The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 3 (of 3)Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Philosophy
The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 3 (of 3)
Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Civilization, Greco-Roman; Dinners and dining -- Greece; Greece -- Social life and customs; Homosexuality -- Greece
For when one in the flower of his age
Learns to sneak into other men's abodes,
And shares of meals where he has not contributed,
He must some other mode of payment mean.
And Æschines the orator has said something of the same kind in his
Speech against Timarchus.
31. But concerning courtesans, Philetærus, in his Huntress, has the
following lines:—
'Tis not for nothing that where'er we go
We find a temple of Hetæra there,
But nowhere one to any wedded wife.
I know, too, that there is a festival called the Hetæridia, which is
celebrated in Magnesia, not owing to the courtesans, but to another
cause, which is mentioned by Hegesander in his Commentaries, who writes
thus:—"The Magnesians celebrate a festival called Hetæridia; and they
give this account of it: that originally Jason, the son of Æson, when
he had collected the Argonauts, sacrificed to Jupiter Hetærias, and
called the festival Hetæridia. And the Macedonian kings also celebrated
the Hetæridia."
There is also a temple of Venus the Prostitute (πόρνη) at Abydus, as
Pamphylus asserts:—"For when all the city was oppressed by slavery, the
guards in the city, after a sacrifice on one occasion (as Cleanthus
relates in his essays on Fables), having got intoxicated, took several
courtesans; and one of these women, when she saw that the men were all
fast asleep, taking the keys, got over the wall, and brought the news
to the citizens of Abydus. And they, on this, immediately came in arms,
and slew the guards, and made themselves masters of the walls, and
recovered their freedom; and to show their gratitude to the prostitute
they built a temple to Venus the Prostitute."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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