Phryne

Scholarship about Phryne is hindered by the fragmentary nature of the surviving sources, many of which were not written until centuries after Phryne's own time. As with other women from classical Athens, this is more challenging as surviving sources were written entirely by men, and reflect male viewpoints and biases.^[2] The most substantial contemporary source about Phryne's life was Hypereides' defence speech from her trial, which took place perhaps between 350 and 340 BC. In the ancient world this was a major influence on Phryne's biographical tradition, but it is now lost, except for a few fragments.^[3] The surviving ancient sources about Phryne are mostly from the Roman Empire, based on earlier Greek literature.^[4] The most important of these is the second-century AD rhetorician and grammarian Athenaeus, from Naucratis in Roman Egypt. His Deipnosophistae ("The Scholars at Dinner") is the source of the vast majority of extant ancient writings about Phryne.^[5] Other authors of the first, second and third centuries AD, including Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diogenes Laertius, also tell anecdotes about Phryne.^[6]

Athenaeus' main source was fourth-century comic drama.^[5] By the mid-fourth century BC, Athenian comic playwrights had moved away from the mythological subjects popular in earlier periods, and more often satirised real people.^[7] From the late fifth century, hetairai were a frequent subject of comedy, and comic plays from Phryne's lifetime often refer to hetairai and their connections to well-known men.^[8] Phryne featured in several of these plays, including Timocles' Orestautokleides and Neaira, Anaxilas' Neottis, and Posidippus' The Ephesian Woman. In Neottis and Orestautokleides she is named in lists of hetairai, in Neaira Timocles' makes a joke about her early life, and Posidippus describes her trial in The Ephesian Woman. Two other plays, Antiphanes' The Birth of Aphrodite and Alexis' The Woman from Knidos, might have alluded to her association with the artists Apelles and Praxiteles.^[9]

Very little is known about Phryne's life for certain. Ancient sources about her largely tell disjointed anecdotes which are difficult to piece together into a full biography,^[10] and many of those stories may be invented.^[11] Helen Morales writes that separating fact from fiction in accounts of Phryne's life is impossible.^[11]

Phryne was from Thespiae in Boeotia.^[12] She was probably born in the 370s BC,^[b] and was the daughter of Epicles.^[16] Both Plutarch and Athenaeus say that her real name was Mnesarete.^[17][18] According to Plutarch, she was called Phryne because she had a pale complexion like a toad (phryne in Greek).^[17] Eleonora Cavallini suggests that this apparently unflattering name was applied ironically, contrasting the ugliness of a toad with Phryne's beauty.^[19] She may also have been nicknamed Saperdion, Clausigelos, and Sestus.^[c][16]

Phryne seems to have spent most of her life as a hetaira in Athens.^[21] Often translated as "courtesan", a hetaira was a kind of sex worker in classical Athens. They are often distinguished on the one hand from the porne, a slave-prostitute who worked in a brothel, and on the other from the pallake, a concubine who had a long-term, exclusive relationship with one particular man. The precise distinction between these terms is debated by scholars, and ancient sources do not necessarily make strict distinctions, rather choosing one term or another based on their rhetorical purposes.^[22]

Phryne might have come to Athens with her family following the conquest of Thespiae by Thebes in 373 BC, been born in Athens to Thespian refugees following the Theban conquest, or been brought there as a girl to take part in the sex trade, as was Neaira, another fourth-century hetaira.^[23][21] She apparently grew up poor – comic playwrights portray her picking capers^[d] – and became one of the wealthiest women in the Greek world.^[16] According to Callistratus, after Alexander razed Thebes in 335, Phryne offered to pay to rebuild the walls on the condition that they carry an inscription acknowledging her.^[25] She was also said to have dedicated a statue of herself at Delphi, and a statue of Eros at Thespiae.^[26] Phryne probably lived beyond 316 BC, when Thebes was rebuilt;^[16] according to Plutarch, her fame meant that she could continue to charge high fees to her clients in her old age.^[27]

