Warning: Nothing in this podcast is intended to be explicit, not now or ever, but there is no dodging the fact that Neaira’s story is one of sexual exploitation, beginning when she was very young. Just keep that in mind before listening.

Let’s play a game: Let’s see how many famous women of ancient Greece we can name. Mythological ones don’t count. Ready? Go.

I’m waiting.

And waiting.

Maybe you came up with Sappho the poet? Maybe a handful of others if you’re really good. But not a lot. We know next to nothing about ancient Greek women.

Athens had great architecture, great art, great philosophy, terrible women’s rights. Even by the low standards of history, Athens is bad. The legal term for wife was damar, which means “to subdue, or tame.” Respectable women were strictly regulated in where they could go, how far they could walk, etc. They were not intended to be seen on the streets. That was for slave women and prostitutes. Some Greek writers rebuked respectable women for daring to be seen even by members of their own households. Female infanticide was common. One interesting way of determining the status of women is to compare the average age of grooms and brides. The farther apart they are, the more unequal the relationship is likely to be. Athens was particularly bad in this respect. Girls as young as 12 or 13 were often married to men of over 30.

I say Athens, rather than Greece, because not all the city-states were the same. Women in Sparta were definitely better off. But most of our sources are from Athens, and they say very, very little about Athenian women, other than to rebuke them for crimes like looking out of their windows.

So it is a little astonishing that we even know Neaira’s story. Until you realize exactly how we know it. Not from a delightful little autobiography. Not from a dedicated muckraking journalist. Nope. We know it from the court records. The speech Against Neaira survives. Sadly, the defense’s speech does not.

As much as I hate taking Neaira herself out of the spotlight, I think it’s necessary to explain the court system first because we’re not going to take everything the speech says about her at face value. So let’s look at the context.

Ancient Greek Courts

Athenian society loved lawsuits. But if you are imagining judges in wigs, professional lawyers, juries of 12 unbiased peers, and a dizzying array of procedural rules, you can think again. For one thing, you don’t get legal counsel. If you wanted to bring suit, you did it yourself or you got help from an unpaid friend or relative. Speaking in court for money was a punishable offense. The jury included 501 Athenian citizens, which was the smallest possible number for this kind of suit. They were selected at random from an even larger pool, but there was absolutely no cross-examination to find out if they had personal bias or prior knowledge of the case. During the case, the jurors had no obligation to remain silent, nor did any magistrate explain the law to them or discuss what evidence was or was not admissible. They merely listened to (or heckled) the prosecution for up to a few hours, as determined by a water clock. Then they listened to (or heckled) the defense for up to a few hours. Then they cast their votes. Job done.

So it really did come down to who was more persuasive to an amateur audience composed entirely of men. Many of these men likely knew the participants: Athens was not huge, after all. They likely had opinions on the subject long before the trial even started. Feuds between families were certainly possible, and revenge was considered a perfectly acceptable motive for bringing suit. In fact, it was often emphasized as the reason because it meant that you weren’t bringing the suit for personal financial gain. Oh no, much better to be doing it to bring down an enemy who had wronged you.

Against Neaira

This was certainly true for Neaira’s case. The speech is called Against Neaira, but she herself is incidental to the prosecution’s real motives. The fact was that she was living as a free woman with one Stephanos, citizen of Athens. Stephanos had brought another orator named Apollodorus to court in 348 BCE, claiming that one of the policies he had sponsored had been contrary to law. Apollodorus was fined a hefty sum. In about 346 BCE, Stephanos accused Apollodorus of murdering a slave woman. He was not successful in that case, there being some dispute about whether the whole claim was fabricated. But either way, Apollodorus felt seriously harassed, and his response was in kind. Somewhere between 343 and 340 BCE, he brought a case of his own, accusing Neaira and Stephanos of living in an illegal marriage. Marrying a foreigner was forbidden. And by foreigner, we mean anyone not from Athens.   

To prove his case, Apollodorus wrote a speech of over 100 sections to argue first that Neaira was a disreputable woman from Corinth, and second that she and Stephanos were married. This is the speech that survives as virtually our only source on her life. Stephanos’s defense speech does not survive. Nor does a single word of Neaira’s, whether to protest her innocence or even to admit her guilt. This was a patriarchal society, and Neaira, a woman in her fifties or sixties, would have been present in the court to sit in silence as the two men dragged every last painful detail of her difficult life into public view.

