Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Celebrity Sex Worker of Ancient Greece

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

This is the story of one of the most notorious women of the Ancient world.Phrynne was a sex worker in the 4th century BC who came from an impoverished background to be one of the most talked about, and wealthiest, women in Greece.What do we know about her remarkable life? Was it true that by exposing her breasts in court, she was acquitted from a potential death penalty? And how has her influence been felt in the centuries since then?Joining Kate today is Melissa Funke, author of Phryne: A Life in Fragments, to find out more.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, I'm back again, you're back again. And that really is the most important thing, because if you weren't back again, this is just a mad woman talking into a microphone with absolutely nobody listening to her. So I'm very glad that you are here again.

But before we can keep going on our little journey together, uh-huh, you know, it's the fair news warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult. It does seem kind of silly that I have to keep issuing this warning at the top of a show, which is quite clearly about sex, but I've actually got to the point where I enjoy doing it now,

so that's just it, fair do's forevermore. Let's do this. Come take a seat for Twixters, and thank you so much for donning such a fabulous toga. We are here in 350 BCE ancient Greece, and we have arrived just in time for the infamous trial of Frini, one of the most famous and frankly fabulous courtisans of her, and well, of all time, actually. Frini is on trial with three accusations put against her, one of them being that she organised unlawful firesay, which were apparently debauched meetings. I've never been to one of them, but I have been to a wether spoons,

and I think that that might have been kind of the same thing. To add to the drama, this case has been brought against her by a former lover, enthusiast. What a dick. But fear not because she is being defended by one of her current lovers, Hyperides. See, it's a hot mess already. And the trial is about to reach its dramatic conclusion. And in a moment that shocks the court, just as she's about to be found guilty in sentenced to death, Hyperides rips off Freene's dress to expose her nude body to the room. And the jury thinks themselves, well, with tits like that, she can't possibly be guilty and they let her off. That's the story! That's apparently what happened. Now, I don't know if this has set any kind of legal precedent. I don't know if we can still do that if we're facing charges, but I'm just gonna throw it out there. It might be worth a go, guys.

And if you think that incident sounds completely bonkers, well, you've heard nothing yet, because the life of this woman is incredible. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Big news to start with Betwixters. This episode, this one right now going into your lugholes, would you believe it or not? It's our 200th episode on Betwit. 200. That is incredible.

And for me and from everyone at the Betwixt team, we wanted to just say a huge, huge thank you to everyone that's been along with us for the journey. Whether you've just joined or whether you've been here from the beginning, we're just thrilled to have you on board. Here is to the next 200. Now, given it's going to take us a while to light all 200 candles on our birthday cake,

I guess we may as well crack on with the episode. And today, fitting for such an occasion, we are exploring one of my most favourite women in history. Frini, a cortisan from ancient Greece, who went from humble, impoverished beginnings to being one of the most celebrated and wealthy women of her time. She was truly remarkable. Joining me is Melissa Funk, author of Frieney, A Life in Fragments, to tell us everything that she has found out about this captivating woman. How were Frini and other sex workers viewed in ancient Greece? What were her relationships with artists and philosophers at the time like? And what was her legacy?

Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Melissa Funky. How are you doing? I'm doing very well today. How are you? Oh, I am thrilled that you are here because we are going to talk about one of my most favorite historical people. and I just saw your book that is out, was it last month?

Last week. On Freeney? Last week. And I saw it. And as soon as I saw it, I emailed the producers to be like, we've got to get around. I need to talk about this one. So I suppose my first question is, what brought you to Freeney and what made you want to tell her story? Oh, that's a great question.

So I've been working on the Hittairai, which is a Greek word for. it means female companion, but really it's a euphemism for really an upscale sex worker by the time we get to the fourth century. Like escort. Yeah, when Frini is alive. And so I had worked on some letters, some fictional letters that were written from the perspective of sex workers of Hittairai, way back in the day doing my master. So I won't say how long ago that was, but long ago.

I was interested in, again, women's voices. Because in antiquity, we have very few examples of real women's voices. but we do have lots of authors who are very interested in ventriloquizing women. And so I was looking at these letters there by an author named Alcifron, who is very detailed, I think of him kind of like the Wes Anderson of antiquity. Oh, nice. The first letter is, at least in the way this collection is arranged, is a letter from Frinny to one of the most famous sculptors of antiquity.

His name is Praxideles. And she's asking him to come to her in a religious sanctuary. where there is a statue of Aphrodite, a statue of eros, so the embodiment of like sexual desire and a statue of herself in a sanctuary of eros. And she's saying, come, come lie with me. Like, let's, let's have sex in this sanctuary. And we won't defile anything. I mean, the general rule is that you do not do things like that in a sanctuary. But here she is that she's so bold and she's so desiring. And we very rarely see expressions of women's desire articulated. in ancient Greek literature.