Hetairai had a reputation in ancient literature for their wit and learning.^[30] The trope of the witty hetaira derives from the Memoirs of Lynceus of Samos, a comic author of the late fourth century BC, which contained several anecdotes about the wit of the hetaira Gnathaina.^[31] Several anecdotes from the Deipnosophistae relate Phryne's witticisms.^[30] Many of these portray Phryne getting the better of a client – in one story, she asked a prospective client for one mina (100 drachmae – by comparison an unskilled labourer in ancient Athens might earn half a drachma per day^[32]) to sleep with her. When he complained that she had charged a different man less than half of this amount, she retorted that if he waited until she wanted sex, she would accept the lower fee.^[33][34]

Though ancient authors writing about Phryne were deeply concerned with her beauty, they rarely described specifics of her appearance.^[35] The only physical description of her in ancient sources is from Plutarch, who mentions her pale complexion.^[36] Other sources contrast the naturalness of her beauty with the artificiality of that of other courtesans. In one anecdote, during a dinner party game, Phryne had all the women present wipe their faces. When their makeup was removed Phryne was revealed to be the only one who is naturally beautiful rather than relying on cosmetics.^[36][37] Another story connected to Phryne's beauty concerns her inability to seduce the philosopher Xenocrates, emphasising his self-restraint.^[38][39]

Trial

The most famous event in Phryne's life was the prosecution brought against her by Euthias.^[16] Little is known of Euthias, except that he was supposedly a former lover of Phryne, and was accused of being a sycophant – a person who habitually brought prosecutions for personal gain.^[41][42] The prosecution speech delivered by Euthias – which, according to Athenaeus, was composed by Anaximenes of Lampsacus on his behalf – did not survive.^[43] Phryne was defended by Hypereides, a well-known and wealthy orator who had a reputation for licentiousness due to his association with hetairai. Six of the speeches attributed to him relate to hetairai, and in a surviving fragment of his defense of Phryne, he admits to being her lover.^[44][43] Hypereides's defence speech survives only in fragments, though it was greatly admired in antiquity.^[45] The date of the trial is uncertain.^[46] Based on Athenaeus' claim that Anaximenes wrote the speech for the prosecution, it has been suggested that it was probably between 350 and 340 BC.^[f][48] Alternatively, Craig Cooper argues that the trial was likely after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, while Eleanora Cavallini suggests that it was after 335 BC.^[49]

Phryne was charged with asebeia, a kind of blasphemy. An anonymous treatise on rhetoric, which summarises the case against Phryne, lists three specific accusations against her – that she held a "shameless komos" or ritual procession, that she introduced a new god, and that she organised unlawful thiasoi or debauched meetings.^[50] The charge of introducing new gods had previously been used in the trial of Socrates in 399 BC; that of organising thiasoi is also known from the trial of Ninos, possibly about 360 BC.^[51][52] According to Harpocration, the new god introduced by Phryne was called Isodaites; though Harpocration describes him as being "foreign", the name is Greek^[53] and other sources consider it an epithet of Dionysus, Helios, or Pluto.^[54] It is unclear what precisely was supposed to have been the issue with Phryne's komos and thiasoi: perhaps that they were attended by both men and women, or by lower-class women.^[g][56]

According to Athenaeus, Euthias's case against Phryne was motivated by a personal quarrel rather than Phryne's alleged impiety.^[57] Craig Cooper suggests that the trial of Phryne was politically motivated. He observes that Aristogeiton, to whom Athenaeus attributes a speech against Phryne, was a political enemy of Hypereides and prosecuted him for illegally introducing a decree after the Battle of Chaeronea.^[58] Phryne's own provocative behaviour – for instance her offer to restore the walls of Thebes, on the condition that an inscription attributing the rebuilding to "Phryne the hetaira" be displayed – may also have partially motivated the prosecution. Konstantinos Kapparis suggests that the trial might have been seen as a response to "the uppity alien woman who did not know her place".^[59] Cavallini argues that Phryne's offer to rebuild the walls of Thebes, and her dedication of a portrait statue at Delphi which was placed next to one of king Philip II of Macedon, publicly aligned Phryne with the anti-Macedonian faction with which Hypereides was associated, perhaps motivating the case against her.^[60]

