletons of Bedouins and settled Arabs of Ottoman Palestine. Contracted in childhood, bejel spreads by physical but not necessarily sexual contact, whereas syphilis which is an illness of adults, is transmitted only sexually. In both cases, the deterioration of the bones as well as the symptoms and the progress of the illness are identical. However, only venereal syphilis is able to go through the placenta and to infect the embryo. The mother of the Costobelle foetus must therefore have suffered from venereal syphilis. This would confirm the view held by modern pathologists that venereal syphilis already existed in Ancient Greece and Rome.

The sin of enjoying sex

Besides the sin of lust punished by illness with which prostitutes contaminated all those who approached them physically, harlots embodied also the sin of sexual pleasure amalgamated with that of non-procreative sex condemned by the Church Fathers. The Apostolic Constitutions (7.2) forbade all non-procreative genital acts, including anal sex and oral intercourse. The art displayed by prostitutes consisted precisely in making full use of sexual techniques which increased their clients' pleasure. Not surprisingly therefore, Lactantius condemned together sodomy, oral intercourse and prostitution (Divin. Inst. 5.9.17).

One technique perfected by prostitutes both increased the pleasure of their partners and was contraceptive. Lucretius' description of prostitutes twisting themselves during coitus (De rer. nat. 4.1269-1275) was echoed by the Babylonian Talmud (Ketuboth 37a): 'Rabbi Yose is of the opinion that a woman who prostitutes herself turns round to prevent conception'.

Contraception

In the sermons of the Church Fathers, contraception and prostitution formed a couple that could only engender death. St John Chrysostom cried out in Homily 24 on the Epistle to the Romans 4: 'For you, a courtesan is not only a courtesan; you also make her into a murderess. Can you not see the link: after drunkenness, fornication; after fornication, adultery; after adultery, murder?'. According to Plautus, abortion was a likely action for a pregnant prostitute to take (Truc. 179), either - Ovid suggested - by drinking poisons or by puncturing with a sharp instrument called the foeticide, the amniotic membrane which surrounds the foetus (Amor. 2.14). Procopius of Caesarea states emphatically that when she was a prostitute, Empress Theodora knew all the methods which would immediately provoke an abortion (Anecd. 9.20).

In the same breath, the Didascalia Apostolorum (2.2) condemned both abortion and infanticide: 'You will not kill the child by abortion and you will not murder it once it is born'. In 374, a decree of Emperors Valentinian I and Valens forbade infanticide on pain of death (Cod. Theod. 9.14.1). Nevertheless, the practice which had been common in the Roman period, continued. That is why the Tosephta (Oholoth 18.8) repeated in the fourth century the warning made by the Mishna in the second century: 'The dwelling places of Gentiles are unclean... What do they [the rabbis] examine? The deep drains and the foul water'. This implied that the Gentiles disposed of their aborted foetuses in the drains of their own houses.

The newborn babes who had been killed and tossed into the main sewer of the Ashqelon Baths, were predominantly boys.[12] This contradicts W. Petersen's statement that 'Infanticide is ... associated with the higher valuation of males'.[13] According to him, whenever infanticide is practised, girls are first eliminated, followed by deformed and sickly children, offspring unwanted for reasons of magic (such as multiple births, twins or triplets) or of social ostracism (such as bastards). Beyond the biological fact that male births are more numerous than female births, the male dominance in the infanticide pattern at Ashqelon may derive in this precise case from the very trade of the mothers of these newborn children.

According to Apollodoros' Against Neaira, Greek hetairai predominantly bought young female slaves or adopted new-born girls who had been exposed. They educated them in the prostitutes' trade and confined them to the brothels until these girls were old enough to ply their trade themselves and support their adopted mothers in their old age. Consequently, in a society of prostitutes, would Petersen's 'natural' selection not have been reversed? Baby girls would have been kept alive and brought up in brothels so that eventually they would be able to pick up the trade from their mothers when the latters' attraction had faded. It would not have been possible to raise baby boys in the same way.[14]

Tainted by the sins of lust, of sexual enjoyment and murder, Byzantine prostitutes, however, were never 'branded', unlike the Roman prostitutes who by law had to look different from respectable young women and matrons and were therefore made to wear the toga which was strictly for men (Hor. Sat. 1.2.63); unlike, too the mediaeval harlots of Western Europe who are consistently depicted wearing striped dresses, stripes being the iconographic attribute of 'outlaws' such as lepers and heretics.[15] Descriptions of the physical aspect of Byzantine prostitutes are at best vague, such as 'dressed like a mistress' in Midrash Genesis Rabbah (23.2). We can only imagine their appearance from fragmentary evidence, such as blue faience beaded fish-net dresses worn by prostitutes in Ancient Egypt, of which there are several strips in the Weingreen Museum of Biblical Archaeology of Trinity College, Dublin.

