The historical record indicates a woman in ancient Athens could live her life playing three primary roles: gynê, pornē, or hetaera.
One class, pornē, gives us the root of the English word “pornography.” Pornē had a property relation to a man who managed their work. Her chance for education, political influence or marrying into an established family would be delimited by him. Pornē had responsibilities and most likely a common ethic, even if as a class their status meant together, they comprised only minor political influence. In their work pornë were treated as a sexual toilet, attending to and being subjected to urges which were not considered appropriate conditions of existence for other classes of women.
One such class of women was the “wife.” The ancient Greek word for wife, gynaika (γυναίκα), also simply means “woman.” The wife was centrally important to Athenian life. She likely had an ethics which applied to her, albeit different from men. She had duties to run the household and raise the children and exercised economic responsibilities. An Athenian man needed to demonstrate his character and fitness for political life by demonstrating skillful ability to provide her with discipline. Most likely, she primarily socialized with other wives, if she interacted with others than her own family at all. Such a stance meant she could only participate less directly in public political life.
The word hetaera means “female companion” in ancient Greek. A hetaera had specific responsibilities, but also specific freedoms, not exercised by other classes of women. Seemingly, her political influence in Athens was recognizable, and had a significance comparable to that of property-owning Athenian men. In this sense her life was lived near to the Aristotelian sense of the human being, or Man, as a “political animal.”
Hetaera likely sometimes married as well. For the most part, hetaerae were gilt-edged courtesans who inveigled, educated, and enchanted elite men. The hetaera sustained herself through affiliations—with the most powerful businessmen, military leaders, philosophers, and political magnates of her time. Hetaerae were luminaries. No women living were more highly educated, benignantly networked. Hetaerae were certainly muses, but they could also be virtuosos. To be one meant rapturous beauty, magnetizing personality, knife-like wit. With peerless facility in the arts, these fine-spun Hellenistic women joined spirited public debates, used their wealth to influence political events, and entranced the great men of Athens, who offered their philanthropic patronage in return. While we think of ancient Greece as having been male-dominated, hetaerae exercised an immense, less seen influence in Greece. In Western antiquity, these women voted, were literate, acted nobly in the polis—cultivated virtue. There is a technical, philosophical sense in which hetaerae were able to exercise special forms of power about which we might potentially learn in detail. Women such as Phyrne and Lais were hetaerae whose actions are reflected in the historical record.
Painting by Gérôme depicting hetaera Phryne on trial for impiety. The sight of her nude body, according to legend, persuaded the jurors to acquit her.
We recall the term for “wife,” gynaika, means “woman,” but the status of the hetaera gestures more fully at the Aristotelian conception of the “human.” We may use Aristotle’s reasoning to demonstrate a truth about her freedom.
Aristotle, as we have seen, defined the human being as “by nature a political animal.” He asserts in 1.1253 a of his Politics: “the man that is by nature and not merely fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it.” A hetaera was rather a political animal. One might think marginality to limit destiny for a woman of her ancient time—but hetaerae had city, loves, friends, colleagues, peers.
WHO ARE THESE WOMEN—who ARE in this sense most fully a human being—IN OUR ERA TODAY?
Princess Giulia Ricci 