We see it a little bit, for example, with Sappho, but not a lot and not so bold. And so I thought, who is this woman? Because I knew she had been a historical woman. Who is she? I've got to know more about her. And so I sort of, you know, have been working and touching on this topic for years. But more from a literary perspective.

And then a few years ago, I thought, that's a book. I need to write to figure out the biographical tradition of Frini. because she has all of these compelling stories and anecdotes, all these things she's, she's always very witty, she's getting the best of famous men, but I've got to know what her story was and all the evidence that we have for it. So really,

this book was sitting down and collecting all of the evidence and then thinking about how the story of a woman like Frini who seems glamorous, right, she's a sex worker, she becomes very wealthy, she's notoriously so stunning that no one can resist her. How did that story get told? And so that's where all of this came from.

But what I will say is that her story and the way it's told certainly distorts, I think, a lot of the real woman, the real historical Frini. I was so impressed to see a biography out there because I'd always assumed that people like Frini who exist very much on the margins and that they're, she's almost, she is a fantasy. She was a real person, but the stories that surround her,

this legendary Greek courtesan who amassed a fort. tune and could, you know, run rings around men and always had a quick witticism back. But there's nothing in her voice. It's always people writing about her. So how did you overcome that? What sources are you using for this? So a lot of our sources for Frinney come in the generations after she was born, or after she lived, pardon me. But one of the chapters does deal with speculating about her life. So again, it's very challenging. The sources from her own life are comedies, the ones that refer to her. And they make jokes. One of the playwrights calls her a charybdis, like the giant whirlpool, mythological whirlpool that swallows down ship

captains and the ships alongside them, right? So she's so greedy in her relationships. And there's other jokes about, oh, she was a caper gatherer when she was young. And so whether that's saying she was quite poor when she was young, or it's more likely probably a dirty joke of some kind that we don't quite get. So there are these little tantalizing references to her. from her own lifetime. And we have a couple of fragments of the very famous court case where she went to court and famously, spoiler alert, she was acquitted because she took off her clothing in the middle of the courtroom. At least that's the story that's been told. So we have a couple of fragments of that speech. That's all that comes from her lifetime. That's it. So when the stories start to be told about her,

that happens in the Hellenistic period when you have all of these scholars working at Alexandria. And they're very obsessed with classical Athens, with the fourth century in particular when Frini was alive. And so they start telling stories about the Hittirai, about these women. We might call them courtisans, but, you know, just think upscale sex workers. And they are very interested in finding these women, but it becomes a genre unto itself to write about Hittirai. And the genre is of anecdotes. So it's never more than a few lines. It's always something like Frini met a man and she stated her price.

He said that's too high. She said, hang around and I'll charge you less if I feel like I want it. That's the type of anecdote. And we find this about a variety like lice, glicker, a bunch of women who lived in the fourth century. So that's how her story starts to be told is with these little fairly generic anecdotes, right? The things that Frini is said to say could be said by any of these hittirai. But what starts to happen once we get into the Roman imperial period, so about the first century CE and the second century CE is we have authors who are really interested in how these women might

have thought. And so they start doing dialogues of Hittairai or they start like Alcifron. They start writing letters in their voices. And so there's sort of a reclamation. The original men writing women. Exactly. Ventriloquism, right. And there's this reclamation of their voices, of Frinney's voice.

particular, she gets kind of most of the attention because she's sort of the Hittaira par excellence. She's the one that everyone refers back to. But in this process, they make them a lot bolder and they characterize them more richly. So, you know, we kind of get away from Frinney and then we get back to a different kind of Frinny with this boldness that, you know, it might reflect what she was really like, but it certainly is sort of a response to the genre of literature that these authors, people like Elsafron, people like Lucian, are writing in, you know, once we get into the imperial period. And you do see this archetype that's created in someone like Frini, I don't think you might call them a tart with a heart or like the larger than life, you know,

balshy, brash sex worker who is, you know, hard nose, but also cares for people. And you see that repeating in many of the great courtesans. Nell Gwynn would be a great example. There's lots of stories about how her wit was legendary. And there's all kinds of these witty, very intelligent women. And they seem to have started with this woman. I can't think of anyone earlier, second century BCE. We might think about Aspegia, but Aspecia, I don't think really was historically a sex worker. She was accused of it by comic playwrights. Aspecia is the partner of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman in the fifth century BCE. But she's often assumed to have been a sex worker. And I think part of this is just she was a public and unusual woman. And so comic playwright

said, she's running a brothel or they accused her of these kinds of things. But it probably doesn't reflect the reality of her life. And I think sometimes we find in some of those accusations, obviously in the ancient world, a little bit of pornophobia where, you know, to be a sex worker is the worst thing I can accuse you of. So Aspeja is known as being like a bright woman. And some people have suggested, you know, she was the one who taught Socrates. She's a model for diatima in this symposium. So she might be the sort of earliest model of this. But really, it's women like Frini. It's that fourth century where it really, really kicks off. And I think part of what that is all about too. And the reason that people can make jokes about them is that they also start to feature