Prostitution - a social necessity

'Banish prostitutes ... and you reduce society to chaos through unsatisfied lust', St Augustine warned (De Ord. 2.12). He preached, moreover, that 'unnatural sex is atrocious if committed with a prostitute, even more atrocious if committed with a wife... If a man wishes to use part of the body of a woman which it is forbidden to use for that, it is more shameful for the wife to allow for such crime to be performed on her body than to let it be done on another woman' (De bon. conjug. 11.12). Thus, in the well-organised world of the City of God, there was no need whatsoever for domestic contraception. If possessed by a non-procreative urge, a man simply had to go to a prostitute and pour out his sperm but in vas, since coitus interruptus was strictly forbidden. The harlot's rôle was therefore that of a 'natural' contraceptive.

As a result of a chain of false logic, sexual repression dictated by the Church Fathers led to eroticism per se at the hands of prostitutes. Whilst controlled procreative sexuality was kept harnessed at home, pleasure blossomed amongst the harlots. The Midrash Genesis Rabbah (23.2) explained that at the time of the Great Flood, a man used to marry two women, one to bear him children, and another for sexual intercourse only. The latter took a 'cup of roots' to render herself sterile and was accustomed to keep company with him dressed like a mistress. Is this not reminiscent of Apollodoros' triad amputated of the pallake - the concubine? Had values therefore not changed despite the advent of Judaeo-Christian civilisation?

In fact, values had changed, but in this particular context for the worse. Frankness had given way to prudish dishonesty displayed both by Rabbinic Judaism and Patristic Christianity. Such puritanism is surely to blame for the proliferation of Byzantine prostitution and in its trail the increase in numbers of abandoned children. The bad faith shared by Augustine and Jerome on the matter of prostitution encouraged prostitution in exactly the same way that the Victorian brothel was, according to Michel Foucault, the offshoot of bourgeois puritanism. [16]

Article | Women Pioneers and the Male Image Seduction

The Professional Careers: Women Pioneers and the Male Image Seduction

Rachel Finnegan


Royal Irish Academy
Dublin

An idea of just how the female was perceived by a thinking Athenian male can be judged from a statement made by the philosopher and polymath, Aristotle. In his Politics, he discusses the idea of rulers and subjects. Having stated that it is advantageous for animals (whether wild or tame) to be governed by men, he then asserts: 'Also, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject.'(1) Such a concept explains and justifies why it has been necessary, throughout history, for men to hold power over women.

Earlier examples of this justification take the form of charter or matriarchal myths.(2) In accordance with this Aristotelian dictum, the sources, with revelations about double-standards in relation to women's position in society and in law, and the obvious anti-female tendencies - particularly towards those of the less respectable classes - present a very dismal picture to the modern reader of the West. The custom of seclusion made it impossible for women of the 'respectable' classes to pursue a profession - at least outside the home - and a question which has been hotly debated for many years is whether or not this system reflects men's distrust or hatred of the sex.(3)

As vividly illustrated in Xenophon's Oeconomicus - a famous treatise on household matters - the duty of a woman or wife (the same word, gyne, sufficed for both) was to manage the internal affairs of the household, while that of the man was to deal with matters outside the home.(4) Together with producing heirs to the estate, and taking part in various obligatory religious rituals, household management was a woman's sole occupation in life, and as such, the amount of education she required was minimal. It is not until the end of the fourth and the third-centuries BC. that we start to find evidence of education and schooling for girls in the Greek world.(5)

The whole subject of respectable women was taboo in Classical Athens, to the extent that it was frowned upon to even mention them by name in public - a convention realistically presented even in the otherwise unconventional world of comedy.(6) Given this, together with the fact that their life-style was hardly conducive to inspiration or creativity in the arts, it is not surprising that one of the major proofs of female literacy - literary production - is almost non-existent. Other sources, such as vase-paintings with scenes of women reading or writing, are often misleading and difficult to interpret, since subjects which have always been thought to represent ordinary women, often turn out to be Muses or the poetess Sappho.(7)

