Thonis the Courtesan and the Problem of Dreamt Sex

William F. Hansen (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Plutarch recounts a comment by the courtesan Lamia upon a famous court-case involving an Egyptian courtesan named Thonis.  A certain Egyptian youth desired Thonis, who however demanded a large sum of money for her favors.  In the meantime the youth had a dream in which he had sexual intercourse with Thonis, and following the dream his desire for her abated.  Nevertheless, Thonis took him to court and demanded full payment.  As judge in the case, Bokchoris told the man to produce the money and move it back and forth in his hand, and instructed the courtesan to grasp the shadow of the money; for he likened an imagined event to the shadow of something real.  Lamia commented that the judgment was unjust, inasmuch as the dream had put an end to the young man’s desire for sex, whereas the shadow had not put an end to Thonis’s desire for money (Demetrios 27).  The anecdote is also found in Aelian, with somewhat different details. 

I attempt to illuminate this Greek anecdote by examining several aspects of it more closely.  First, I situate the Thonis story in its international narrative context, showing that the Greek anecdote is a form of a very widely-distributed traditional tale.  The international tale has several forms.  For example, a poor man stands outside an inn, enjoying the smell of the food inside; the innkeeper demands full payment for the meal; in court the judge instructs the poor man to drop a coin on a table, saying that the clink of a coin is equal to the smell of food.  Erotic versions of the tale are found, although the tale is predominantly non-sexual in modern oral tradition. 

Second, I look at some of the more immediate contexts of the Thonis tale in ancient storytelling.  Among these are the popularity of anecdotes about courtesans and the tendency to group traditional tales of clever judgments into cycles, attributing the judgments to a particular prominent person, such as (in this case) the Egyptian king Bokchoris.