Phryne was said to have been acquitted after the jury saw her bare breasts – Quintilian says that she was saved "not by Hypereides' pleading, but by the sight of her body".^[61] Three different versions of this story survive. In Quintilian's account, along with those of Sextus Empiricus and Philodemus,^[h] Phryne makes the decision to expose her own breasts; while in Athenaeus's version Hypereides exposes Phryne as the climax of his speech, and in Plutarch's version Hypereides exposes her because he saw that his speech had failed to persuade the jury.^[62] In ancient Greece baring the breasts was a gesture intended to arouse compassion, and Phryne's supposed behaviour in the court has parallels in Greek myth and literature. Havelock compares it to Hecuba pleading with her son Hector in the Iliad, showing her breasts to remind him of her place as his mother.^[63] Ioannis Ziogas observes that it particularly recalls Clytemnestra's plea to Orestes in Aeschylus's play The Libation Bearers – which like Hecuba's appeal to Hector reminds Orestes of her position as his mother – and the story of Helen appealing to her husband Menelaus for mercy after the fall of Troy – where it is the eroticism of Helen's display which saves her.^[64] Both Ziogas and Melissa Funke argue that the story of Phryne bearing her breasts to the jury specifically referenced that of Helen; just as Helen's divine beauty protects her from punishment for her actions in the mortal world, so too does Phryne's.^[65][66]

However, this episode probably never happened. It was not mentioned in Posidippus's version of the trial in his comedy The Ephesian Woman, quoted by Athenaeus. The Ephesian Woman was produced c. 290 BC, and the story of Phryne baring her breasts therefore probably postdates this.^[67] In Posidippus's version, Phryne personally pleaded with each of the jurors at her trial for them to save her life, and it was this which secured her acquittal.^[68] The story of Phryne baring her breasts may have been invented by the Hellenistic biographer Idomeneus of Lampsacus,^[i][69] who wrote a treatise on Athenian demagogues.^[70] Though all of the ancient accounts assume that Phryne was on trial for her life, asebeia was not necessarily punished by death; it was an agōn timētos, in which the jury would decide on the punishment if the accused was convicted.^[71][j]

Phryne's trial is, along with those of Ninos and Theoris of Lemnos, one of three known from the fourth century in which a metic (a free, non-Athenian resident of Athens) woman was accused of a religious crime. Hers was the only one in which the accused was acquitted – Rebecca Futo Kennedy argues that this was due to Phryne's greater wealth and connections to influential men.^[72] A Hellenistic biographer, Hermippus of Smyrna, reports that after Phryne's acquittal, Euthias was so furious that he never spoke publicly again.^[73] Kapparis suggests that in fact he was disenfranchised, possibly because he failed to gain one fifth of the jurors' votes and was unable to pay the subsequent fine.^[74] The trial of Phryne also supposedly led to two new laws being passed governing courtroom behaviour: one forbade the accused being present while the jury considered their verdict; the other forbade lament in the courtroom.^[75]

Depictions of Phryne in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, such as Angelica Kauffmann's Praxiteles Giving Phryne his Statue of Cupid^[m] (1794) avoid eroticising Phryne; paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century such as Gustave Boulanger's Phryne (1850) eroticise and exoticise her.^[95]

Hypereides's defence speech was translated into Latin by the orator Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, active in the late 1st century BC. The translation was praised in an oratorical handbook written by Quintilian in the 1st century AD for conveying what Quintilian calls the subtilitas of the original.^[96][n] Albert Schachter suggests that the original Greek text may have been kept in Phryne's native Thespiae, and that Corvinus possibly travelled there to consult it.^[98]

Phryne was largely ignored during the Renaissance in favour of women such as Lucretia and Cleopatra, who were seen as heroic.^[99] Only three paintings of Phryne are known from the seventeenth century,^[100] but interest in depicting her increased in the eighteenth century with the advent of Neoclassicism.^[101] Early depictions of her by Angelica Kauffmann and J. M. W. Turner avoid eroticising her.^[95] From the eighteenth century French artists focused on portraying Phryne as a courtesan, particularly depicting her public nudity at religious festivals or during her trial.^[102] This came as part of a broader interest in historical courtesans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and literature.^[39] By the mid-nineteenth century artists such as Gustave Boulanger, rejecting the neoclassical aesthetic of Hellenism, painted Phryne without any reference to the ancient context as an eroticised and Orientalised nude.^[103]