Whatever the degree of literacy among Athenian women, it is clear that only those from the less respectable classes of society, the old, or those whose families had fallen on hard times, worked outside the home. Even then, however, the occupations they undertook could hardly be described as professional careers, but rather, as the least condemnable means of earning a wage (as opposed, for instance, to prostitution). Such work included street or market-vending (which may have involved the actual production of wares), midwifery, matchmaking and child-care. The women themselves were regarded as inferior since they were not only engaged in lowly trades outside the home, but worked side-by-side with metics (resident aliens) and slaves, and necessarily came into contact with men - the avoidance of which was clearly the primary aim of keeping women at home in the first place.

Such a prejudicial attitude is apparent in a legal oration involving a man by the name of Euxitheus who had lost his rights of citizenship because his mother was a nurse and a ribbon-seller and, therefore, was assumed to be a non-citizen.(8) Demosthenes succeeded in helping his client regain his citizen status by defending the mother and other citizen women like her, who had clearly been reduced to such a life-style through pressure of continued war. When husbands went away to war for years on end, or died on the battle-field, women were often faced with the prospect of taking up some lowly job to keep the family from starvation.

However repressive a society, it is inevitable that there are always some exceptions to the general rule, and throughout history there are examples of various women who actually did manage - against all opposition - to pursue their chosen career and achieve fame - even if it meant dressing up and posing as a man! Closer to our own time, we can think of slightly less extreme situations in which English novelists had to adopt men's names in order to have their works accepted by publishers: women such as George Eliot (who is still known by this pseudonym) and the three Bronte sisters - Acton (Alice), Currer (Charlotte) and Ellis (Emily). It is significant that most of the 'influential' women from the period we are dealing with were particularly concerned with what we nowadays call women's 'issues'. This is, perhaps, because they were writing on, or in other ways concerned with, those matters which most affected them, in the same way that men - as is evident from the sources - were prone to concentrate on peculiarly male affairs. What is more interesting, however, is the contemporary male attitude to such women and their achievements, which is generally one of ridicule or condemnation.

With regard to writing - what we would possibly regard as the most respectable and genteel of occupations - the seventh-century poetess, Sappho, dedicated many of her love-songs to other women and girls.(9) Similarly, Erinna, another poetess writing in the mid-fourth-century BC, is famous for a poem she composed in memory of her dear friend Baucis - a young girl who was always at her side (GLP 3.120). Both these women dwelt on themes of the close friendships of young girls - Sappho in particular presenting the idea of happiness and innocence in childhood, and the horror of being snatched away from friends at an early age and forced into unwelcome marriage.(10)

Although the work of Sappho has been greatly admired and imitated by poets through the ages, it was continually mocked by the Athenian comic playwrights, who gave the word "lesbian" (the adjective deriving from her birth-place) obscene connotations.(11) The work and private life of Erinna, and her close friend Baucis, are similarly derided by the Alexandrian mimographer, Herodas, who, in his Mimes, uses them as comic names for olisboi (dildos);(12) and if this sort of smutty male reaction to female writers is not bad enough, commentators on their works - both ancient and modern - have further diminished the reputation of such literary talent and skill by actually denying female authorship.(13) Another example is the poetess Corinna, (of Thebes or Tanagra), who defeated Pindar five times in poetry contests and was rewarded for giving him some literary advice by being referred to in a later poem as a 'Boeotian sow'(14) - the sow being a common term of abuse used of women in the Greek world.(15) Likewise, the fifth-century poetess Praxilla wrote a Hymn to Adonis, which was duly ridiculed by other members of the literary circle.(16)

From writing, we turn to philosophy - an activity less likely to include women, since its practice often involved the discussion of theories in groups or sects. There are exceptions, however: the life and works of the sixth-century Pythagoras - known even then as the 'Feminist Philosopher' - are said to have been greatly influenced by various women. He learned most of his moral doctrines from the Delphic Priestess, Themistoclea, and - having established a Pythagorean community in the Greek colony of Croton, in southern Italy (an order which included at least twenty-eight female teachers and students), he married a famous cosmologist, Theano, who wrote treatises on mathematics, physics and medicine. Both she and her daughters were particularly interested in gynaecology and when the school was destroyed and Pythagoras killed, Theano succeeded him as leader of the community. We are told by Diogenes Laertius, who is the most important source for female philosophers,(17) that men gave their wives into the charge of Pythagoras to learn his doctrines.