in court cases in the fourth century in Athens. So Athenian men start taking sex workers to court quite often, it seems. We have, you know, quite a few examples of this. And so I think they start to kind of take on a place in the public eye in that way because of all of these accusations. They're accused of doing things like presenting themselves as Athenian women, presenting their children as Athenian. When if you're a sex worker, you know, you cannot be Athenian. You can't have a legitimate child. But I think that's sort of where you see that footprint where they start to really enter the public eye. And you can see in those court cases and in the comedies, you see the people of Athens going, we are really, really intrigued by these women. We find them so compelling, but we don't

really have a spot to put them. They don't fit comfortably where our wives and our daughters and our mothers do. So how do we treat them? What should we do? You know, and then we're going to put them on the comic stage. We're going to talk about them all the time. They're a little bit obsessed with them, I think, in the fourth century. But this is where that idea of this larger than life, I think, personality comes into play. And it starts to build from that. It's incredible, isn't it? That it kind of all, you can be traced back to this particular group of people and what they were and the fascination that people have with them. And that's something I wanted to ask you about because we have this idea of ancient Greece of it being this kind of hedonistic

sexual paradise where everybody, you know, gets the jellies on. It was actually quite conservative, especially for women. They didn't like, and if you read pretty much any compliment about an ancient Greek woman, it will say chaste in there. It'll say she's a chaste woman, she's a modest woman, and she's fabulous at sewing, or whatever the hell it is. So how, when they so value chastity and modesty to someone like Frini become like a celebrity, is she respected? I'm not sure, but like this cultural fascination around with her. How does you square that circle? So I think, and I spend a lot of time thinking about why classical Athenians are so obsessed with women. You know, they put them on stage in these plays that are written by men and performed by men, you have most, or not mostly,

but you do have, you know, at least half women characters and characters like Medea and Clydeumnestra, these are not shrinking violets that you're throwing on stage. What I think is that when you have such a strict society and you're operating it in this very strict way, obviously, or ideally it's that strict. You know, we know everyone has ideals, cultural ideals, and very few people actually live up to them, right? Even if they're strict. And if it's strict, you often have more of that stuff happening behind the scenes, right? So, you know, I suspect some of what you were just saying about ancient Greece, you know, there was some of that going on for sure, for sure. But you've got to navigate that difference between ideals and realities, right? So we have these strict ideals, but in reality,

we are seeing women out of the household. You know, we know citizen women, for example, had to go out and work sometimes to pay the bills to keep their families going and some of them would have entered sex work for sure. So you've got these ideals that are challenging to live with and you're kind of recognizing that for women it's a very specific kind of challenge to live with these too. And you've got to navigate it somehow and I think that comes out in this obsession. And again, you have a woman, say like Frini, who because she's a sex worker, she's also foreign, which in Athens in the fourth century, you know, limits some of her rights. It all. It all, also means that she has to pay a certain kind of tax every month,

but she's probably the head of her own household, which is very unusual. That is not ideal for an Athenian woman. And she's moving through social circles in ways that an Athenian woman, an Athenian wife or a daughter can't quite do or shouldn't quite do. Yeah. And I think that is very challenging because, you know, there's a woman who can live in different parts of the city,

who can move through different circles and have access, especially probably to young elite men, wealthy men, that other women can't or shouldn't. And the Athenians are really trying to figure out how they feel about that. Yeah. You know, and so I think that comes out in that obsession with these women, the taking them to court, you know, putting them on stage all the time. There are so many sex workers on stage in the fourth century in comedy, in particular. So you can see that obsession and that discussion getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

It's like they can't work out how they feel about them. because it's like they're like, well, they're not good and chaste and moral. So we can't respect them like we do with their mothers. And yet we can't stop talking about them. So it becomes this strange focal point for a lot of writers. Yes. Yeah. And again, the one thing we see, too, is that, you know, with these court cases in particular, the men who are associated with the sex workers, too,

clearly they haven't squared the circle of how they're interacting with these women. because it seems like when things go sour for whatever reason, they're like, okay, in you come, I'm going to take you to court. Because I can and because I'm an Athenian man, I have access to this. They turn very quick. Yeah. And you're very vulnerable in that situation as a foreign woman or a sex worker without rights. So you see the way that they use the mechanisms of the Athenian state, right, against these women.

And I think that's also some of that discomfort with women who don't fit in tidily into their system. that's how they're working it out too by punishing them literally. It's fascinating. So what do we know about Frini then? This is a woman that men love to tell stories about. But do we know, for example, where she was from? Yes.