So imagine your biography as written by someone whose only goal is to discredit your closest family member. Stephanos was the real target. Neaira herself was just a handy weak point to attack. And we’ll keep that in mind as we go through her biography because there is no reason to simply accept all of Apollodorus’s assertions at face value. He had a blatant motive for slander.

Growing Up a Slave

Having said all that, we are finally, at 1200 words in, getting to our heroine. Neaira must have been born somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 BCE. Where? We don’t know. She may have been a foundling, a baby girl abandoned by parents who couldn’t afford to keep her. She may have been sold by those parents. Or she may have been kidnapped. All we know is that Nikarete of Corinth bought her while still a child. Nikarete was a former slave herself, but by then she was free and a successful business woman. Her business was running a brothel, and Corinth was a good place to do it. Corinth lies on an isthmus, a crossroads of travel in Greece, and was famous for its prostitutes. Nikarete was said to have a good eye for recognizing future beauty in a child, and Neaira was not the only girl she purchased. Once in her care, she trained them carefully for hers was no low-class establishment. If you’ve read or seen Gone with the Wind, think Belle Watlin. Or perhaps you’ve read Memoirs of a Geisha. Nikarete’s girls were trained in music, conversation, and other arts. Their relationships were often long term, though not exclusive, and they commanded a very large price.

Of course, most of that price didn’t go to Neaira. It went to her owner Nikarete. According to Apollodorus, Neaira was bringing money into the establishment before she reached puberty.

On the other side of that transaction were the men, of course. Prostitution was completely legal, accepted, and taxed, so there was no problem there. The more respectable women (meaning the wives, daughters, and sisters of respectable men) were completely unavailable for this purpose. Often not even seen by men outside their own household. This is important because Apollodorus points out that Neaira visited Athens twice in this time period, always in the company of men, and that she dined and drank with them in public. Going out to dinner might not seem like such an unusual thing to do to you, but in ancient Greece, nice women didn’t do that. Men might enjoy an entertaining woman’s company for the evening, but the woman herself received no respect.

Another sign of this disrespect is the fact that we even know Neaira’s name. When respectable women appear in the court records, they are referred to as so-and-so’s sister or the wife of so-and-so. Apollodorus hammers us repeatedly with Neaira’s name from the beginning to the end of his speech. Great for historians. We like names. But in the context, it is just another way of saying: this woman is trash, and she doesn’t deserve to be treated as more.

In Her Twenties and Past Her Prime

Nikarete could not expect Neaira or any of her girls to be profitable forever. So her standard practice was to sell the girls when they peaked, so as to maximize her profit. We don’t have a year or an age, but the guess is that she would have been in her early twenties. Two of her customers, Timanoridas and Eukrates, went in together on the purchase. Together they paid Nikarete 3000 drachmas for the privilege of taking Neaira off her hands. For Nikarete it was a profitable deal: an average slave working in Demosthenes’s sword factory cost between 300 and 600 drachmas. Neaira was extremely valuable. For Timanoridas and Eukrates, it saved money. According to Apollodorus, they had been previously required to pay the entire household expenses for Nikarete. Now they owed nothing further and shared Neaira only between the two of them, an arrangement that was not unique in Greece.

What Neaira thought about this change in circumstances, we are given not the slightest indication. She was still a slave, with no control over her own valuable self.

But of course she couldn’t keep her value indefinitely to her new owners either. It was probably only about a year or so before Timanoridas and Eukrates decided they’d had enough, possibly because one of them was about to marry a wife who might object to Neaira’s presence. Rather than sell her on the open market, these business partners approached Neaira herself with a deal. They would sell her to herself (that is, allow her to purchase her own freedom) they said, for a mere 2,000 drachmas. Just look how generous they are! They are prepared to lose 500 drachmas a piece over their original outlay. They only ask that Neaira leave Corinth because they don’t want to see her reduced to working in a low-class brothel, of the type that less expensive prostitutes frequented.

