Athenian Prostitution and the Law

Allison Glazebrook (Brock University)

Prostitution is a well-known feature of classical Athens. Free citizens, slaves, ex-slaves, and metics, worked as prostitutes. Male and female prostitutes worked in porneia, entertained at symposia, and entered into contracts with clients. Pimps and prostitutes paid the pornikon telos. Despite the apparent ubiquity and legitimacy of prostitution, prostitutes and prostitution were surprisingly unregulated in Athens. This paper asks why and argues that laws relating to prostitution were primarily concerned to protect the integrity of the citizen body as a whole and not motivated by any sense of shame surrounding prostitution as a profession or by a need to protect the individual.

Prostitution was not restricted to particular areas of ancient Athens or otherwise regulated. For example, locations of brothels (Isae. 6.19-20; Aeschin. 1.74) are a result of economic factors rather than any zoning practices. (Tsakirgis 2005: 79; cf. McGinn 2006). Brothels appear no differently treated compared to other businesses. Aeschines comments that an ergastērion in a sunoikia or oikia can house a smithy, a doctor’s office, a laundry and later a brothel (1.124). Various laws reconstructed as relating to prostitution (Arist. Pol. 50.2; Din. 1.23), on closer examination are not specific to prostitution at all. For example, Graham (1998: 40) has recently suggested, based on the stèle du port from Thasos, that Aristotle records a law against solicitation (Pol. 50.2). But taken in context, the regulation appears simply about windows and their shutters, as originally thought. Based on the same passage of Aristotle, Davidson (1998: 82) and Halperin (1990: 110) have also argued that the astunomoi were responsible for setting and enforcing the price of a night with a prostitute. There is no specific mention, however, of prostitutes, only aulētrides and other musicians, and so the passage cannot be used as evidence for capping the fees of prostitutes or their pimps.

An examination of laws on procurement, adultery and the right of every citizen to hold office and speak in the assembly and law courts (Aeschin. 1.14, 19-20, 183-4; Lys. 1.30-3; [Dem.] 59.67, 86-7; Plu. Sol. 23) leads to the conclusion that protecting the integrity of the citizen body is the prime motivator in legislating prostitution. For example, the Athenians had laws on procurement that restricted the selling of an Athenian’s children for the purpose of prostitution (Aeschin. 1.14, 184). Solon restricted the right of a father to prostitute his daughter by only allowing daughters found unchaste to be sold for such purposes (Plu. Sol. 23.2; Glazebrook 2005; Herter 1966: 109). The importance of this law is a concern for legitimacy based on marriage in a restricted citizenry (Lape 2002-3: 120-22, Herter 1966: 108). Laws against procurement also protect the full citizen rights of future citizens and the citizen body from the influence of untrustworthy characters. A male citizen who had acted as a prostitute, whether in his youth or under compulsion, lost his civic rights (Aeschin. 1.19-20; Dem. 22.30; And. 1.100). The act of prostitution itself was not a crime, but Athenians distrusted any male who had been penetrated (Halperin 1990: 95-7; Dover 1973: 124).

Laws on prostitution in modern western societies today where prostitution is openly practiced (Amsterdam and Nevada) typically include age restrictions, the zoning of prostitution, solicitation practices, and the spread of disease. In other cases, prostitution is a criminal offence, motivated by a sense that prostitution is morally wrong and exploitive. But a sense of shame and concern for the individual appear alien to such legislation in ancient Athens, which instead suggests a concern with protecting the integrity of the citizen body and the future potential of that body for full citizens.

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