So we have a few things that I'm pretty certain that we can say, yes, this is true of Frini. She's from Thespi, which is a town in Biotia. So it's just kind of north, it's near Thebes, north of Attica and Athens. But Cessbii is the hometown of that sanctuary of Eros. So it's kind of wonderful that this, the most beautiful desirable sex worker of the fourth century comes from the hometown of sexual desire, basically, right? It kind of like if she came from Paris today.

Yeah, exactly. We can talk about this later, but there's definitely a connection with Frini and Paris and sex work that happens later on too. But yeah, so she's from Thespia. And so she clearly, again, isn't Athenian, this means she can't have Athenian civil rights, the rights that an Athenian woman or man would have access to. So we know she's from there. I'm certain it's said a million times. She apparently had a statue at Delphi of her by Praxite, at least this famous sculptor,

that said Frinny, the daughter of Epicles of Thespii. So she's actually claiming her family roots there too in that way. So then the question becomes, was she brought to Athens? Yeah. Was she free when she came to Athens? That's the challenge to navigate. I think she was probably free, but it's not uncommon for Seth.

sex workers to have been enslaved at least when they're younger. You know, we do have examples of sex workers who earned enough money to free themselves or were helped to be freed by patrons, for example. But so for her, again, was she enslaved or not? She probably entered the sex trade at a very young age. We do have lots of evidence of sex workers who enter. There's a very famous legal speech against Neira, which basically gives us, it's our most fulsome narrative of a woman's life from the fourth century in Greek. And it tells us about her being enslaved. in Corinth as a young woman, pardon me, a young girl. It should be very clear. The terms that are used in Greek suggest a child. And it's very clear, a young child. So we see kind of the path, the possible

path that someone like Friddy could take. Yeah. And we can see perhaps by using those bits of historical evidence, we can kind of speculate about a woman like Friddy, again, how she kind of moved into Athens and then moved in and around the social circles there. So again, she's from Thespi. What else can we say? She definitely became very wealthy. I think that's certain that she has all. of these reputations. It's very common to say sex workers are greedy, but I think in particular, there are a set of anecdotes about her fabulous wealth. So I think she did become wealthy. Therefore, she had to have been free, at least by that point. She certainly did go to court. We know that. She probably didn't reveal her nude body at the end of the case, though. But that's almost the sum total,

but we know about her. We don't know about her death. We have a couple of anecdotes of her in old age, where she says things like she's selling her dregs, basically. She's making a joke about, you know, old wine. And that her reputation is her dregs, but she can still, because her reputation is so significant, she can charge still a high price, even though what's left isn't so great anymore. But we don't know what sort of happens to her at the end of her life, right?

And so what we really end up is this snapshot of Frini in this active period where she is this grand Hittaira, right? And when she's this glamorous figure, this notable figure, Athens, but that fulsome biography just isn't there, unfortunately. She modelled, or at least was said to have modeled for Praxtalis, the very, very famous. Prexitalis, yeah. Thank you. The very famous sculptor.

And the statue itself, Aphrodite of Canossus. Tell me about that statue and why that was like much more than just, oh, it's a statue of Aphrodite with a tits out, like the impact that this thing had on the ancient world. Yes. Okay. So this statue is the first monumental nude. female statue. It's the Aphrodite of Canidas. And what's interesting is in the historical record, we don't have a lot that mentions the statue when it's first sculpted, you know, in probably

350s, 340s, again, by Pregsittalese, who is like the most famous sculptor from ancient Greece. And so the other thing that we find is that it's high rate, there's a real push to link them to famous men. And if there's a man who lived kind of around that time, we're going to get them together. But there are several statues that are connected to Frinian and Prexitellis. So, I think it's guaranteed that the two of them knew each other, whether they were romantically associated. That's the other question. So we have prexiteles and Frini linked somehow. And then we start to see in the Hellenistic period the mentions of the Aphrodite of Knaidos as this statue is becoming famous and copied and sent all around the Greek and then the Roman world. So we have a real push

to kind of consume Greek culture, you know, through Frini, through the statue. So we're going to put these two together. But this statue, in the stories about it, seems to have caused a bit of a splash, at least later on. It became like a tourist attraction. So Knaidos is a city and what's now Turkey on the coast. And it was probably this nude statue was in a round temple, we think. So you can think about going and you can walk around the statue. And she's posed in a way so that her nudity, she's not, you know, standing with her arms wide open. She's got one hand. And she's got one hand sort of hiding her vulva. She is sort of leaning. She's got a water jar and a cloth that she's either just removing or putting on. So there's even like a little narrative. Are you catching the nude

Aphrodite in the bath? Is she preparing for a to meet a lover? And depending on the angle that you look at the statue, you can go around it, you might get a different narrative too, right? So it's this very complicated statue. Now, because it's a nude statue and because the first monumental female nude statue, this seems to have really impressed people in ancient Greece. And so we have a lot of stories about people who encounter the statue and they can't control themselves when they see it. They fall in love with it, right? So one of the most famous statues is a young man at Knidos

falls in love with the statue and he contrives to have himself locked into this little round temple with it overnight and makes love to the statue. And so famously this statue has a stain on the marble of its sputic that is a semen stain. And to kind of loop back to that letter that is Alcifran's letter that is attributed to Frinny. And that's why we can't have nice things. Yeah, because Greek men keep trying to sleep with statues.

