ONLINE CLASS: War Prize, Concubine, & Whore: Euripides, Plato & Demosthenes on the Fallen Woman (23114)

In this three-week course we read texts that differ from each other radically: pseudo-Demosthenes’ legal case Against Neaira, about a sex worker whose ambitions and needs took her into the highest echelons of Athenian political life; Euripides’ Andromache, for the story of Hector’s wife as a war-prize living in Greece; and Plato’s Menexenus, along with excerpts from Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, for a glimpse of Aspasia, arguably the most famous woman we know of from ancient Athens. Each text reveals how the ancient male imagination—for none of these female figures can be truly known for herself—contemplated a ‘fallen’ woman and the power she could exert over the most prominent and important men of the state.

Reading Schedule and Description:

We begin with Against Neaira, a speech offered in prosecution of an alien woman who is a sex worker, although the real target of the judicial attack is her husband, the Athenian citizen Stephanus. This speech portrays in brutal detail the life of an ancient Greek sex worker, from her earliest childhood groomed to please men to her later years when Neaira attaches herself to Stephanus and the two proceed to con and cheat their way into the most sacred parts of Athenian ritual—allegedly. The speech draws a highly schematized dichotomy of a woman’s life and role within the polis of Athens, depending on whether she is a woman of good standing or not.

Next we study Euripides’ Andromachê, a surprising tragedy—because nobody dies and there’s a happy ending—about the former wife of the Trojan war hero Hector. Now a war prize and concubine in the palace of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, Andromachê is powerless against the vindictive machinations of her master’s wife, Hermionê, whose envy has arisen because Andromachê has borne Neoptolemus a child while she is barren. Euripides dramatizes questions about the honor and nobility of women, whether these are inherent in some or bestowed by marriage and privilege. (If you’ve read Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, you may recognize this play as a source for late events in that novel.)

Finally we consider the figure of Aspasia as she appears in Plato’s Menexenus, a dialogue in which Socrates recites a funeral oration that he claims was composed by this woman on behalf of the Athenian war dead. Aspasia’s enigmatic status as a foreign immigrant from Miletus, a city allied with Athens, and concubine (hetaira) of Pericles makes this funeral oration an astonishing work. After all, Pericles himself composed the most famous ancient funeral oration we have, found in Book 2 of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. It was the annual custom of the Athenians to invite a prominent and well-respected (male) citizen to proclaim such an oration over the men who had died that year in Athens’ wars, and the notion that Aspasia had composed such an oration good enough to be admired by Socrates, invites us to ponder how the talent and training of a woman might enable her to transcend her status. To be clear, the real Aspasia did not write the speech in Plato’s dialogue, but the philosopher has created an intriguing relationship between Socrates and a woman considered to be a high-status sex worker.) Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, written many centuries after, gives us background on the figure of Pericles as well as our most complete account of Aspasia’s life and relationship with the leading politician and military general of Athens at the time.

Three Tuesdays: October 3, 10, and 17 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online