I therefore have reason to say that I live in a happy city, and at a moment of agreeable folly. Then too, the source of my contentment is that my lovers love me and I adore my profession.
The other day, in the home of Glycera,18 the poet Cratinus tried to insult us by sustaining that courtesans were similar to bath-attendants who are obliged to wash the good and the bad in the same basin, without distinction. Then I stood up and closed his mouth by reciting the verses that the great Pindar once consecrated to us, and which make our profession illustrious:
“O young women who receive all strangers and give them hospitality, it is you who burn in your hands the pure tears of incense in honor of Venus. And after you have rendered the mother of amour obliging and propitious by your secret prayers, you also procure us delightful moments, and you permit us to pick on soft beds the fruits that are the most agreeable to our pressing needs.”
II
Six days ago my lover Athenagoras abandoned me and no longer wants to cross the threshold of my house. He is rich, but it is his beauty that I regret. It has often happened that I have wanted to retain him in my bed in the morning, after the joyful endeavors of the night. By that sign, I know how much he pleases me. During our long liaison I sensed the irresistible hunger easing within me, the necessity that once drove me to leave my house every evening in search of the surprise of an unexperienced caress, kisses springing from a passionate mouth, and a sensuality more generous, more gripping or more tragic.
I have, however, always prized the sole attraction of our profession, which is the liberty to lavish ourselves splendidly upon everyone, like the sunlight. We have the privilege of being able to try the warmth of all enlacements, to offer our body to all kisses, and always to hollow out, to fathom and to scrutinize the carnal mystery. And since it is evident that, as priestesses of Venus, we owe ourselves to the multiple games of the goddess, I believe that loving a single man jealously would be, for us, a kind of default and forfeiture, tantamount to renouncing our perfection, abdicating our liberty and diminishing our attractions.
Exclusive passion is a monstrosity and the equivalent, in a courtesan, of a sacrilege. Men, in any case, are equally monotonous in their amour, and do not seem worthy of the passionate distinctions that we make between them. Priapus veils their eyes and understanding so forcefully at the moment of pleasure that they can scarcely think about us. I have observed that all of them act in amour as if they had tasted the leaves of the hippomane, which are said to communicate madness.19 At the moment of caresses, a sort of necessity spurs them and forces them to seek and solicit and rapid and blind satisfaction of their needs. They never linger in voluptuousness, and rarely perceive the profound essence of pleasure, which is subtle, all slowness, and is only revealed after a patient initiation. They only have in mind an obstinate idea of intrusion and larceny, like young mules who would like to penetrate a field. Their desire is all the more promptly exhausted the more tenacious it seems.
Women, by contrast, vary and renew themselves, always altered by perfection. Complaisant seekers of long exultations, they enable sensuality to unravel, meditating and diversifying their enjoyment, and seem to possess the source of wisdom and the source of pleasure in the same part of the body. Male amour is like an obtuse mole staggering in darkness; that of the female, by contrast, evokes the image of tender odorous corollas that, being soft and ticklish, love to be crumpled, shaken and raided by the rummaging bumble-bees that gorge themselves therein on honey and perfumes. Like the eyes of certain insects that are composed of a thousand facets, female sensibility is infinite and diverse, and only reflects, multiplies and confounds, incessantly and eternally, the charming incarnations of sensuality.
And I repeat, attachment to a single man appears to me to be a disgrace, a scourge similar to ignorance or poverty, and, in any case, an insult to the goddess who wants us to obtain joy from all the parts of our body, by all means and with all beings, trying to accord ourselves, by coupling carnally, not to one man but to humanity, in order to be able to grasp and penetrate the forms and resources of universal desire.
I therefore defend myself against any accusation of loving Athenagoras. No, I scarcely love him. The proof is that the other day, when Pannychis, armed with an evil smile, came to tell me that he had seen my lover in the company of my rival Melitta, I did not feel pierced by jealousy, and did not conceive even the shadow of a chagrin.
