1.    Introduction

THE FEMININE MATRIX

In the closing remarks of pseudo-Demosthenes 59, the speech “Against Neaira,” the chief prosecutor, Apollodoros, spells out the civic chaos that will ensue if Neaira, an erstwhile courtesan, is allowed to pass as a citizen's wife:

If the law is held in contempt by us with her acquittal, and loses its authority, then undoubtedly it will turn out that the career of prostitutes will fall to the daughters of citizens, as many as cannot be married because of poverty, while the status of free women will fall to hetairai, if they are given the right to fearlessly have children as they wish and to take part in the rituals and sacraments and honors of the city.

(59.113)

On the other hand, there is also a strong conceptual link between the prostitute and ritual agent. One characteristic these roles shared was that both were visible in the public sphere.² Artemidorus, in his book about dream divination, makes explicit the symbolic association between the two types of women:

How can we understand these two ideas together? How can there be both a deep-seated distinction between the prostitute and the wife as well as an apparent association between the prostitute and the woman, frequently a wife, performing “the rituals and sacraments and honors of the city”? The answer to this question is complicated, and the different strategies that Athenian authors had for representing these relationships will be the subject of this book.

This book started as a study of prostitution in classical Athenian literature. When I noticed that the texts in which there was a sustained depiction of prostitution repeatedly figured the prostitute as a part of a particular spectrum of feminine social roles, the discovery of an indigenous pattern of thought eclipsed my original aims. The prostitute was only one aspect of a more expansive frame of conceiving the feminine – and this frame seemed worth investigating. Indeed, a continuum of femininity has significant implications for various fields of signification that extend beyond what we can learn from prostitutes alone, including gender and sexuality, performance and exchange. The feminine matrix – which configured the relationship between the prostitute, the wife, and the priestess or other ritual agent – was an organizing principle that the Athenians in the classical period used to think and talk about themselves; it was part of the Athenian social imaginary.⁴ This structure operates in a variety of texts and genres and was therefore linked to various facets of Athenian identity.

As we will see, the feminine matrix is a fractured and flexible discourse, and its polyvalence lends itself to various representational strategies. The word

Thus, in the readings that follow, I hope to cast a new light on the complexity and heterogeneity of the classical Athenian sex/gender system. I examine the way that representing the feminine as a continuum of roles acts as one discursive strategy in a constellation of tactics for representing sexuality in different ways. Central to my understanding of the way sexuality is constructed is Foucault's notion of discourse, which he explains as an open field in which tactical elements can circulate in various combinations in the service of diverse strategies. The same element can be used to produce multiple meanings, or to serve opposing strategies. Discourse is inherently unstable. It is both the means and effect of power, but it also can be the starting point of resistance to power.⁸

In what follows we will see the matrix of the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual performer put to work in a variety of strategies. It is used both to regulate civic identity as well as to construct an extra-civic masculinity. Whether conceived of as a hierarchy, triad, or continuum, it is used to intersect with, oppose, or eclipse the binary power differential associated with pederastic relations, as well as the relentless polarization of male and female in Athenian literature. It engages with and provides a counterbalance to the

As should be clear by this point, although the texts that I address in this book all share a polyvalent depiction of the feminine, it would be misleading to suggest that my analysis is wholly focused on femininity. Nor is the significance of this spectrum confined to the realm of sex and gender. For it also configures relationships between various spheres of exchange, with the prostitute eliciting marketplace transactions, the wife signifying exchanges made in the civic sphere, and the ritual agent performing transactions on a cosmic level. Finally, because the prostitute and the ritual agent were not subject to the same representational constraints as a woman in her capacity as wife, this triad was also deployed to define and contain the possibilities for feminine performance in public. Much work has been done recently in all of these areas, and it will be helpful to situate my argument in the context of contemporary scholarship. I will first show in broad strokes how this book draws on and contributes to current discussions about gender and sexuality, and then I will turn to a discussion of scholarship relevant to performance and exchange.