Inevitably, the comic poets satirised this aspect of the Pythagorian community. We have fragments of two comedies entitled Pythagorizousae or Pythagorising Women - one the work of Cratinus and the other by Alexis.(18) Although only a few lines of each exist, it can be imagined that - as indicated by the titles - this unusual situation of influential and intellectual females was satirised to its fullest extent. Other famous women associated with later branches of the Pythagorean School included Phintys and Milissa who, in the fifth-century BC, wrote on the obligations of women.

Diogenes Laertius also records that around 300 BC a young Mantinean woman by the name of Hipparchia became fascinated by the doctrines of the Cynic philosophy and, more especially, by the Theban philosopher, Crates.(19) She was so obsessed that she not only refused to marry several eligible suitors but threatened suicide if her parents did not arrange her marriage with the man. The philosopher himself tried to dissuade her, to no avail, and eventually informed her that if she wished to marry him she would have to adopt his career - which would necessarily involve posing as a man. Having agreed to this, she then had to masquerade as a man in order to pursue her interest in philosophy - and was thus able to live the life of a Cynic.

She is reputed to have accompanied her husband to dinners and other public events and evidently incurred the wrath of the male guests. According to one tale, she annoyed a certain Theodorus by one of her quips, or sophisms, causing him to rip off her cloak and ask why she has given up weaving. Her reply was to the effect that the pursuit of education is more important than the loom. Other female philosophers include the Platonists Lastheneia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Phlius - the latter of whom was also reputed to have worn men's clothing.(20) She was, therefore, accepted in intellectual circles by a means which was to be adopted by many later female scholars.

The logic behind such an extreme requirement is difficult to follow: if a woman was actually accepted into a sect on the basis of the necessary credentials (presumably, the virtue of her superior mind), why was it obligatory for her to become, or seem to become, a man just because philosophy was traditionally a male preserve? In the case of Hipparchia, her admittance to the Cynic way of life was, perhaps, based partly on her wealth (which would have involved a large dowry for Crates) and the fact that her brother Metrocles also belonged to the sect.(21) Perhaps - like the Spartan marriage ritual of a bride cropping her hair and wearing men's clothes(22) the measure of trans-dressing was taken to put other members at ease in this unaccustomed female presence. Another interpretation could be that the sect did not wish to be regarded as having courtesans in its midst, and so insisted on its female components looking as little as possible like courtesans, who were easily identified by their colourful clothes, elaborate hair-styles and heavy make-up.(23) Whatever the case, that such a custom was not considered particularly unusual is indicated, perhaps, by the reaction of the historian, who simply records the facts without further comment.

We come now to the question of women's participation in the medical profession. We know from various iconographic and literary sources that women in childbirth were either assisted by female friends and neighbours, or employed a midwife.(24) One suspects that such work required, or rather, was given, little training, and depended mainly upon experience. It seems, too, that it was the particular preserve of old woman, who, in the Classical period, enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than the younger women.

It was perhaps perceived that once they had passed the age of child-bearing they were no longer affected by superstitious beliefs concerning sterility, which is why they alone, of all women, could take an active role in the slaughtering of sacrificial victims.(25) Neither were they concerned with marriage prospects or the threat of producing illegitimate children. Judging from the explanation in Demosthenes, mentioned earlier, and the reasons women had for going into this sort of work (for example poverty and war), such a job would also have been regarded with scant esteem. Given the fear, especially in the Classical period, of women coming into contact with men outside their own immediate family, it would have been ideal for such work to have been undertaken, properly, by women; but, as the following story reveals, such opportunities did not exist and because of this, patients had to be involved in considerable expense for the privilege of a trained, male physician or otherwise had to resort to some sort of unprofessional female help. Not surprisingly, the rates of infant mortality and mothers dying in childbirth were extremely high.(26)

