Christian morality has fixed a formula of perfection from which sensuality is excluded, and in which it is even considered to be a sin. It is at the moment when that morality invades the earth that the glory of courtesans declines and the light of the mind also palpitates. They are struck with anathema, rejected from society, become fallen beings. Their history is the history of their martyrdom. During plagues, famines and great calamities they are expelled and killed, to appease the anger of the gods. They have different legislations. In many countries they do not have the right to marry and in others they are parked in ghettos. In Rome, under Paul IV, young nobles believed themselves dishonored if they did not set fire to a house of women into which they penetrated. In Toulouse, one who had committed the crime of entering a convent was hanged. In Beaucaire, every year, they were made to run naked around a hippodrome until they were breathless. In Mantua, a prostitute who has touched an object is obliged to buy it, for she is considered to be impure, and in that same city they must wear a little bell around their neck, like lepers.
And yet, even when they have forgotten their past grandeur, even in their abasement, they remain the vestals of an imperishable flame. What has subsisted through the centuries of the spirit of the ancient courtesans has remained the fecund element of society.
I have tried to sketch in broad outlines a few courtesans’ lives, a few lives of women who, by their energy, their activity and the wide abandon they made of their bodies for their own pleasure and that of others, appear to me to have been creators of joy and beauty, to have brought more perfection to humanity than many illustrious generals or venerated pontiffs. Condemned and decried, they have been obliged to live on the margins of societies; they have skirted crime and sometimes fallen into it, for the bringing of pleasure, like that of pain, is often tainted with blood. But they have lived, they have traced the design of their life forcefully on the changing picture of things, in which good and evil are mingled, and in which amour has had the principal role. That is already a great deal.
I firmly believe that a time will come when courtesans will recover the place among women that is their due, which is the foremost. For the moment, a false conception of morality is triumphant. An insurmountable wall has been raised between all those who have sought and received the title of wife, who are sheltered by the formidable fortress of faith, and the others, those who have more desires, less money and more fantasy and have remained in the plain of life, and it has been decreed that there is virtue on one side and dishonor on the other. That has been transmitted to children, carefully and religiously, as a sacred principle; their souls have been spoiled so thoroughly that the idea in question seems to form part of them, to be an indisputable verity, which they will also transmit faithfully.
Chastity does not have that importance. It is not sublime in essence. Beneath the frock-coats of hypocritical clergymen, behind their plastrons of congealed habit, like breastplates of virtue, conventional men, the powerful and pitiless directors of opinion, proclaim it in vain. The matrons of yore might have triumphed and stood tall, aureoled by their children, they might have glorified their chastity as if it were a virtue to be chaste, but the reason and the sense of life tell us loudly that the truth is in the free gift of oneself, in the offering of the carnal splendor received from nature. To nourish and bring up her children is not the only, nor even the primary, duty of a woman. It would be better if there were no children and humanity were to perish than to live without the beauty and the sensuality that raise the spirit equally.
No, family, pleasure of the hearth, crown of virginity secretly woven by pious hands, you are perhaps an egotistical form of happiness, but you cannot be the ideal. A slow but victorious law rises above all beings and bears them toward greater intelligence and greater amour. Even if it requires countless centuries, woman will one day be the equal of man. She cannot be that as long as she is captive in the gynaeceum, the harem or the boudoir where one takes tea. She cannot be that as long as she is not granted, like a man, the absolute right to dispose of her body to whomever she pleases and as often as she pleases.
Glory to the courtesans who were the first to dare to liberate themselves, to dare to climb one step higher, to replace the task devolved to women with a higher one, to be, instead of the vegetable that nourishes, the lily of the field that has only cultivated perfume and color. Many those of today who live without esteem, those to whom no honors are rendered, have recovered the consciousness of their role. Let them immolate their pride in the temple of the beauty they create, just as the courtesans of Corinth offered their hair in holocaust to Venus in order to obtain the victory of the Greeks. But let them remain courtesans, without going backwards, for they will radiate, with the perfection of faces and the harmonious lines of bodies, the purest light of humanity.
Hermanossa
Author of the Treatise on the practical means
of orientating the sensuality of physical amour
toward the divine.
What is known about the life of Hermanossa of Corinth has an uncertain character. It seems that the surest fact is that she was raped during her fourteenth year at the foot of a pine tree on a sandy slope that inclined toward the sea, and even that is doubtful.
The poet Andronicus said on that subject:
“I raped her when she was an adolescent and a virgin because she spat in my face. I punished her for her pride. She chewed in rage a lump of resin detached from the pine that sheltered us. When I left her, having enjoyed her, she rolled to the bottom of the sandy slope and was slightly bruised by the shingle of the sea. She complained about that and I shouted to her: “Go on, little swallow, I’ve made a more durable mark on our flesh by taking you by force, for that one won’t be effaced from your memory. Bruised vanity is not like the skin of the body, it never scars.”