Because I have selected only those texts that include a depiction of a prostitute, wife, and ritual agent in relation to one another, my entry point is indeed through representations of women.⁹ In this sense this book owes a debt to those scholars who in the 1970s brought about a “paradigm shift” in terms of disciplinary thinking by developing a methodology for the study of women in classical antiquity.¹⁰ The work of these scholars – and here I am thinking of Sarah Pomeroy, Mary Lefkowitz, and Maureen Fant and the contributors to the 1973 Arethusa volume – was generally devoted to making women visible in the classical record.¹¹ Significantly, they recognized a range of women's

As scholars embraced feminist theory, however, they began to grapple with what Amy Richlin has called “the paradox of our discipline” – the problem of the feminist's relation to textual material, which is nearly all written by men.¹³ The nature of the relationship between representation and reality is a relentless riddle for the classicist interested in gender. Linked to this, but specific to the study of Greek drama, is a problem that Helene Foley posed: “While women in daily life appear to have been confined to the internal spaces of the household, to public silence, and to non-participation in the political life of Athens, women play an exceptionally prominent role in drama.”¹⁴

Engaging with French structuralism, specifically Vernant's idea that tragedy was a space where the city put its values on trial, and negotiated its conflicts, both Helene Foley and Froma Zeitlin read the powerful women of Greek drama as sophisticated constructs that served in the project of exploring masculine identity.¹⁵ They demonstrated that gender was a potent symbolic field for negotiating complex social relationships such as that between polis and oikos, Olympian and Chthonic, Greek and barbarian. Around the same time Nicole Loraux demonstrated the centrality of gender to Athenian civic discourse as she analyzed the place of gender in the social imaginary.¹⁶ With these scholars I have found that representations of women are “good to think with,”¹⁷ and that gender is a powerful organizing rubric in Athenian thought.

My work draws on their insight that representations of women (especially in realms from which women are excluded) often speak most volubly about men or other things.¹⁸ But where many of these readings imply that woman serves as the irrational, unstable, multiple Other that renders the masculine self whole, my analysis demands that we understand the incongruities in representations of the feminine as a sign of the incoherence of the masculine self. That is to say, the coexistence of different strategies for representing women – as part of the male–female binary or as part of a triad of feminine roles, for instance – implies that masculinity is not a rationalized whole.¹⁹

Concomitant with the growing sophistication in gender studies I have traced was a burgeoning interest in understanding pederasty and its relationship (or lack thereof) to contemporary discourses of sexuality. In 1978 K. J. Dover published Greek Homosexuality, in which he suggested that Greek pederasty is characterized by a power differential between the pursuer and the pursued or active and submissive sex partner that is underwritten by perceptions of heterosexual sex roles.²⁰ This gendered conception of Greek homosexuality was later broadcast beyond the field of classics by Michel Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, volume 2 of his History of Sexuality.²¹ He made the claim that Greek sexual identity was less crucially determined by object choice (as is now the case) but rather was concerned with power dynamics, where a normative masculine role is defined by being an actor or penetrator, whereas the feminine role is characterized by passivity and penetration.²² Foucault argued that the association of gender with sexual roles explains much of the anxiety about men or boys in homosexual couplings who are perceived to be sexually submissive. Because these observations represent Greek sexuality as radically

Although this school of thought has had tremendous influence, it has also met with serious criticism.²⁴ The most trenchant critique, with regard to the Greek evidence, has been proposed by James Davidson. He suggests that masculinity is crucially concerned with self-mastery, especially regulation of the appetites, as opposed to active and passive sex roles. Taking Timarchus as his example (the poster boy of the penetration thesis), who is accused of being a prostitute hired by numerous men, as well as a man who seduces other men's wives, Davidson argues that Timarchus cannot be understood simply as an adult who takes pleasure in being penetrated. Rather, Davidson proposes that the unifying theme in Aeschines’ speech is Timarchus’ unbridled appetite – an interpretation that makes sense out of the double accusation of porneia and the squandering of his estate.²⁵ And yet I don't think it negates the implication that when Aeschines refers to Timarchus as the wife of Hegesandros he is evoking the power dynamics of their sexual relationship.²⁶ Instead of pitting these two conceptions of masculinity in a zero sum competition, we can understand both mastery over one's desires and phallic agency/passivity

We see different strategies for representing gender deployed at different times depending on the rhetorical demands of the context. As Foucault has argued, and Davidson has reiterated, the idea of having mastery over oneself and control of one's pleasures is essential to the Athenian notion of masculinity, and this notion is in fact congruous with the idealization of the male citizen as sexual actor.²⁷ Thus, in the Laws an analogy is made between the profligate man and the one who is penetrated: as the Athenian stranger argues against pederasty, he says, “as all men will blame the cowardice of the man who always yields to pleasures and is never able to hold out against them, will they not likewise reproach that man who plays the woman's part with the resemblance he bears to his model?” (836e). Being a slave to one's own desires is comparable to being penetrated in terms of failed masculinity. Gender then is not a unified field – there are different strategies for representing it, and they circulate in a variety of permutations.

