The End of Sparta

dikasterion and showed the Athenians her divine chest. She won the not-guilty verdict with her mastoi that the green orator could not. Then her titthoi pointed always upward. Her backside was hard as marble, curved, wide and full. Her tiny waist went in like the yellow-wasp’s middle, and then out again. “Crescent moon,” Hyperides had called her, for the bulge of her backside.

The Athenian sculptor Praxiteles was known to visit Thespiai to call on her girls to sit for all his stone goddesses-though he rarely asked Phryne any more to model. In this great year of Epaminondas he saw the little pockets and rolls on her thighs, and the flesh that hung too much from the back of her upper arms. As she sagged- and she did so only a little, but still enough for the sculptor’s falcon eye to notice-she bore him no ill will. Instead she turned her hate of aging to men in general, and men with power in particular. Phryne fought the cruel law of her lord Eros. The belly and bald head of an old man-just like the Satyrs’ on the pots from Athens-did not mean he could not taste young flesh if his money and his vineyards grew with his years.

But for women? When the flesh spotted and its glow faded, when the hair thinned and the breasts drooped, then so did Eros, the cruel god who saw only the wrinkled skin of the raisin, never the sweetness inside. To bear a child after lovemaking-and Phryne had borne more than one-was a different sort of thing than a man’s single poke. If she would no longer be seen in stone, and tired of men, Phryne turned her head to counting coins, and what it cost and what it brought in to please the citizens of Thespiai. She grew rich from her shop of love in a house built into the corner wall, and added tall talk and Theban pipers to her business of pleasure, piling up more silver than she ever had as a poser and seller of love. For dessert she sold the Spartan agents secret plans, ideas, and agendas, and all the things the powerful blurted out as she mastered their passions.

Better than Nais, the courtesan of legend, she wanted to be. With her money, she would find a man of action to whisper to, to taunt, to flatter, to play an Aspasia to a Perikles, and through him to defeat age and the laws of the Hellenes that say women alone must be trapped in their cages of aging flesh while stupider men were not. So Phryne charged the estate owner ten silver Boiotian shields, but the philosopher or general sometimes nothing. Perhaps this bias came out of love of wisdom, but more likely she was careful to win high friends-all except Epaminondas-who could keep her exempt from both the fickle mob in the assembly and the angry wives of Thespiai.

She had come to Thespiai to stop the town from fighting the Spartans; it was said that she had a box of Agesilaos’s gold. But, again, why did she hate Epaminondas more than did any Spartan? Perhaps she had lost business to the war, when the Boiotians invested in bandages and canes and not myrrh and frankincense. She worshiped at the altar of order and oligarchy; she knew clients by wealth, land, training, birth, accent, and parentage. Give this great leveler Epaminondas a cubit and soon he would take a stade and turn Hellas into a mixed-up rabble, where Phryne would have to peddle her refined wares like the cheap harlots that lurked in the cemetery or the pottery kilns and took on all customers. Only hoi aristoi had the refinement to enjoy her houses of pleasure. In the world of Epaminondas to come, her slaves would be masters, her house frequented by smelly tanners and stained butchers who would choose always the younger flesh, never the smarter and more seasoned.

Phryne claimed that she was not near thirty seasons (in truth, it was more). She had twenty strongboxes of coin to Melon’s two. The farmer’s visits to her house had all started when one of her girls had sent a message for “the hero of Leuktra” to visit the new symposia-a world away from Helikon’s vineyards suffering under Seirios, the Dog Star’s heat. Phryne thought having the hero of Leuktra in her halls would be good business, as she reviewed the ways to praise the coming invasion of the south in a manner that might stop it.

Not happy just with the foreigners’ money, Phryne had refurbished the Thespians’ temple to Eros off the town square with a new fluted column and a hundred fresh roof-tiles. She even had paid for a new statue of Aphrodite near the south gate. Then she repainted the roaring marble lion at the city gate, added blue crystals for his eyes. “We get travelers from the islands, and from Thessaly way. They all hear of my house of Phryne, and my statues. If I live another season, I will hire more potters from Athens. They’ll paint what my girls do on clay, and we will last forever.” With her silver, Phryne stocked the back rooms with four looms and hired the widows in black to weave rugs and to sell to all her men what they could. That way the fools could go back home to their wives with gifts, and not just the scent of younger women on their cloaks. Always she sent them off with a word to stay home and forget the mad plans of Epaminondas. Phryne still had beauty for most, and she knew it trumped all the philosophers’ pretensions and the dour reserve of the generals. Phryne had reduced both to no more than street-corner beggars, eager to touch her hair, even a toe or finger-at least for a year or two more before her beauty faded altogether.