As a glance at the extensive Hippocratic Corpus will show, the medical profession proper was a completely closed shop - and even the area of gynaecology was (as it is now) dominated by men. A strange story is recorded by the Roman historian Hyginus,(27) telling of an incident which is supposed to have occurred in fourth-century Athens, at around the same period as the tale about Hipparchia the Cynic. According to his report, the citizen women of Athens (presumably those of the wealthier classes) - too modest to see male doctors - were fast dying out in childbirth, and as the result of other female complaints. A young Athenian maiden called Agnodike (or Hagnodike, which translates as 'Chaste in Justice'), wishing to resolve the problem, cut off her hair, dressed up as a man and went to Alexandria, in 300 BC, where she studied medicine and midwifery under Herophilus, a famous doctor. On her return to Athens, still disguised as a man, she set up a practice and in order to put her reluctant patients at their ease, would lift up her cloak and reveal her true sex. She became so popular among female patients, however, that the male doctors - jealous of her success and eager to protect their profession - had her prosecuted on a charge of corrupting men's wives - a charge which relates to the Hippocratic Oath sworn by doctors even today.

In court, she surprised the whole company by lifting up her cloak and revealing herself to all as a woman. In this way, she inflicted two different charges on herself: first, that of being a woman physician, and secondly practising under false pretences. On hearing that their heroine was about to be sentenced to death, the furious women of Athens assembled at the law-courts, condemning their husbands as enemies rather than friends, and threatening that they would all die with her if she were put to death. Their protest succeeded and Agnodike was allowed to practice medicine as a woman. The law was changed and it became possible for free-born Athenian women to work in the medical profession so long as they treated females only.

This little-known tale could be interpreted in a variety of ways: firstly, as conforming to a certain type of myth involving the element of the symbolic exposure of the genitals (anasyrmos)(28) - something like the phenomenon of our Sheela-na-gigs; secondly, as corresponding with comic scenes of travesty, with male actors playing female roles, and the added complication of then posing as men;(29) and thirdly, as a historical account of the development of the movement towards women's education in the medical field. There is little proof, though, either way - except for the fact (which may or may not be significant) that a funerary stele dating from the fourth-century BC describes a certain Phanostrate as a midwife and physician.(30) This indicates (irrespective of Hyginus' tale) that the practice of obstetrics was beginning to be undertaken by women from the fourth-century onwards.

If true, the element of female travesty in this story differs from the others outlined above. Rather than being made a stipulation by the men in charge, this method of dress is adopted secretly, as a means of entering illegally into a male-dominated profession. Whereas the various philosophical schools in question acknowledged and accepted the intellectual capabilities of certain women, members of the medical profession chose to deny or ignore them.

One interpretation to be deduced from this is that the choice of acceptance on the one hand, and rejection on the other, depended on financial considerations. Although the comic poets would have us believe otherwise,(31) philosophy was not a profit-making organisation or profession, whereas medicine was. Therefore, a woman like Hipparchia might be allowed to practice philosophy among the Cynics, and possibly, at the same time, contribute financially by means of a dowry. This, however, was not a prerequisite for her entry, as indicated by the admission of other, less wealthy women.

As the story of Agnodike suggests, women in general were barred from the medical profession because the closed brotherhood of physicians wished to remain exclusive to members of their own sex. The latter cannot have believed that women were incapable of such work, since not only did they have an existing role in medicine (i.e. their employment as midwives), but their gradually increasing participation in education, and the resulting attributes in academic pursuits such as philosophy, cannot have gone unnoticed by educated members of the opposite sex. Rather, the doctors sought to keep women out of the medical world in a further attempt to keep the profession, and therefore the profits, to themselves.

According to the tale, at least, Agnodike, was accepted (conditionally) in intellectual circles and into a profession. Her acceptance, however, was based on the fact that she, like Hipparchia and their successors through the ages, was prepared to forgo her femininity to take up a chosen career in the male-dominated Greek world.