Pannychis was, however, telling the truth. Yesterday, in the home of Glycera, I was able to assure myself of the infidelity of Athenagoras, if not his lack of amour. Throughout the dinner I saw him full of attentions for Melitta. He gave her many caresses, albeit without ever taking his eyes off me. I even thought that I divined that, if he was dying of amour for Melitta, it was in order to annoy me and awaken my jealousy.
Sitting next to her, he had passed her a quince into which he had bitten, and then, at the end of the dinner, he placed on her head a crown of flowers that had already faded on his own bosom, but which had not touched me. In order to be disagreeable to me, Melitta also indulged in a thousand coquetries, swooning with laughter and squeezing my lover’s knees furtively.
At one moment, Athenagoras having accidentally spilled a little lecythe of wine on his tunic, she leaned over and immodestly, brazenly, brushed his breast with her lips. It was then that, filed with disgust, I got up and went to sit down far away from them, next to young Stagonium, the auletride, who has in recent days cheered up my solitude and shared my bed. That girl believes me to be afflicted by the unjust and inexplicable conduct of Athenagoras, and in order to console me, lavishes the most tender caresses upon me. She is young, without usage or experience; if I love her it is because of the slenderness of her body, for her pointed and dainty hips, and also for her breath, tentative and gentle, the breath of a child, still a trifle sour, with a savor of fruit. We enjoy ourselves together amicably, and as I am fearful, we always go to sleep enlaced.
In consequence, I am giving no thought to fathoming the resentment and the caprices of Athenagoras, who appears to me to have a twisted and deformed understanding. If I regret him slightly, it is, in sum, only for his limpid and fresh youth, for his joyful insouciance, which is contagious and which charms me.
III
By Jupiter, how impulsive and obtuse men are, and how idle and slack their intelligence seems!
I got up late this morning and abandoned myself to the cares of Herpyllis, who excels at anointing and powdering the body, and who steeps my fingernails delicately in benzoin reddened with paederota powder. Stagonium, my lovely friend, was there, and I was gazing at her with pleasure.
Suddenly, someone knocked on the door rudely. The visitor was Athenagoras. He came in, wrathful and taciturn, and sat down on the bed without wishing us good day. I waited for a moment, but as he continued to remain silent, I also made a semblance of ignoring him and, unfastening and dispersing my hair, I leaned over in order that Herpyllis could attach a cluster of pearls and slender gold chains to it.
Time passed thus, weaving the silence and fomenting a storm.
Then, when Herpyllis went out and Athenagoras recognized my firm determination not to be the first to speak, he suddenly demanded, in a broken and cavernous voice: “Who is your new lover?”
“Melitta,” I replied, laughing mischievously.
“Don’t hope to deceive me with your smile and your lies,” he said. “I’m not one of these men who, delivered until an advanced age to the hands of sophists, have no experience of matters of amour.”
“Are you not rather ashamed of offending Naïs, who is more faithful to you than Penelope was to Ulysses?” Stagonium said to him then, fearful of a quarrel, her pretty eyes already swollen by tears.
But I made my little friend shut up and, addressing myself to the young man, said to him: “Do you have need of hellebore then, Athenagoras, or is it Melitta’s amour that has rendered you stupid and brazen? For truly, it would have been necessary to blush and hesitate before
daring to come here and speak to me in that fashion. You’re forgetting the insults you thought of addressing to me by showing yourself enchained to Melitta’s lap, like Hercules to the charms of Omphale. It’s you alone who are ingrate and unfaithful.
“Certainly, you have only come to make these ridiculous reproaches to me in order to disculpate yourself and disguise your inconstancy and abandonment. You want to make the world believe that it is me who is releasing you. You’re acting wisely. Otherwise, no one would be able to understand how you could push bad taste so far as to prefer a ruin to me! For, after all, you know that people call her the Trap, and the Tomb, and that she had the beauty by which you seem so smitten in the days of Nestor. Your grandfather is still alive; ask him to give you news of Melitta. He must certainly have shared her bed, like all of Greece, when she was young. But tell me: have you ever seen her in the light, your new mistress? Have you ever looked at her back?”
