Phryne (, before 370 – after 316 BC) was an ancient Greek hetaira (courtesan). Born Mnesarete, she was from Thespiae in Boeotia, but seems to have lived most of her life in Athens. She apparently grew up poor, but became one of the richest women in Greece.
Little is known for certain about Phryne's life. She is best known for her trial for impiety, in which she was defended by the orator Hypereides. According to legend, she was acquitted after baring her breasts to the jury, though the historicity of this episode is doubtful. She also modelled for the artists Apelles and Praxiteles: the latter's Aphrodite of Knidos was said to have been based on her.
Phryne was largely ignored during the Renaissance, but artistic interest in her began to grow from the end of the eighteenth century. Her trial was depicted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1861 painting Phryne Before the Areopagus, which influenced many subsequent depictions of her, and according to Laura McClure made her an "international cultural icon". As well as being depicted in the visual arts, since the nineteenth century she has also appeared in literature, in theatre, and on film.
Sources Scholarship about Phryne is hindered by the fragmentary nature of the surviving sources, many of which were not written until centuries after Phryne's own time. As with other women from classical Athens, this is more challenging as surviving sources were written entirely by men, and reflect male viewpoints and biases. The most substantial contemporary source about Phryne's life was Hypereides' defence speech from her trial, which took place perhaps between 350 and 340 BC. In the ancient world this was a major influence on Phryne's biographical tradition, but it is now lost, except for a few fragments. The surviving ancient sources about Phryne are mostly from the Roman Empire, based on earlier Greek literature. The most important of these is the second-century AD rhetorician and grammarian Athenaeus, from Naucratis in Roman Egypt. His ("The Scholars at Dinner") is the source of the vast majority of extant ancient writings about Phryne. Other authors of the first, second and third centuries AD, including Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diogenes Laertius, also tell anecdotes about Phryne.
Athenaeus' main source was fourth-century comic drama. By the mid-fourth century BC, Athenian comic playwrights had moved away from the mythological subjects popular in earlier periods, and more often satirised real people. From the late fifth century, hetairai were a frequent subject of comedy, and comic plays from Phryne's lifetime often refer to hetairai and their connections to well-known men. Phryne featured in several of these plays, including Timocles' Orestautokleides and Neaira, Anaxilas' Neottis, and Posidippus' The Ephesian Woman. In Neottis and Orestautokleides she is named in lists of hetairai, in Neaira Timocles' makes a joke about her early life, and Posidippus describes her trial in The Ephesian Woman. Two other plays, Antiphanes' The Birth of Aphrodite and Alexis' The Woman from Knidos, might have alluded to her association with the artists Apelles and Praxiteles.
Life Very little is known about Phryne's life for certain. Ancient sources about her largely tell disjointed anecdotes which are difficult to piece together into a full biography, and many of those stories may be invented. Helen Morales writes that separating fact from fiction in accounts of Phryne's life is impossible.
Phryne was from Thespiae in Boeotia. She was probably born in the 370s BC, and was the daughter of Epicles. Both Plutarch and Athenaeus say that her real name was Mnesarete.Plutarch, 14 ( 401A).Athenaeus, 13.60 = 13.591e, citing Aristogeiton's speech against Phryne. According to Plutarch, she was called Phryne because she had a pale complexion like a toad ( in Greek). Eleonora Cavallini suggests that this apparently unflattering name was applied ironically, contrasting the ugliness of a toad with Phryne's beauty. She may also have been nicknamed Saperdion, Clausigelos, and Sestus.
Phryne seems to have spent most of her life as a hetaira in Athens. Often translated as "courtesan", a hetaira was a kind of sex worker in classical Athens. They are often distinguished on the one hand from the , a slave-prostitute who worked in a brothel, and on the other from the , a concubine who had a long-term, exclusive relationship with one particular man. The precise distinction between these terms is debated by scholars, and ancient sources do not necessarily make strict distinctions, rather choosing one term or another based on their rhetorical purposes.
Phryne might have come to Athens with her family following the conquest of Thespiae by Thebes in 373 BC, been born in Athens to Thespian refugees following the Theban conquest, or been brought there as a girl to take part in the sex trade, as was Neaira, another fourth-century hetaira. She apparently grew up poor – comic playwrights portray her picking capers – and became one of the wealthiest women in the Greek world. According to Callistratus, after Alexander razed Thebes in 335, Phryne offered to pay to rebuild the walls on the condition that they carry an inscription acknowledging her. She was also said to have dedicated a statue of herself at Delphi, and a statue of Eros at Thespiae. Phryne probably lived beyond 316 BC, when Thebes was rebuilt; according to Plutarch, her fame meant that she could continue to charge high fees to her clients in her old age.