FOOTNOTES

1. I.ii, 12-13.
2. On the subject of ancient matriarchal myths, see J. Bamberger, 'The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society', in M. Z. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society. A Theoretical Overview (Stanford 1974), 263ff. and S. Pembroke, 'Women in Charge: the Function and the Ancient Idea of Matriarchy', JWI 30 (1967), 1ff..
3. The question of 'contempt' has been denied by some scholars, e.g. C. Seltman, Women in Antiquity (London 1956) 111 and D. C. Richter, 'The Position of Women in Classical Athens, CJ (1971), 1ff.
4. VII, 22-28.
5. For an interesting study on the subject, see S. Pomeroy, 'Technikai kai Musikai: the Education of women in the Fourth Century and in the Hellenistic Period', AJAH 2 (1977) 51ff.
6. This is an intriguing phenomenon, which has been examined and tested out in various types of literature. See, for instance, D. Schaps, 'The Women Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women's Names', CQ N.S. 27 (1977) 223ff. and A. Sommerstein, 'The Naming of Women in Greek and Roman Comedy', QS 6 (1980) 393ff.
7. On the difficulties of assessing literacy among Greek women, see S. Guettel Cole, 'Could Greek Women Read and Write?', in H. P. Foley (ed.) Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York 1981) 219ff..
8. Demosthenes LVII, 35-36.
9. E.g. fr. 31, Poetarum Lesbiorium Fragmenta (eds), E. Loebel & D.L. Page (Oxford 1955).
10. Tragic heroines and female choruses occasionally express similar views - cf. the chorus in Euripides' Phoenician Women 1672ff. and the Danaids, Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, who resist marriage proposals. Procne, however, has been less successful and has had to accept the foreign husband assigned to her by her father (Sophocles, fr. 521).
11. E.g. Aristophanes, Wasps 1346 and Ecclesiazusae 920.
12. 6. 20 and 7. 57-58. See R. Finnegan, 'Women in Herodian Mime', Hermathena CLII (1992) 21ff., esp. n.18.
13. See, for example, D. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford 1955) 145, n.1, who rejects the view that Sappho, fr. 99, 1.5 is actually the work of Alcaeus.
14. See J. M. Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, iii, 644 and refs.
15. E.g. Phocylides fr. 2, 3 and Semonides The Female Mind, 2, both of whom claim that the tribes of women originated from a 'bristled sow'. See H. Lloyd-Jones, Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (London 1975), 64-65, n.2.
16. For a more favourable, modern, view, see T. F. Higham & C.M.Bowra, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford 1938, repr. 1950), 725, n.409.
17. Vit. Pyth. xxi.
18. Kock II, 290 and 370, respectively.
19. VI, 96-98.
20. Diog. Laert. III, 46.
21. Ibid, VI, 96.
22. Plutarch, Lycurgus, XV,3. See P. Cartledge, 'Spartan Wives: Liberation or Licence?', CQ 75 (1975) 84ff., esp. 101.
23. Cf. the marvellous description in Athenaeus XIII, 568, a-d (from Alexis' comic play Fair Measure ) of the various ways of beautifying ugly prostitutes. The wearing of excessive cosmetics was considered a mark of vulgarity, not to be encouraged in respectable wives - cf. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, X, 2ff. where Ischomachus censures 'false glosses', and believes that women should exhibit only natural beauty.
24. Such female roles are comically reflected in the comedies of Aristophanes: e.g., Ecclesiazusae 528ff., where Praxagora uses her presence at a friend's birth as a fictitious excuse for her absence from the home; and the description of a feigned pregnancy in Thesmophoriazusae 502ff., where an aged nurse and the fake mother produce an infant from a jar and inform the elderly husband that it is his own. More realistic examples are mentioned in inscriptions - e.g. the "Nurses" in IG II, iii 4195-97. See H. McClees, A Study of Women in Attic Inscriptions (New York 1920).
25. See M. Detienne, 'Violentes "Eugenies" en Pleines Thesmophories: des Femmes Couvertes de Sang', in M. Detienne & K.-P. Vernant (eds), La Cuisine de Sacrifice en Pays Grec (Paris 1979) 203ff.
26. IG III, ii, 1320 and 1384, for example, are grave inscriptions for women giving the cause of death as childbirth. Further testimony are the many grateful dedications by women to Eilythuia for bringing about successful births (e.g. IG II, ii, 1590).
27. Fabula 274, 10-13.
28. See H. King, 'Agnodike and the Profession of Medicine', PCPhS 212 N.S. 32 (1986) 53ff, but esp. 64ff.
29. The most obvious example in Attic comedy is the plot of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae, where the women of Athens, disguised in their husbands' clothes, sneak into the Assembly and vote for women's rule. For the dramatic implications of this comic device, see L. K. Taaffe, Women & Aristophanes (London and New York 1993), esp. 103ff.
30. IG II, iii 2343.
31. Cf. the caricature of Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds.