Ancient Greek men, I should be careful. God. Sorry. Tell me about the letters. Oh, yeah. In the letter, when she says, we're not going to defile these things. She uses this term in Greek that is the same term that's used in the stories about, it's the word for stain, right? So she's also saying, like, we're not going to be like the people who are, you know, having sex with statues, basically.

Yes. Yeah. So this makes a big splash. So you can see why there's a push to take this woman who is famous and beautiful. And there are a few stories about her being nude in public. And to put her together with this famous nude statue, there's already a connection to praxitilis. So there's a real push to get all of these things together. Yeah.

That makes sense. My other favorite Frini story. is the one where she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes. Yeah. So famously, again, and I think this speaks to the fact that she probably was quite wealthy in her own lifetime. But famously, she said, yes, I'll rebuild the walls of Thebes for you. Alexander the Great and his army had raised them.

And she said, as long as you put an inscription on them that says, Alexander raised these walls, but Frinney put them back up. There's a little bit more to that, too, because again, she's famously witty. The SBI had been destroyed and sacked by the Thebans. So that's not a gracious offer. That's an ironic offer on her part. Oh. She's so smart.

I'll be back with Melissa and Bruney after this short break. The brains and the beauty and the wit, it didn't keep her out of court. Which is interesting, as you were saying earlier, is that they're still very vulnerable because all of this power is very dependent on quite a fickle male appreciation, unfortunately. So tell me how.

How does our girl end up in court? What happens? Okay, so we're not sure how she ends up in court. Again, in Elsifron's letters, there are three letters about this court case, but it's a fellow named Euthius who brings her into court. So the suggestion in Elsefron's letters is that Frinney and Euthius had been in a relationship. And when it broke up, basically he took her to court. In the letters, I think it says she asked him for payment and instead he took her to court.

Now, whether that's a fictionalization by Elsefron, on, you know, it's likely. Because the other thing that happens with sex workers that we know of historically is that they get brought into court as a way of getting back at the men that they're affiliated with, too. It's a way for two men to work out a problem using a woman who's the one who's sort of carrying the burden of everything that's at stake. So she gets brought to court. The charge is impiety.

And in classical Athens, impiety is a very flexible charge. It's sort of anything that looks like you are acting in a way that's counter to what's sacred. So we are told by a later legal scholar that she has introduced a new god who is called Esodaites. And all he says is that this is a foreign god who is worshipped by trifling women, which I think is a shot at Frinney. Oh, right. Yeah. Do we know anything about this God? That's all we know for. That's it. That's all we know. Didn't catch on then, did it? Oh. No, no, didn't. Probably associated with Dionysus, though, whose worship brings together enslaved and free and men and women and mixes up all the social boundaries. So probably affiliated with Dionysus. She has been

acting poorly in the Lyceum, which is a shrine to Apollo. But also, this is, of course, where Aristotle's school will be or is. It's where a lot of elite young men who are challenging the status quo hang out too. So what's going on there? And as well, there's a third charge. She's charged with having sort of sacred worship groups with men and women together. So you can see the real concerns. You can see the real is that she's mixing up social standing. She is a busy girl. Yeah. The other thing to remember what this charge is,

this is the same charge that Socrates gets brought up on too. That's interesting. Yeah. It seems to be if you have someone that you have trouble with. That's the one. And you don't like what they're doing. That's the charge because it's so flexible, but it's also sticky, right? It's the kind of thing that once you've been accused of it,

it's very hard to defend oneself against. That's clever. All right. So she ends up in court and you might think that this would be an absolute it breeze for Frini because clearly she has money and she has connections. But I find it very interesting that she's still at the mercy of men and at the patriarchy. And she absolutely, as soon as she's not occupying that space of fascination and awe, she's very easy to like throw away and throw down. And the court case is not easy for Frini. So can you, like what is one of the

sources that we have left to tell us what happened here? Okay. So a lot of our sources, of course, come from that imperial period. So again, second century CE, we have a fellow named Athaneus who collects everything he can find about the Hittirai, and in fact, everything he can find about ancient great culture. We have Plutarch, who has a biography of the advocate for Frini. His name is Hyperides. He's a very notable and wealthy man himself. Hyperides, which is very interesting, has multiple Hittaira girlfriends in multiple homes around Attica. We hear he kicks his son out of the house so he can keep one. So he's got three different. houses, three different hittirai. Oh, dear. And then it's also suggested that he is in love with

Frinny too, because again, I think you can't have a Hittira and a notable man and not try to get them into bed together somehow in these stories. Legal scholars love, though, this speech. They love hyperides. He's a talented orator. So they're very, very interested in him, too. But basically, you've got two of the kind of the sexiest people in Athens coming together in this big blockbuster trial. So we have a few fragments of the speech. And we know from, a play that was written a few generations later, the trial had become famous by that point. But that play says that Frini,

at the end, when it seemed like she was just about to be convicted, and this is a capital charge possibly, so she could be even put to death. So she goes to the jury, and we've got 501 Athenian men would be there on the jury. And she goes to them individually and beseeches them. This is what we hear in the play. That seems like an impossibility to me.