Hetairai had a reputation in ancient literature for their wit and learning. The trope of the witty hetaira derives from the Memoirs of Lynceus of Samos, a comic author of the late fourth century BC, which contained several anecdotes about the wit of the hetaira Gnathaina. Several anecdotes from the relate Phryne's witticisms. Many of these portray Phryne getting the better of a client – in one story, she asked a prospective client for one mina (100 drachmae – by comparison an unskilled labourer in ancient Athens might earn half a drachma per day) to sleep with her. When he complained that she had charged a different man less than half of this amount, she retorted that if he waited until she wanted sex, she would accept the lower fee.
Though ancient authors writing about Phryne were deeply concerned with her beauty, they rarely described specifics of her appearance. The only physical description of her in ancient sources is from Plutarch, who mentions her pale complexion. Other sources contrast the naturalness of her beauty with the artificiality of that of other courtesans. In one anecdote, during a dinner party game, Phryne had all the women present wipe their faces. When their makeup was removed Phryne was revealed to be the only one who is naturally beautiful rather than relying on cosmetics. Another story connected to Phryne's beauty concerns her inability to seduce the philosopher Xenocrates, emphasising his self-restraint.
Trial
The most famous event in Phryne's life was the prosecution brought against her by Euthias. Little is known of Euthias, except that he was supposedly a former lover of Phryne, and was accused of being a sycophant – a person who habitually brought prosecutions for personal gain. The prosecution speech delivered by Euthias – which, according to Athenaeus, was composed by Anaximenes of Lampsacus on his behalf – did not survive. Phryne was defended by Hypereides, a well-known and wealthy orator who had a reputation for licentiousness due to his association with hetairai. Six of the speeches attributed to him relate to hetairai, and in a surviving fragment of his defense of Phryne, he admits to being her lover. Hypereides's defence speech survives only in fragments, though it was greatly admired in antiquity. The date of the trial is uncertain. Based on Athenaeus' claim that Anaximenes wrote the speech for the prosecution, it has been suggested that it was probably between 350 and 340 BC. Alternatively, Craig Cooper argues that the trial was likely after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, while Eleanora Cavallini suggests that it was after 335 BC.
Phryne was charged with , a kind of blasphemy. An anonymous treatise on rhetoric, which summarises the case against Phryne, lists three specific accusations against her – that she held a "shameless " or ritual procession, that she introduced a new god, and that she organised unlawful or debauched meetings. The charge of introducing new gods had previously been used in the trial of Socrates in 399 BC; that of organising is also known from the trial of Ninos, possibly about 360 BC. According to Harpocration, the new god introduced by Phryne was called Isodaites; though Harpocration describes him as being "foreign", the name is Greek and other sources consider it an epithet of Dionysus, Helios, or Pluto. It is unclear what precisely was supposed to have been the issue with Phryne's and : perhaps that they were attended by both men and women, or by lower-class women.
According to Athenaeus, Euthias's case against Phryne was motivated by a personal quarrel rather than Phryne's alleged impiety. Craig Cooper suggests that the trial of Phryne was politically motivated. He observes that Aristogeiton, to whom Athenaeus attributes a speech against Phryne, was a political enemy of Hypereides and prosecuted him for illegally introducing a decree after the Battle of Chaeronea. Phryne's own provocative behaviour – for instance her offer to restore the walls of Thebes, on the condition that an inscription attributing the rebuilding to "Phryne the hetaira" be displayed – may also have partially motivated the prosecution. Konstantinos Kapparis suggests that the trial might have been seen as a response to "the uppity alien woman who did not know her place". Cavallini argues that Phryne's offer to rebuild the walls of Thebes, and her dedication of a portrait statue at Delphi which was placed next to one of king Philip II of Macedon, publicly aligned Phryne with the anti-Macedonian faction with which Hypereides was associated, perhaps motivating the case against her.
Phryne was said to have been acquitted after the jury saw her bare breasts – Quintilian says that she was saved "not by Hypereides' pleading, but by the sight of her body". Three different versions of this story survive. In Quintilian's account, along with those of Sextus Empiricus and Philodemus, Phryne makes the decision to expose her own breasts; while in Athenaeus's version Hypereides exposes Phryne as the climax of his speech, and in Plutarch's version Hypereides exposes her because he saw that his speech had failed to persuade the jury. In ancient Greece baring the breasts was a gesture intended to arouse compassion, and Phryne's supposed behaviour in the court has parallels in Greek myth and literature. Havelock compares it to Hecuba pleading with her son Hector in the Iliad, showing her breasts to remind him of her place as his mother. Ioannis Ziogas observes that it particularly recalls Clytemnestra's plea to Orestes in Aeschylus's play The Libation Bearers – which like Hecuba's appeal to Hector reminds Orestes of her position as his mother – and the story of Helen appealing to her husband Menelaus for mercy after the fall of Troy – where it is the eroticism of Helen's display which saves her. Both Ziogas and Melissa Funke argue that the story of Phryne bearing her breasts to the jury specifically referenced that of Helen; just as Helen's divine beauty protects her from punishment for her actions in the mortal world, so too does Phryne's.