Antipiracy Operations in the Aegean Sea

Antipiracy Operations in the Aegean Sea

US-Greek Naval Relations Begin: Antipiracy Operations in the Aegean Sea
Peter M. Swartz
CNA [Center for Naval Analyses], Center for Strategic Studies Alexandria, Virginia
[Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited.]

Introduction

This paper discusses the US Navy's campaign against Greek pirates who interfered with American shipping in the Aegean during the second decade of the nineteenth century.1 This campaign was not a particularly important one in the overall history of the US Navy, nor did it strongly influence subsequent Greek-American naval relations. Nevertheless, it illustrates some key aspects of the nature of the Greek war for independence, and of the republic in North America that had itself won its independence less than half a century earlier.

America's war for independence spawned many small American naval forces-national, state, and private. Some had acquitted themselves quite well against the Royal Navy, but all had disappeared once American independence had been won. The new United States of America, however, quickly became a major international shipping power during the last decades of the eighteenth century, capitalizing on American knowledge and resources as well as European involvement in the several wars of the French revolution and of the Napoleonic Era. A particularly profitable trade had grown up between American ports and Smyrna. America's huge new merchant fleet, however, periodically became prey to French or British warships and privateers, as well as the corsairs of the Barbary States of North Africa. Therefore, in 1798 the United States commissioned a new Navy to protect its burgeoning commerce.

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Male Belly Dance in Turkey

The male dancers had more freedom when Compared with rakkase. They could be either Muslim or non-Muslim. Historians say that there were two different types of rakkas: kocek and tavsan oglan. Koceks had long and curly hair which was seen as a sign of beauty during that period. Koceks did not wear hats or headscarves but wore women's dresses. The tavsan oglan (rabbit boy) wore a charming little hat and tight pants. Historians believe the majority of tavsan oglans originated from non-Muslim societies living on islands in the Aegean and Marmara regions. Reports suggest that koceks and tavsan oglans performed mainly during Ramadan. At other times these men would work as "Sakis" (bartenders) in the meyhanes (special restaurants serving meze, raki or wine) or dance at special occasions such as weddings. 

Male Belly Dance in Turkey by Jasmin Jahal, February 2002

In February 2000, the Associated Press released an article about how the Turkish police rescued a 19-year-old male whose father had chained him to a bed for three days. The stated reason for this abuse? The father disapproved of his son's performances as a belly dancer!

It has become all the rage in Istanbul for nightclubs to feature young, handsome male belly dancers. They are called rakkas from the word raks, which means dance. They dress in sparkling costumes and perform nearly every night of the week. While conservatives object to male belly dancing, the practice actually ha a very long history, particularly in Turkey.

The Ottoman Empire was an era that was named for a Muslim prince called Osman I. The golden age of the Empire was during the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66). Throughout the reigns of several sultans, the Ottoman Empire lasted from 1345 until 1922, when the sultanate was abolished and Turkey became a republic.

The center of the Empire was always the royal palace of the Sultan, the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Should you visit Istanbul today, you can still visit the buildings of the Palace, now presented as a tourist attraction and a museum of great historical value. The Palace was at its greatness a collection of buildings around a series of courtyards and included beautiful gardens and the Sultan's harem.

In Muslim countries, the harem was that part of a house set apart for the women of the family. It was a place in which non-family males were not allowed. Eunuchs guarded the Sultans' harems, which were quite large, including several hundred women who were wives and concubines. There, female dancers and musicians entertained the women living in the harem. Belly dance was performed by women for women. The rakkase is the female dancer of the Ottoman era. Becoming a rakkase or a singer was strictly forbidden for Muslim women. Even non-Muslim rakkase had to wear headscarves and very conservative dresses. Although forbidden by religion, the government tolerated music and dancing. Yet, female dancers hardly ever appeared in public.

With the absence of females in social and entertainment life, Ottoman men would watch male belly dancers, generally known as rakkas, to satisfy their need to see something aesthetic. The male dancers had more freedom when compared with rakkase. They could be either Muslim or non-Muslim. Historians say that there were two different kinds of rakkas: kocek and tavsan oglan.

