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
And when Cyrus the younger was making his expedition against his
brother, did he not carry with him a courtesan of Phocæa, who was a
very clever and very beautiful woman? and Zenophanes says that her name
was originally Milto, but that it was afterwards changed to Aspasia.
And a Milesian concubine also accompanied him. And did not the great
Alexander keep Thais about him, who was an Athenian courtesan? And
Clitarchus speaks of her as having been the cause that the palace
of Persepolis was burnt down. And this Thais, after the death of
Alexander, married Ptolemy, who became the first king of Egypt, and
she bore him sons, Leontiscus and Lagos, and a daughter named Irene,
who was married to Eunostus, the king of Soli, a town of Cyprus. And
the second king of Egypt, Ptolemy Philadelphus by name, as Ptolemy
Euergetes relates in the third book of his Commentaries, had a great
many mistresses,—namely, Didyma, who was a native of the country, and
very beautiful; and Bilisticha; and, besides them, Agathoclea, and
Stratonice, who had a great monument on the sea-shore, near Eleusis;
and Myrtium, and a great many more; as he was a man excessively
addicted to amatory pleasures. And Polybius, in the fourteenth book of
his History, says that there are a great many statues of a woman named
Clino, who was his cup-bearer, in Alexandria, clothed in a tunic only,
and holding a cornucopia in her hand. "And are not," says he, "the
finest houses called by the names of Myrtium, and Mnesis, and Pothina?
and yet Mnesis was only a female flute-player, and so was Pothine, and
Myrtium was one of the most notorious and common prostitutes in the
city."
Was there not also Agathoclea the courtesan, who had great power over
king Ptolemy Philopator? in fact, was it not she who was the ruin of
his whole kingdom? And Eumachus the Neapolitan, in the second book of
his History of Hannibal, says that Hieronymus, the tyrant of Syracuse,
fell in love with one of the common prostitutes who followed her trade
in a brothel, whose name was Pitho, and married her, and made her queen
of Syracuse.
[Sidenote: COURTESANS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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