Apollodorus presents these two men as very caring concerned about Neaira’s future, to the point of being willing to take a financial loss for her. But whether it’s a financial loss depends on whether they could at this point have sold her for more than 2,000 drachmas, and it’s very questionable whether they could. The mere fact that they thought she would end up in a cheap establishment suggests that she was now considered past her prime. Yes, let me say that again in case you missed it: she is still in her twenties and past her prime. Her value was sinking.

And just where was Neaira, the slave, supposed to come up with even 2,000 drachmas? She certainly did not have so much. What she had was connections, if you want to use that word for her former customers. She sent word to them all, and many of them sent her a gift. Not a loan, mind you, a gift. One in particular, named Phrynion, came himself from Athens, bearing gifts, and acting as her representative. The 2,000 drachmas were paid and Neaira, the slave, was now Neaira, the freedwoman.

Free at Last

Phrynion brought her back with him to Athens. He did not technically own her. By law she had purchased herself, but certainly they both may have felt that she owed him something.

Phrynion was a disgusting person, even according to Apollodorus, who had no interest in generating sympathy for Neaira. He was an extravagant drunk, who mistreated her in multiple ways. Neaira soon packed up and left. She moved to Megara where she spent two years working in the only trade she knew.

But times were hard, Greece was at war, and money was tight. Athens was better off, but she could not go back there because of Phrynion. He had no legal hold over her as a master, but he could (and later did) claim that she had taken some of his property with her when she fled Athens. To go back, she would need protection. And protection presented itself in the form of Stephanos, an Athenian citizen. He came and stayed with her for a while in Megara and eventually agreed to bring her back to Athens to live in his own house. It is hard to know whose idea this was originally, but we do know this: Neaira did not have to come. She was free now. She did not have to accept Stephanos. She did not have to move back to a city where she had an enemy. So if she came to Stephanos, it can only be because she chose him.

The Children

And this is where Apollodorus throws us a curve ball. Because all of a sudden, as if by magic, there are three children with her: two boys and a girl, all coming to live with Stephanos in Athens. Where did they come from? Obviously, Neaira could have been pregnant many times over to many different fathers at this point. But it seems unlikely that Nikarete would not have had a procedure for that eventuality. It was hardly to her financial advantage for her girls to jeopardize their looks by being pregnant and their lives by giving birth. Even if contraception and abortion techniques failed, it seems unlikely that she would have kept and supported the children who could do nothing for her for many years. Exposing infants was widely practiced in ancient Greece. The same can be said for any of the men that Neaira subsequently lived with.

This question is the crux of Apollodorus’s argument because nothing Neaira and Stephanos have done up to this point is illegal. He has no grounds against them except this: according to him, Neaira and Stephanos married. It was illegal for an Athenian citizen (that’s Stephanos) to marry a foreigner (that’s Neaira). But Athens didn’t have a system whereby you went down to the courthouse and signed a license to get married. You couldn’t produce a certificate to prove you were married. The difference between living together as husband and wife and just living together was in what happened to the children. Sons of a legal marriage were presented as citizens; daughters were given in marriage to citizen husbands. So how Stephanos treated these three children is the evidence needed to prove or disprove that a marriage took place.

And Stephanos does seem to have treated these three children well. The two boys were presented to his phratry, a kinship group, probably when they were three or four years old. When they turned 18, he had their names inscribed on the population register. All very proper for Athenian citizens. The daughter, Phano, was married to citizens not once, but twice, after the first marriage didn’t work out. Dowries were paid. Again, all very proper for an Athenian daughter.

According to Apollodorus, this was part of the deal Neaira made with Stephanos in Megara: that he would raise her children as citizens if she came with him to Athens. In reality, you have to wonder how Apollodorus could possibly have known what was said in private between two people thirty years in the past. You also have to wonder why, if these three children were not proper Athenians, Stephanos was willing to break the law for them. And why no one in the phratry, or the neighborhood, had raised objections in the 30 years between Neaira’s coming to Athens and this trial. You’d think that if there had been such controversy, Apollodorus would have mentioned it and brought in witnesses. But he’s silent about that. Does it not seem more likely that these children were not Neaira’s at all? But rather Stephanos’s children by a previous Athenian wife?