I don't think you could do that. but the story that starts to get added to this in the Hellenistic period and later is that hyperides at this point when it seems like she's just about to be convicted, he takes her robe, her clothing, and whips it off. And there she is standing nude before, and especially there's an emphasis on her breasts, but she's standing nude before the jury. And that Athenaeus says they all fall into awe because here is the agent of Aphrodite in front of them. They look almost like a religious awe. But I think, you know, she's a sex worker. Of course, she's an agent of Aphrodite in that very literal sense. But they can't help but acquit her because she is so stunning before them. And so that's the story that gets told. So the defense there was basically she can't be guilty with tits like these. That was the defense. Basically.

Basically. Or maybe she's guilty, but it doesn't matter because we can't. Because she's too beautiful. These beautiful breasts to death. That's right. I mean, wow, that's a hell of a defense, isn't it? I suppose if I'm being generous, I suppose that you could kind of look at it as like, if she's on charge for impiety, as in that she's pissed the gods off,

is the argument that, well, she can't have pissed them off because they would never have made her this beautiful? Or is it just, but she's got great tits? I think it's a combo. I think it's a combo. The other thing is that there's a literary tradition of women in times of duress when they're asking for pity, revealing their breasts. And one of the women who does that, I've done that myself many times. Yeah. You know, who hasn't amongst us? Who hasn't, right? Some extra chips from the chippy on a Friday get him out. Exactly. But Helen of Troy is famous for

doing this. And there are some scenes when during the sack of Troy, Menelaus comes back and he's going to kill her because he's so angry about, you know, having had to go to war over her. And he's got a sword out basically and she reveals her breasts and he's stunned and can't kill her. There's even a scene in a lost epic by a fellow names to Sychorus where the whole Greek army is facing against Helen and she does that. She reveals herself and they drop, they're all about to stone her and they drop their stones. So what I suspect is happening is this literary tradition is making its way into the stories about Frinney. And I often think of Frinney as kind of a human Helen or a non-mythological Helen, a historical Helen, because she has that same interest in

her beauty. She has the same power in her beauty. And she's this controversial woman. She's not doing the right thing, which Helen of Troy certainly doesn't do either. Do you think there is any chance in Helen that this actually happened? Or do you think it's just fun stories? I think it's just a fun story. Part of me wishes for this because it's also an expression of that dynamic that you were just talking about where she's really vulnerable. And there's this obsession with these vulnerable women. And they sort of, so they gather cultural power because of that, right? They're able to be powerful in that way. And there's a lot of discomfort around that. So part of me is like, you're obsessed with me. You want to put me to death because you're, you don't know what to do with me.

Well, take a look, right? This is what this is all about. It's sort of the end game of that kind of thought. So I kind of wish it was true. I mean, there's so much about Frini that I wish, I wish I could know for certain. And I think that's one of those things. She has this court case, which whether or not she got her boobs out, we're not sure. But it seems like there was a court case of some description, because there's corroborating evidence. Definitely. Of it. Yeah. Do we have any sense of what happens to her afterwards? Does she just bounce right back? Or has the court case done serious damage to her? So the challenges too with all of these anecdotes is any kind of chronological order, right? Is to figure out when this happens. So I think, I definitely think she bounces back in some sense. I think she stays

fairly wealthy. One of the plays that is produced during her lifetime puts her on stage as a fury. So furies, right, are these characters, these mythological characters that are spirits of vengeance and they chase you endlessly. And so it's a play about a fellow who is notoriously a pederast. So he's interested in boys. And the chorus of the play seems to have been elderly sex workers who are clearly chasing him because they want him to be interested in them. You know, he's not patronizing them. They want his money. And so she's one of them, right?

And so I think she still stays in the public eye to a certain extent. And again, she's famous enough that she's like that cultural referent that people can say, oh, Frini, you know, is this. And it hits, the joke hits, the joke lands. So whatever happens, she stays prominent, which is interesting. I've just mentioned Socrates trial. Of course, Socrates gets put to death. Yeah, chit-tit.