The tavsan oglan (which means "rabbit boy") wore a charming hat and tight pants. The koceks often wore women's clothes and allowed their long, curly hair to flow freely. Koceks and tavsan oglans performed for wedding celebrations (the custom included men and women to celebrate separately), feasts, festivals, and also in the presence of the sultans.

The tradition of rakkas is a reflection of the solitary existence of the Ottoman male. The dancing boys were organized into different companies of entertainers called kol. By the mid 1600's, they were said to be about 3000 of these dancers in twelve companies. They were young boys who were sensuous, attractive, effeminate, and carefully trained in music and dance. Their dancing was sexually provocative and impersonated female dancers. It incorporated ladylike walking, finger snapping (a special two-handed finger snap), slow belly movements, suggestive gestures, acrobatics, and playing wooden clappers called calpara or, in later times, metal cymbals called zils. The boys danced as long as they stayed good looking and could hide their beards. The dancing boys were an acceptable substitute for the prohibited women dancers. Some audience members were so enamored with the koceks that they would write poetry about the male dancers.  Many times audiences lost control, shattering glasses, and even shouting and attacking the dancers.

The koceks profession went out of style in the 1800's during the era of Mahmut II. It was officially banned in 1856, forcing many of the koceks to emigrate to other countries such as Egypt.

Today, male dancers dressed as women still perform in some areas of Turkey. They often entertain for weddings and special celebrations. No longer are the male dancers organized into the twelve companies that existed during the Ottoman era. The sensuality of their performances has faded and is usually considered nothing more than a folkloric show. Yet the effect of the rakkas history is still felt amongst the new millennium's fad to hire male belly dancers. They are as sexual and popular as any of the best Turkish female belly dancers.

The very concept of men performing belly dance can stir a controversy. There certainly exists a place in Middle Eastern dance for men. However, it is most often best accepted if done in a folkloric sense and with traditional garb. A great many Middle Eastern men are offended by a male dancer who moves his body the way a female dancer would. Yet, there are some wonderfully talented male belly dancers in the oriental dance world today. The history of belly dance in Turkey proves that the performance arena of oriental dance has incorporated male dancers for centuries. Then as now, the audience found enjoyment, beauty, talent and excitement.

The Process of Violentization

 "The Process of Violentization" [1] describes four stages in the development of serial killers.

Stage 1 Brutalization: Within this stage, the subject is forced into doing violent acts by a member of their primary group.

Stage 2 Belligerency: In this stage, the subject reinforces his warlike attitude to the situation by a method of different steps. They take personal responsibility to the fact that they started the brutalization stage to begin with. In turn, they feel like they must lash out in order to forget about what they did to begin with. The subject feels like the only way for them to make right to the situation is to keep acting out. With this repeating behavior they get emotionally attached to what they are doing. Because of this emotional attachment, the subject feels like anytime they are provoked, they can end the feeling by continuing the violent acts.

Stage 3 Violent Performances: The subject continues to act out violently and they feel that they get inner confidence by acting like this and that in turn builds their self esteem. With their actions being executed, they feel like they get a knack for it and they incorporate it into their daily activity. In this stage they feel most comfortable with what they are doing and do not feel like they are doing anything wrong. The subject feels like they have gained celebrity status to what they are doing, and within this stage is the defining moment of whether or not they will continue to do what they are doing.

Stage 4 Virulency: Once the subject has made it to this point, they feel like whether or not their fame is notorious or not, they believe it to be a good thing. This stage is also known as the need to show off. They feel like they can move on to bigger and better things if they wanted to and the subject tries to. They have an overcoming feeling of being invincible and that nothing can stop them, so they continue these violent acts. After this stage has been completed they are now considered to be a criminal and there is no stopping the subject to what they may do next.

[1] Lonnie Athens was senior research criminologist at Georgetown University Law Centerand now teaches in the criminology department at Seton Hall University. Athens developed a theory called The Process of Violentization.

Costak's City | A Poet Runs Thru This City

Constantine P. Cavafy

(1863 - 1933)

Cavafy, one of the most prominent Greek poets, was born on April 29, 1863 and died on the same date in 1933 in Alexandria (Egypt). Here's a short biographical note by the poet himself:

I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria -- at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece.

My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian.

1878 | Tulumbadgi of Amicis

2013 | Costak Logo

8 or 12 murders. Still thinking...The letter T as a dagger...