Apollodorus even raises this possibility himself, declaring that if so, he was willing to withdraw from the case. As proof of his version of their parentage, he suggested torturing two slaves, whom Neaira had taken with her when she fled Phrynion 30 years before. They would know, he said, the real facts behind these children, and of course, the truth would come out from torture.

Stephanos (bless him) refused to turn over the slaves to the questioner. Apollodorus had previously suggested this, and he reports that Stephanos said no. Whether this is because he had sympathy for the two women or because he thought they would tell an inconvenient truth or because he thought they would tell an understandable lie to escape the torture, we can only speculate. Apollodorus, in fact, sounds a little desperate. It is just possible that he knew Stephanos, who would speak after him, had witnesses to explain the children’s parentage. By asserting that Stephanos did not trust what these slaves would say, Apollodorus is suggesting that Stephanos had already bought and paid for his other witnesses.

And Apollodorus has yet more to say about the scandalous doings in Stephanos’s household. According to him, Stephanos planned for Neaira to continue her prostitution in Athens, thus supporting his household. In fact, working together, they may have been able to extract more money from the customers because Stephanos (acting the part of the outraged husband) could burst in at an opportune moment and demand to be paid off. Now it is possible that all this is true. But it is also possible that this is still a smear campaign. Apollodorus has been rather free with the names of Neaira’s clients up to this point, but he does not offer a single witness or even the name of a man who paid up under these circumstances.

The name that does get mentioned is Phrynion’s. Because after Neaira’s return to Athens, he did try to claim her for himself again. Since we don’t know the exact details of her original arrangement with him, we don’t know to what extent she really was bound or in debt to him. But we do know from Apollodorus’s own speech that Stephanos fulfilled his expected role very well. He protected her and asserted her rights as a freedwoman and prepared for a court case. It never came to court because the two men decided on arbitration instead. Arbitration, then as now, was quicker, cheaper, and generally involved a compromise rather than a clear winner and a loser. In this case, the arbritrators decided that Neaira was free (3 cheers for our heroine), that she was to return to Phrynion any property that he had not specifically given her outright, and (here’s the rub) that she was to live alternately with both Stephanos and Phrynion. Which sounds awfully like the exact situation she was in when she was a slave owned by Timanoridas and Eukrates. Again, we have absolutely no hint of Neaira’s response to any of this.

Phrynion’s name now completely drops from the historical record, so we have no idea how long this horrible arrangement lasted, but it seems clear that by the time of the trial, he was no longer in the picture. Perhaps he died. At any rate, Neaira was finally able to live full time with the man she had chosen.

The remainder of Apollodorus’s complaints do not involve Neaira herself, but rather the daughter, Phano. He has a great deal to say on the subject of her first marriage to a citizen (illegal if she were Neaira’s daughter), the subsequent breakup, a later affair, a second marriage to a citizen (illegal again if she were Neaira’s daughter), and her participation in an important religious rite (both illegal and sacrilegious if she were Neaira’s daughter). He is clearly trying to drum up the self-righteous indignation of the jury. How flagrantly this trashy woman and her trashy daughter flouted the norms and conventions of Athenian society!

It is possible to drill multiple holes in Apollodorus’s argument, but the main crux of the argument is this: if Phano was Stephanos’s daughter by a previous wife, then the whole issue vanishes. And if she were Neaira’s daughter all along, we have to wonder why not one, but two, Athenian men were willing to accept her as a wife, and the religious establishment was willing to accept her in an important ritual role?

Without Stephanos’s rebuttal, we will never really know. And even more frustrating than that is that we also don’t know what the jury decided. The speech ends, and we are left hanging. We can only hope that after living this life, and sitting silently in court through this long accusation, Neaira was allowed to return to her home, her freedom, and the closest thing to a stable family she had ever known.

Selected Sources

My main source for this week is Debra Hamel’s Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece.

If you are up for reading the whole of Apollodorus’s speech, an annotated version can be found here. Note that the speech is preserved as Demosthenes’ 59th speech, but it is one of the Pseudo-Demosthenes speeches, meaning that it was in the Demosthenes’ collection, but not thought to be authored by him.

Feature Image from Getty Villa, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. (The image is not of Neaira, since we have no images of her, but of an unnamed Greek woman from approximately the same time.)