And, as Athenagoras was about to reply: “I’m sure that she wouldn’t undress in front of you, even if you gave her ten minas,20 for her back is striped like that of an onager, and the veins in her legs extend like the blackened rigging of a vessel that has been at sea too long. When you’ve had the opportunity to see that treasure at close range, instead of any other caress, give her hair a flick. You’ll see then that the crown of her head is crumbling like the venerable walls of Troy, and that nothing persists in haunting her temples but a few hairs like those of a young white ewe. How can you not experience scruples, how can you not feel a frightful remorse, while indulging in familiarities, like a new Oedipus, with that woman, who might have been your mother?”
And I said other analogous things to him, for I was genuinely angry. I saw that he was nonplussed, and it was out of pity that I stopped. He did not want to appear vanquished, however, and tried to respond.
“If I frequent Melitta, who is not as old as you say, I have my reasons. But explain to me rather, why you have not informed me, as honesty demands, before belonging to another man. I would have preferred that rude frankness rather than see you making mock of me and lulling me with your perfidious words.”
“I have no desire to respond to you, nor do I care to comprehend what you want to insinuate,” I told him, “for, after all, if I took a new lover it would only be natural and ordinary, being a courtesan. But I tell you truthfully that I have not entered into relations with anyone and that you are showing yourself ingrate in sustaining the contrary. You know that I prefer you to all others. I do not demand large sums of money from you and I do not urge you to steal from your father. Have I ever refused my body to the slightest of your caprices? Let us explain ourselves to one another more clearly, then, and confess first why you are heaping me with so many stupidities. I recognize that you are still nourishing some affection for me, since you have come here expressly to insult me. That is why I advise you to speak without disguise. Is it, by chance, that someone has calumniated me in your presence, leading you to believe false accusations?”
“That viper Melitta must have launched her venom,” said Stagonium.
“No, it’s not Melitta, it’s my own eyes that accuse Naïs!” cried Athenagoras. “She cannot deny her crime, since I witnessed it myself.”
“He’s surely mad,” I said, addressing my friend.
“Only remember the festival of Adonis,” Athenagoras went on, “and you will be rapidly confounded. I had announced to you in advance that it would not be possible for me to come and join you that night. In fact, my father was keeping me locked in the house. Having been informed of our amours, he feared the expenses. He had given orders to the porter not to let me out. I was therefore getting bored in my room, never ceasing to think of you, wicked woman! It in the middle of the night, however, hearing the plaintive and voluptuous cries of courtesans going to the festival, I could no longer support your absence and, opening the window, I leapt boldly into the courtyard, at the risk of killing myself.
“From there, I ran along the exterior enclosure and then slipped outside by climbing over the wall. Running all the way here was a matter of moments for me. I found the door of the terrace open, and, as everyone in the house was asleep, I succeeded in reaching your room without making any noise. I felt myself shiver as I went past the bath where I had seen your lactescent and capricious nudity triumph so many times and I approached your bed furtively. But then...”
“Then, great Jupiter…?” I cried, very curious.
“Then, I heard the rhythmic respiration of two sleeping persons, and my blood froze. I took a few more steps, I put out my hand, and alongside your head with the wavy tresses, I touched another head with close-cropped hair, and a very young face, since it still had no beard. If I had had a sword, in my wrath, I would certainly have run the two of you through...”
Athenagoras could not continue his narration, for Stagonium and I were suddenly seized by mad laughter, which made him stop, nonplussed, open-mouthed with surprise.
“Why are you laughing? Do you believe…?”
“But it was me who was asleep beside her,” said Stagonium. “You mistook me for a man, then?”
“It’s not true—you’re lying!” cried Athenagoras.
“But yes, it was Stagonium, who kept me company all those nights. Is that the cause of your anger and abandonment then? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“You can’t deceive me so easily, Naïs! The person who was lying beside you did not have Stagonium’s abundant golden fleece of hair.”