The most famous nineteenth-century depiction of Phryne was Jean-Léon Gérôme's Phryne Before the Areopagus. Gérôme's painting depicts Phryne standing naked in the courtroom,^[o] covering her face with both arms and leaving her body exposed.^[106] This painting was controversial for showing Phryne covering her face in shame, in the same pose that Gérôme used in several paintings of slaves in Eastern slave-markets. Critics argued that Phryne should be proud rather than ashamed of her beauty, and that Gérôme's portrayal of Phryne was anachronistic.^[107] Others complained that Gérôme's Phryne was too like an ordinary woman, lacking in the ideal Aphrodite-like beauty they expected, or that the apparently prurient reactions of the judges was inappropriate, and that they should have been portrayed as having religious admiration, rather than desire, for Phryne's beauty.^[108] Driven by this controversy, Gérôme's painting was widely reproduced and caricatured, with engravings by Léopold Flameng, a sculpture by Alexandre Falguière, and a drawing by Paul Cézanne all modelled after Gérôme's Phryne.^[109] The painting was widely enough known that in 1884, Bernhard Gillam could parody it in a political cartoon for the American magazine Puck.^[110] By the end of the century, Gérôme's painting of Phryne and the various works inspired by it had made her an "international cultural icon", in the words of Laura McClure.^[1]

The story of Phryne bathing at Eleusis, which according to Athenaeus inspired Apelles to paint the Aphrodite Anadyomene, was also a subject for nineteenth-century painters. In Britain, Frederic Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones both painted works on this theme in the 1880s, but the most famous nineteenth-century painting of the subject was Henryk Siemiradzki's enormous – nearly eight metres wide – painting Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis.^[111]

In literature, the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope took Phryne's name for two women: George I's mistress the Duchess of Kendal in his poem "Phryne", and Robert Walpole's mistress (and later wife) Maria Skerret in the Epistle to Bathurst.^[112] Phryne appears in Charles Baudelaire's poem "Lesbos", from Les Fleurs du mal, where she is used metonymically to represent courtesans in general. In the early twentieth century, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke alluded to Baudelaire's "Lesbos" in his poem "Die Flamingos", echoing the reference to Phryne. Rilke compares the flamingos to Phryne, as they seduce themselves – by folding their wings over their own heads – more effectively than even she could ("they seem to think / themselves seductive; that their charms surpass / a Phryne's").^[113][114] Late nineteenth-century depictions of Phryne in other media included a waltz by Antonin d'Argenton, a shadow-theatre production by Maurice Donnay – where the scene of Phryne's trial was modelled on Gérôme's painting – and a comic opera by Camille Saint-Saëns.^[115]

In the twentieth century, Phryne made the transition to cinema. In 1952 Alessandro Blasetti's "Il processo di Frine" ("The Trial of Phryne") adapted the story of Phryne's trial with a contemporary setting, based on a short story by Edoardo Scarfoglio. The following year, the peplum film Frine, cortigiana d'Oriente ("Phryne, the Oriental Courtesan") was released. In both films, the depiction of the trial is iconographically influenced by Gérôme's painting – in Il processo di Frine, her lawyer covers her with his own cloak before removing it in the manner of Gérôme's Hypereides; in Frine, cortigiana d'Oriente Phryne undresses entirely, though to avoid censorship only her naked back is shown on screen.^[116] A third Italian film, La Venere di Cheronea ("The Venus of Chaeronea"), focused on the story of the relationship between Phryne and Praxiteles.^[117]

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  Salvator Rosa, Phryne and Xenocrates 1662
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  Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays, Phryne Before the Areopagus mid-18th century
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  Angelica Kauffman, Phryne Seduces the Philosopher Xenocrates 1794
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  Jacques-Louis David, Phryne Before the Judges 1818
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  J.M.W. Turner, Phryne Going to the Public Baths as Venus: Demosthenes Taunted by Aeschines 1838
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  Marie-Christine Leroux as Phryne, photographed by Nadar for Gérôme's Phryne Before the Areopagus 1860–61
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  Jean-Léon Gérôme, A Roman Slave Market 1884. One of Gérôme's slave-market paintings showing the slave in the same pose as Phryne.
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  Bernhard Gillam, Phryne Before the Chicago Tribunal, 1884. Gillam's parody of Gérôme's painting depicts the presidential candidate James G. Blaine as Phryne and Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, as the orator Hypereides exposing his scandals.^[118]
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  Poster for the comic opera Phryné 1893, with music by Camille Saint-Saëns