However, the scholarship on ancient sexuality tends to be limited to binary conceptual structures, evident in the work of Dover and Foucault as well as that of those arguing against this paradigm, whose critiques tend to be marshaled around the poles of penetration/not penetration.²⁸ I have found many of these arguments compelling, but the rhetorical shape of this scholarship seems to replicate the phallocentrism of the culture it investigates. Instead, I will argue that the multiplicity and complexity of sexuality that the Athenians themselves recognized demanded a mobile and varied set of representational strategies. In other words, the Athenians had more than one way of thinking and talking about sex and gender; the existence of one strategy does not negate the other. This book argues that a more robust understanding

In contrast to a sustained interest in pederasty, the history of Athenian heterosexual discourse has received far less attention. In a certain way Greek heterosexuality seems to be treated as somehow less “constructed” than homosexuality. Dover argues that perceptions about ancient heterosexuality informed pederastic practices and then compares Greek homosexual and modern heterosexual pursuit: “No great knowledge of the world is needed to perceive the analogy between classical Athens and heterosexual pursuit in (say) British society in the nineteen-thirties.”²⁹ Although Dover doesn't say this explicitly, there is an implicit assumption that Greek heterosexuality, and the power dynamics that characterized it, were less radically different from our own, less determined by historical factors than homosexuality was. Foucault's reliance on Dover and his famous lack of interest in the feminine subject did little to counteract this association.³⁰

However, the recent spate of scholarly interest in ancient prostitution is one avenue through which the representational contours of ancient heterosexuality and its constructedness have become more visible. Leslie Kurke's work on the porne and hetaira in the archaic period, as well as James Davidson's research on pleasure and consumption in Athens, both characterize representations of prostitution as a privileged site of ideological negotiations. For Kurke, the permeable distinction between the porne (streetwalker) and the hetaira (courtesan) signifies other fraught and unstable oppositions such as that between coinage and gift exchange, the agora and the symposium, and democratic versus elitist ideology. Davidson situates sex for sale in a constellation of consumable pleasures; anxieties about food and sex are the expression of a particularly Athenian concern with appetite and self-mastery. In different ways, both of these interpretations assume that talk about sex is not all about sex; rather, they suggest that any given understanding of “sexuality” is determined by a network of associations peculiar to specific historical circumstances. My work builds on the insights of these scholars. I draw on the notion implicit in these analyses

A primary goal of this project is to intervene at the juncture between gender studies and the history of sexuality. For here, as I have outlined above, there is a serious disparity between the complex feminine as elucidated in the lens of gender studies and the largely unexamined discourse of heterosexuality that subtends the discussion of the history of sexuality. The feminine is implicated in the discussion of ancient sexuality but tends to be undertheorized in this emphatically phallocentric inquiry. Insisting on a more nuanced understanding of the feminine produces in turn a richer understanding of the construction of ancient sexuality.³¹

Although feminist work has much to offer the history of sexuality, the contingent and incoherent subject proposed by Foucault and other post-structural theorists has raised significant questions for feminist classicists. In a sense it seems that just as the feminine subject was about to emerge in the classical record, the very notion of subjectivity was called into question. For Amy Richlin the Foucauldian subject has the dangerous effect of obscuring the consistent oppression of women (and other disempowered groups) through time and across cultures.³² The Feminine Matrix does not lose sight of the way gender was manipulated to serve masculine interests, but it also tries to avoid presuming the gendered categories under analysis. With Page duBois I find Foucault's incitement to defamiliarize antiquity compelling enough to think with him despite his significant exclusions.³³ I don't think that a feminist reading is incompatible with the post-modern subject. If only we adopt a slightly modified constructionist position, acknowledging that over time discourses accrete and change (as opposed to superseding one another), we can accommodate the idea that sex has a history, while certain aspects of it remain constant.³⁴