The woman’s given name was Mnesarete. The Thespians had dubbed her Phryne, “Toad,” on rumors that at Athens she had hopped on the couches from one prone lover to another with her long thighs. Despite her beauty, the foul name stuck. In any case she was tall for a woman-maybe as tall as Neto and half a head higher than some men. Melon at first liked her because alone of the ripe women in Thespiai she had no eyes on his farm-nor on him, or so he thought. “I am the scarlet grape at harvest,” this Phryne laughed to Melon, “plump and sweet. Yes, full of juice in the shade of my tendrils here in Thespiai. Why go up to thrashing the wheat stalks as Helios dries you out? I live for our god Love. Not for a man’s ox or even always for a coin or two. Better for you to come down here. I can teach you the ways of the polis. Perhaps with my teaching, within the year you will be Boiotarch or strategos. Think of it-General Melon, lord of the federation. Yes, side-by-side with our noble Epaminondas. That’s what wars are for-to winnow out the smart and brave and give them the fame to make them rich or powerful.”

In these months after Leuktra, the town’s time erotos, its reputation for lovemaking, was as powerful as it had once been for war in the long-past age of its grandfathers. “No Spartans, no Thebans to worry about anymore, just love. We can turn our noses to what matters-and what we know too little about.” Soon Phryne was a philosopher of war as well, and lectured her customers that Herakleitos and that young Platon from Athens were all wrong. There really was an end to war for all time. This was the age of the end of war, to telos polemou. The previous year had been the season of Epaminondas’s war, and this year was to be the season of Phryne’s peace.

Better men of this new age ate well, and they read and wrote on papyrus, and they made machines to keep time, and track the heavens, and lift stone, the polla ta deina of Sophokles. They were no longer like the savage warmaking Thrakians or Makedonians-bushy-haired primitive folk in hides who believed in killing for killing’s sake. Polis man, the new sophist Phryne proclaimed, well, he was simply not as he had been in the past, and so no longer need a hoplite be. Lovemaking was stronger than the urge of pride, and honor, and fear and self-interest. Phryne told anyone who listened, “It takes two phalanxes to fight. When we won’t, there won’t be war. I will rebuild the walls of Thespiai some day taller than those of Thebes, taller even than the new cities of Proxenos to the south, and then we will have no more need of spears. Why not have an eropolis here in Thespiai? At my temple, here where our men can at last enjoy their own spear work? You stiff-legged Melon, don’t you know that song of your love-poet Mimnermos-“The crippled man pokes best of all”?

He nodded at that. The tall statue of her nude-carved as Aphrodite-always stood in the courtyard, shiny with a fresh sheen of olive oil. She had paid Eurybiades to have it carted off from Athens and the studio of Praxiteles. That brought as many into her house as did her ripe girls. Melon found himself wondering who was more alive, the stone or Phryne herself. Soon she had the statue brought into a special antechamber and charged an Athenian drachma a look. Many from Athens and beyond trudged over Kithairon to gaze at the godly marble work. Yet the statue and her courtyard of pots were only a foretaste of what Phryne had prepared inside her tall halls. There were torches around a large common room. A shallow splash pool in the middle was usually full. When Melon entered, there were often naked fat men whose slaves tilled all their fields, with two heavy-set girls each, all entwined in the water. Though from the look of it, Melon scoffed to himself, the bald-heads looked more in pain than in the thrall of Eros. Did any of these shield-bellies, men or women, ever plow or prune?

Stone couches with pillows lined the room. Carved arms and legs served as arm rests. A mural ran around all four walls above the heads of the dozen or so who were drinking wine. A flock of airborne phalloi, erect with feathered wings, were painted above, like harpies attacking naked girls in flight. One had eyes wide and was spitting out from its fanged mouth at a targeted woman below with legs wide open. About half of these figures had penetrated the fleeing in every way imaginable. In two scenes, six or seven of the winged shafts had cornered a smiling yellow-headed Amazon and were hovering over her erect nipples as she