“By Jupiter! Don’t reply to him, don’t tell him anything,” the auletride begged me then, clutching my robe.
Bur, without paying any heed to her, and without replying immediately to Athenagoras, I put my hands around my friend’s head and I pulled off the wig that she had worn since the fits of a hot fever that had caused her to lose her natural hair.
“There, Athenagoras, there’s your rival! You can beg her pardon and not demand that she be subjected to the torture of raves, the cruel punishment of adulterers. Be tranquil! I’ve kept your bed pure of all soiling.”
Thus I succeeded in softening and taming Athenagoras. Gradually, he recognized the truth of what we were saying and experienced so much joy in consequence that he started kissing Stagonium and calling her “little brother.”
Ought I to confess, however, that while still benevolent toward him, I felt myself less amorous in his regard?
He was impatient to embrace me, and because of his very ardor and haste, he disappointed me in my desires and my expectation. Furthermore, his head was scented with saffron, a perfume that always makes me nauseous Those were only small annoyances for which I did not bear him any grudge, but, on the other hand, what can one do when one is not smitten with a man and one does not sense one’s body stirring with emotion and one’s arms eager and alert at the idea of enlacing him?
I must, however, admit, to my own confusion, that on leaving my bed that morning, Athenagoras declared to me that he had never previously experienced so intensely the bitter and rapturous joys. He was right. I had lavished on him, yesterday, the most expert caresses; but he had not understood that it was because of lukewarm enthusiasm and poverty of desire. I was not impatient, as taut as a bowstring, as is usual when I find myself with him. In vain I waited for my senses to arrive at delight. Desire did not abolish consciousness within me, and the amorous furies did not come running to agitate me with their violent transports. Calm and docile, I only thought of satisfying my lover. I followed coldly the advice that old Laïs had once given me in Corinth, while exercising my body and initiating me into the profession, after having cut my hair one day, with silver scissors, near the altar of Venus.
IV
Athenagoras is leaving tomorrow for Naucrates, where his affairs will retain him for a long year.
He is leaving me four silver minas because he loves me and he does not want me to deceive him during his absence. We went to Eleusis, in accordance with the common usage, and I swore fidelity to him above t
he sacred well called Callichoron, but I do not know whether the goddess will want me to keep my oath.
Today, in order to make long adieux, we spent the day in the plain of Dionysus at the foot of Mount Pentelicus, where Athenagoras’ father possesses vast gardens. We went there on two mild white donkeys, following the current of the river Cephise and going past the column of the nymph Amaryssia.
It was a beautiful morning, entirely traversed by the vehemence of spring. The sun solicited the earth keenly, and the countryside exhaled an ardent spirit.
Scarcely had we arrived on the edge of the plain than Athenagoras, intoxicated by the flame of the renewal that was flowing in him, as in the trees and the grass, sent away the slave who was leading the donkeys, seized me in his arms and began running like a madman toward the plane trees.
An impetuous abductor, he held me violently, and procured me the delicious alarms that Hippodamia must have experienced when she was abducted by the centaurs.
I understood that he wanted to reach the broad shady ravine, propitious to amours. At first I made a semblance of struggling against him and wanting to extract myself from his grip. As I did not succeed in that, I inclined my head and began to blow softly on the nape of his neck and run my pointed and dry tongue along the hollow ticklish path that separates the shoulder-blades. Pierced by ardent desires, however, he scarcely seemed to sense my teasing, and ran, leaping hedges and brushing the iridescent softness of hyacinths and narcissi.
Finally, when he reached the most obscure part of the garden, where the plane trees inclined toward the spring and compose a moist opacity with their foliage, he bent his knee and, like a courier, he deposited me in the green grass, still shiny with morning dew. However, he did not liberate me entirely. He still kept my hands imprisoned, squeezing them gently between his own. Our gazes sought one another, met and touched, and his eyes were bathed by a troubling and tender humidity, advertising desire.
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