It is not certain, however, that the poet Andronicus told the exact truth about the rape. This is an epigram addressed by Chereas to Andronicus:
“What a singular form pride has in your soul, Andronicus. You take pride in having knocked down a little girl and taken her by force on the sea shore. She, on the contrary, claims to have given herself to you freely. You glorify your strength at the expense of your power of seduction. Are you, then, so weak in the body as take pride in what ordinarily a matter of shame?”
And there is this in a poem by Hermanossa:
“When I was a child I chewed a lump of resin in order not to cry out or ask him not to do me harm. I saw the branches to the pine tree agitating above my head and I clutched it as I had seen the flute-player Phylotis do in a similar case. When I slid in the sand it seemed to me to be softer than usual, and when I walked into the sea water I thought that Aphrodite was protecting me.”
Hermanossa must have been from a good family in Corinth, since she was locked up and beaten when she first manifested the desire to share the existence of the cynic philosopher Ammonius. Was that already by virtue of the liking for philosophy she had later? Was it because of the habit that the cynic philosophers had of making love in public? Hermanossa was to give subsequent evidence of that curious penchant. The feasts that were held in her home when she was rich and famous never ended without all the guests, stripped of their garments, coupling in front of one another by the light of lamps carefully filled with oil by the slaves.
It is most likely that it was in the company of the philosopher Ammonius that she acquired the habit from which, she claimed, she was subsequently to derive such a great source of pleasure.
Ammonius was ugly and powerfully built. He lived in a wretched house in an outlying district of Corinth. He was no longer a young man when he was loved by Hermanossa, but he was not old. He lived with other cynic philosophers and prostitutes of the lowest class.
They must, it seems, have led a joyous life. Wine and nourishment were abundant by virtue of the money that the women brought to that sort of community. Often, too, a rich citizen or a fortunate hetaera would invite them to spend the evening
in their home, in order to provide entertainment and hold forth, and would send them away laden with jugs of wine, pullets and vegetables. They criticized amour when it provoked jealousy and exclusive desire, reproved modesty, and passed their women on to one another. They also rejoiced in the pleasures that the latter could obtain between them, but always before their eyes. They mingled with all these material enjoyments and excesses of physical amour the highest speculations regarding the origins of life, the immortality of the soul and its indefinite course through successive existences
Hermanossa’s parents went to find Ammonius and to beg him to deflect their daughter from the amour that she had inspired in her. Doubtless they would have given him money. Ammonius came to their house and, which apparent honesty, described to the young woman the evils that awaited her in his company. A fragment of that dialogue has survived, reported by Aristophanes of Byzantium:
“Our way of life, Hermanossa, is different from that of other men, because philosophy is our principal attraction. We go to sit down at night on the bank of the river Hexamilia, and when the heat is extreme, those who are silent have to listen naked to those who speak, for the beauty of the body gives lightness to eloquence. What will you say, Hermanossa, when Hierocles, who always emerges unsatisfied from a brothel in the port of Lecheum and joins us at dawn, throws himself upon you and bites your belly and your breasts, perhaps without injuring you but forcefully enough to make you moan? What will you say, Hermanossa, when Philemon the Theban, who is enormous and hairy and to whom the gods have given the prodigious power of always being in a state of desire, torments you with a caress that only hunger or the need to sleep can interrupt, and who can even fall asleep without quitting you? What will you say, Hermanossa, to being like one of those lyres that all the musicians take in their hands at public festivals and cause to resonate in turn?”
Doubtless the cynic Ammonius was being hypocritically sincere, and only evoking images capable of tempting the young woman rather than deterring her. Perhaps Hermanossa’s parents were extremely severe in her regard and any other existence seemed preferable to her to the one that she was leading. Perhaps she was at that troubled moment of adolescence when physical desire renders one capable of all excesses and all bodily abandonments. What is certain is that she quit her family and went to live with the cynic philosopher Ammonius. She could not have had a more complete education as a courtesan at the beginning of her life.
After some while, Ammonius trimmed his beard and hair and became an object of scorn among his companions because of the elegance he affected. He grew thin and old.
We have, unfortunately, no details of Hermanossa’s nights on the bank of the Hexamilia, and in the little houses on the road to Cenchreae, among the cynic philosophers and their free companions. She retained a favorable memory of it, for she saw her old friends afterwards with pleasure and sometimes found an unoccupied night to spend in the arms of a cynic. But she was too beautiful to remain among them.
Ambition doubtless comes to her. She becomes celebrated in Corinth. She has composed a series of epigrams to Andronicus that everyone quotes. Now she lives with the rich sculptor Apollodorus.
He has been banished from Athens for his violence; he has been nicknamed “the madman.” It is his genius that enables him not to lose his liberty. His friend, the sculptor Silenion, who has made his portrait, has represented him with the bulging eyes and contorted mouth of a furious madman.
He sculpts the naked form of Hermanossa untiringly, but as soon as he has finished it, he hurls himself upon his statue and breaks it into a thousand pieces. It is a miracle that the model is not broken too. He drags her by the hair and whips her. Once, it is necessary for physicians to come.
