Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts PDF Author: Allison Glazebrook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, free, and independent hetaira well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society. Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts PDF Author: Allison Glazebrook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, free, and independent hetaira well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society. Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts PDF Author: Allison Glazebrook
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781477324417
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Ancient Greek oratory has long been seen as a source for cultural and historical information, in this case on sexual labor, which is generally treated differently within ancient speeches than within other genres, such as comedy or philosophy. Oratory provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, the private ownership of sex slaves, Athenian brothels, sex traffickers (the majority of whom appear to have been female), the cost of sex, the use of contracts between sex laborers and clients, manumission practices for sex slaves, and even the sharing of a sex laborer between two clients (as either joint owners or through a contract for exclusive use). As opposed to the stereotypical witty, educated hetaira that appears in other Athenian literature, sex laborers as they appear in Athenian speeches are portrayed as potentially dangerous transgressors that threaten social on both male and female sex laborers found within. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme (such as desire, the household, or dangerous women) and uses that as a touchstone to examine the representations of prostitutes and sexuality within the speech. Although prostitution was legal in ancient Athens, it was often complicated by notions of gender and sex, citizenship, slavery and ownership, and other issues that become apparent in the speeches. The variety of ways in which prostitution was approached within oratory help reveal the complex cultural constructions around the activity. Glazebrook shows that the different ways in which sex laborers interact with each other and with society as a whole, as depicted in the speeches, reveal the complexity and diversity not only of sexual labor itself, but also of the attitudes, ambiguities, and anxieties that surrounded sexual labor in classical Athens"--

The Reign of the Phallus

The Reign of the Phallus PDF Author: Eva C. Keuls
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520079298
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
At once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens, where the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life. Complementing the text are 345 reproductions of Athenian vase paintings depicting the phallus.

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greece

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Sara Forsdyke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Recovers the voices, experiences and agency of enslaved people in ancient Greece.

Athenian Prostitution

Athenian Prostitution PDF Author: Edward E. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190493666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This is a pioneering study that examines the sale of sex in classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or moral) perspective. Following the author's earlier book on Athenian banking, this work analyzes erotic business at Athens in the context of the Athenian economy. For the Athenians, the social acceptability and moral standing of human labor was largely determined by the conditions under which work was performed. Pursued in a context characteristic of servile endeavor, prostitution--like all forms of slave labor--was contemptible. Pursued under conditions appropriate to non-servile endeavor, prostitution--like all forms of free labor--was not violative of Athenian work ethics. As a mercantile activity, however, prostitution was not untouched by Athenian antagonism toward commercial and manual pursuits; as the "business of sex," prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex, lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. In a book that will be of interest to all students of sex and gender, to economic, legal and social historians, and to classicists, the author explores the high compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that benefitted from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author juxtaposes the widespread practice of "prostitution pursuant to written contract" with legislation targeting male prostitutes functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society's pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against sexual outrage.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens PDF Author: Jenifer Neils
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.

What Is a Slave Society?

What Is a Slave Society? PDF Author: Noel Lenski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110863320X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World PDF Author: Christopher A. Faraone
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299213137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World explores the implications of sex-for-pay across a broad span of time, from ancient Mesopotamia to the early Christian period. In ancient times, although they were socially marginal, prostitutes connected with almost every aspect of daily life. They sat in brothels and walked the streets; they paid taxes and set up dedications in religious sanctuaries; they appeared as characters—sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable—on the comic stage and in the law courts; they lived lavishly, consorting with famous poets and politicians; and they participated in otherwise all-male banquets and drinking parties, where they aroused jealousy among their anxious lovers. The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of genres and sources, from legal and religious tracts to the genres of lyric poetry, love elegy, and comic drama to the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans.

Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World

Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World PDF Author: Anise K. Strong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107148758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
From streetwalkers in the Roman Forum to imperial concubines, Roman prostitutes defined what it meant to be a 'bad girl'.

Spartan Women

Spartan Women PDF Author: Sarah B. Pomeroy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199880999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This is the first book-length examination of Spartan women, covering over a thousand years in the history of women from both the elite and lower classes. Classicist Sarah B. Pomeroy comprehensively analyzes ancient texts and archaeological evidence to construct the world of these elusive though much noticed females. Sparta has always posed a challenge to ancient historians because information about the society is relatively scarce. Most existing scholarship on Sparta concerns the military history of the city and its heavily male-dominated social structure--almost as if there were no women in Sparta. Yet perhaps the most famous of mythic Greek women, Menelaus' wife Helen, the cause of the Trojan War, was herself a Spartan. Written by one of the leading authorities on women in antiquity, Spartan Women reconstructs the lives and the world of Sparta's women, including how their status changed over time and how they held on to their surprising autonomy. Proceeding through the archaic, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, Spartan Women includes discussions of education, family life, reproduction, religion, and athletics.