But I think I'm certain that if she was put to death, we would know. Yeah. Yes. I think that we would know, wouldn't we? So one of the things I want to ask you about, I want to ask you about sex work in ancient Greece in general, because we need to be very careful. It's very easy to look at someone like Freeney and go, oh, my God, it was a right laugh. I would have definitely been doing that. But for every Freeney, there would have been thousands of people living really difficult, wretched, troubling lives.

But what was the status of sex work in ancient Greece? can't all have been gabillionaires with, you know, a witty reparty for everyone. Yeah. So, I mean, that is the thing. And we know there was, you know, a fairly thriving sex trade in a place like classical Athens. Corinth seems to be the city that gets associated with the sex trade. It's a port city, right? It's a big wealthy port city. So you can imagine sex trade flourishes in port cities around the world, right? It sort of always has. But in classical Athens, we do hear, there are different terms that we use for sex workers. And so the more generic one is porne. And it's where we get our word pornography from, right? The first person who uses pornography, pornographos in Greek, but pornographer is a fellow named Athanas. And he's talking about a guy who just keeps talking and writing about prostitutes and sex workers. So, porne is often thought by a lot of scholars. And there's a lot of debate around these terms to be kind of that lower class. I think it's just a generic term for sex workers. Okay.

And the truth is that I suspect a lot of these Hittai who become so legendary people like Frinny probably at one point in their careers, we're probably maybe working in a brothel, right? Not to what we would think of as like a cortisant, not glamorous at all. And so we know of brothels. Sometimes the Athenian state will subsidize brothels. There's a recognition that, you know, people need to go patronize sex workers. I suspect most of them are enslaved. Yeah.

It probably wasn't a very pleasant lifestyle. There's a house. It's called Bowsey. That's the Germans excavated it. So that's what we call it. But that place is also seems to be a bit of a workshop as well. And the term for a brothel is the same as the term for a workshop. So there's this idea that it's the sort of heavy duty physical labor.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And there's a lot of, again, a lot of debate about, you know, which women we can confidently say we're sex workers. And I think we still sort of fall into the trap. of saying like, oh, this woman's out in public, sex worker, right?

Or she's moving between circles. But it's also sexual labor, right? It's a really tricky thing to identify even in 2024. So it's just as challenging to identify in the ancient world. But then you add that layer of concerns over women in public. And that causes us to, you know, sometimes identify women wrongly. But the other thing is they don't want us to be afraid to, when we do know a woman as a sex worker, that's okay.

we don't want to be pornophobic about that either, right? This is what these women were doing to make a living. And they had clientele. There was a space for them in society, even if it was a challenging one to negotiate. We're all selling something. Yeah. And I think one of the things that when you're researching,

especially the history of sex work, is that you're constantly unpicking modern preconceptions or modern assumptions. Because one of the things I found very difficult to square was this idea that in the ancient world that you are enslaved, but they can also be celebrities. And you see that as well with geisha and with lots of different customs.

I can never remember what her name is. The one that you mentioned, like Minera, who was, she was also ended up in a trial with two men being really shitty about her and that there are stories about when she was enslaved as a child. But she was hugely famous and also still enslaved to a brothel. Yeah, so she seems to have acquired, at least according to this legal speech.

And we want to remember the legal speech about her is the speech against her. So I'd love to have the defense speech. I would love it. God, wouldn't we? But this is the story of how we tell the story of women in the ancient world. Our sources are always shaped by these dynamics. And we have to unpick that as much as we can. But yeah, so Neira, yeah, we know that she was in a brothel at a very young age.

She was picked because she was beautiful. The woman who ran the brothel herself had been enslaved. So I suspect it's not an uncommon trajectory for women who survive. because you can imagine in the sex trade in the ancient world, there's going to be a lot of unplanned pregnancies, there's going to be probably some STIs, so a lot of risk involved, I would imagine. So the woman who chose her, yeah, chose her because she was so beautiful. She herself had been enslaved, had become free. And then Neira follows that same pattern. But then we still hear, even once she's free, she's with a partner. And this is supposed to slander her. But when we read it

more generously and more from Neira's perspective, he's taking her to parties. And at parties, she's getting drunk. And then at the end of the night, she's even sleeping with the other enslaved people in the household. And to me, you know, is this consenting sex? It's hard to tell because of the way it's being shaped by the prosecutor. But you can really see the challenges for the people who are involved in the sex trade. You can see even, you know, maybe once you have become free, it's not just that you become this glamorous hitaira, right, who can say yes and no to anyone. the getting free, the getting the finances and perhaps getting to a point where you can set up your own household is one heck of a challenge. And then again, there's Athenian men. If they're unhappy with you, they're going to take you to court. So navigating all of that requires, I think, a real set of skills that we have to acknowledge in these women. But also the vulnerabilities are just constantly present for them. What do you think Frini's legacy is? I mean, she's this kind of tour de force of the ancient world. She's a woman who very much set herself up and played a blinder of a hand, but she still has

ongoing influences. I mean, you said earlier that there were links between her in Paris and sex work. What was that? So in the 19th century, there are, of course, painters who are obsessed with the ancient world. So there's always this sort of compulsion. And in 1861, there's a fellow named Jean-Neon-Gerone, and he's part of a movement called the Neo-Greek movement. So all of his paintings are very detailed paintings of antiquity. And in the 1861 Salon de Paris, he has a painting and it's Frinney before the judges. And in it, you see Frini. And she is standing in the middle and she's in a pose that mimics a famous painting from the ancient world of Aphrodite coming out of the sea. And she's sort of ringing out her hair, she's got her hands up to her side. It's a pose that we see in modern artwork all the time.