Hermanossa says in a poem, with regard to that part of her life, “that there is no greater voluptuousness than fearing death at the moment when one is loved.”
An epigram by Andronicus informs us that, although Apollodorus was violent by nature, that violence could only increase during the nights he spent with Hermanossa.
“Why, then, Hermanossa, if you desire the amour of the two Athenian dancers Theon and Lysimachus, do you not go to find them secretly at Cenchreae, where they have the same room and the same bed? Why must your lover contemplate them in your arms, and what is the love of delirium, and perhaps death, that drives you to give yourself to him immediately after them?”
It was, no doubt, during one of the scenes to which Andronicus’ epigram makes allusion that Apollodorus struck a young man on the head with a stool, who remained an idiot in consequence. He was obliged to leave Corinth. He did not leave a bust or a statue of Hermanossa. He even attempted to destroy his house with a hammer.
But for that departure, Hermanossa would probably have been killed by him, and yet, that curious woman wrote on his subject:
“Only a great artist knows how to see. It is said that he was violent, and perhaps it is true. He destroyed what he had created. I could not reach an understanding with him because, when we walked by the sea shore, he always wanted to walk rapidly and I adore walking slowly.”
Those little things played a large role in Hermanossa’s life—and, in fact, they play a large role in all human amours. She broke with the physician Antiphanes because the latter only ate a single dish, always the same at every meal, claiming that one can live for two hundred years on that diet, because the variety of dishes is the cause of all maladies. When he died, still young, a short while thereafter, she displayed an extraordinary joy, and let it burst forth—which proves the extent to which an unimportant dispute had impassioned her.
She did not want a Prytanis, very rich and very influential by virtue of his position, to be brought to her because she had seen him in the Agora and, according to her, he laced his cothurnes badly.
She broke with young Lycias, whom she called her beardless goat, because, like the sculptor Apollodorus, he walked too quickly while out for a stroll, and she also broke with a young man whose name has not reached us because he had a habit of leaving a few drops of wine at the bottom of a bowl from which he had drunk.
She dismissed a faithful maidservant because she woke her up too early, and for a few days, she had a caprice for an old man devoid of attractions and riches because he was almost bald but knew how to comb the little hair that he had very well.
Hermanossa’s other liaisons are unknown to us. We know nothing more about her except the dread she had of growing fat that gripped her at the age of twenty-five, of which she was to die, and her love for the young philosopher Pausanius.
The man whom Socrates calls the magician and Sappho calls the weaver of chimeras, the man, who, according to the poetess of Lesbos is both bitter and sweet, the man who gives her dolor and amour, strikes the courtesan Hermanossa and gives her an incurable wound.
It is the moment when her orgies are celebrated in Corinth and throughout Greece. She has brought young men from Macedonia who know new fashions of sensuality. An old woman from Persia sings songs during her banquets whose magical rhythm is aphrodisiac and which cause people to fall into a kind of amorous trance. Powders have been brought to her from India that trouble the mind when one respires them, and perfumes that multiply the spasms during intercourse.
It is also the moment when she devotes herself with the greatest ardor to poetry and is most occupied with problems of philosophy.
The sudden disappearance of one of her companions in debauchery, who must have been one of her lovers, the Alexandrian adventurer Naucrates, and the connection made between that disappearance and a grave in her garden under the turpentine trees, caused her to be accused of murder, but the Prytaneis, although severe judges, did not trouble her, or, if they did trouble her, exonerated her easily.
How did she come by that amour for the young philosopher Pausanias. What we find in Hermanossa’s writings explains it to us.
The young man has spent a single night in her arms, and has remained cold, according to her. That is an offense to her beauty
and her science as a courtesan; but that offense she has immediately forgiven him. By virtue of that fatal morning when at young man has quit her roof without pleasure, when that young man draws away under the porphyry colonnades, when he goes down he marble steps, at the very instant when the insult is so recent, when the bed is so cold and so orderly, he could come back if he wanted to, he would find Hermanossa docile to caresses and even more amorous. But no, he draws away forever.
Either because he does not want to risk a further defeat for his pride, or because, in truth, the most beautiful daughter of Greece does not inspire any desire in him and he prefers to speculate about the immortality of the soul, he will never return.
Hermanossa will search all explanations in vain. To please him, she will change the color of her hair and will acquire the dye made from Scythian wood of which one makes use to redden the tresses. An ancient tradition, that Pliny will report later, said that Phaon was loved by Sappho because he had been able to find the male root of the eryngo plant, what had the magical power of inspiring passion. She offered gold lavishly to anyone who could recover traces of that eryngo plant, and doubtless went to find the old naturalist Phorcos, whom she had known with the physician Antiphanes, and he must have explained to her that the eryngo plant was only a vulgar aphrodisiac, infinitely less powerful than natural desire.
She had Pausanias offered, by turns, little girls, little boys and, in despair of the cause, money.
Priscilla of Alexandria Page 2