Frini, by the way, is also credited with inspiring that painting because of course she is come out of the sea nude at a festival one day. And everyone was so, you know, stunned at the, again, the sight of her beautiful nude body in public. So he has painted and he's got all the judges around her and they all have these different facial expressions of shock and awe and all the emotions that we were just talking about. And she's standing there nude. And the way that this woman is painted, she's so pale and white. She really does look like a marble statue. She's clearly meant to in a sense. And that's also supposed to invoke, again, like the Aphrodite of Knaidos that we talked about. and the tradition of nude Aphrodites that come from that.

So this caused kind of a mild scandal in 1861. But it also caused a big splash, a broad splash in French society. So people, for example, bought little statues of the Frinny from that painting. And so, you know, your bourgeois household would have a little franny in it, right? And then people started doing, you know, political cartoons. But the other thing that's going on in Paris at that time, as we're starting to see more of these nude painting, And these are the nude paintings that lead into like Manes Olympia, really famous nudes, that challenge the idea of what nudity and nakedness is in art. And especially for a woman and they're affiliated, the assumption is the models for all these paintings are sex workers.

The other thing that's happening is on stage in Paris, in sort of the last couple of decades of the 19th century, is they're starting to push the limits with nude spectacle at places like the Fully Berger. They're putting nude women on stage. or nearly nude women on stage. And so there's this combination of we have the artist's models who are also sometimes the same women performing. They're having photographs taken of them nude and circulated. And then there are stories being told about these women. The assumption is that they are involved in the sex trait somehow.

So Frini, this painting of Frini comes along and it sort of starts the trend, but it also feeds into these other trends. And so people start putting on the story of Frini on stage because it's a great way. to get a naked lady or a nearly naked lady on stage. But then you can also say, oh, well, it's about antiquity, right? We're doing a cultural event here.

Yes, it's cultural. Yeah. Yeah. It's all very highbrow. Exactly. Yeah. Every time they do this, every time we have a painting of Frinney or we have a Frinney on stage, you also have a woman whose stories and the anecdotes about her are kind of used to publicize it.

So, for example, the woman who poses for the photos that Jerome uses for his original painting, is a woman named Marie-Christine Laroux. And she's a model, right? And she's assumed to be a sex worker. She becomes the inspiration for musetta in La Bohem. So you can see the stories of these women being shaped as well. One of the women who plays Frinny in a comic opera is Cleo de Merode, who's a famous dancer. She has a famous nude statue of herself that gets made to buy the same sculptor who sculpted

the little tiny Frinnies that everyone is buying in the 1860s. Wow. It's very, everyone knows each other in these circles. But she is said to be the lover of King Leopold of Belgium. And this is so infamous, they actually have their own couple name. So before Brangelina, we had Cleopold. So all of these feed into the story of Frini. And so you always have these women whose own stories are building up in the way that Frinney's stories built up in her lifetime.

So where you see the movement from the real woman to like the legend, right? And that feeds into the publicity of Frinney. So Cleo de Maraud, when she's performing as Frini, one of the plays or one of the performances is at a seaside town. She makes a point of going down to the sea like Frinny to be seen, right? In the same way. Of course, she's wearing a bathing costume, she's not nude. But she is tying into all of the stories of Frinney, and then she's performing her on stage. And then there's a new set of stories about her.

And so we see this real obsession with sort of consuming women, right? Consuming the stories of women being titillated by them. But again, they're still in these vulnerable positions. They can be kind of disposed of when they become inconvenient. But again, we see that interest, the same kind of interest from the ancient world replaying again. Melissa, you have been utterly fascinating to talk to today. Thank you so much for talking to me. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Well, they can find my book, Frini Life and Fragments from Bloomsbury Academic. Find the book. Absolutely. You can also find me on Twitter where I talk a lot about people like Frini. and the various hetairi, I think I'm not done with talking about them. There's other ones that I want to look into, and I think their stories deserve the same kind of examination. And we will absolutely have you back to talk about them when you do.

Thank you so much. You have been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Melissa for joining me. And if you like what you heard, you know the drill. Don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You can consider it a 200th birthday present. But if you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello

then you can now email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from queer sex and Jacoby and Britain to Abraham Lincoln's sex life all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Seeds, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.