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Reviews of Books
and ordering available information and scholarship, they
provide an indispensable framework of reference. However, chapter 8, “The Logic of Growth,” then attempts to
explain why an economy that for Bresson (and some
others) reached levels not matched until the seventeenth
century in Holland (206) did not follow its trajectory
through to develop the modern world: a hoary question
to which Bresson offers micro- and macroeconomic responses couched in terms of dysfunctional patterns of demand. The belated appearance of demand as a driving
force is welcome, but this chapter needed expansion in
order to carry conviction.
Bresson regains firm ground with part II, “Market and
Trade,” which provides a similarly indispensable guide
for the institutional framework. It begins with the single
city as regulator and arbiter of trading in the town marketplace (agora) (chap. 9), the internal roles of money
and credit (chap. 10), and the civic taxation of trade
(chap. 11). The focus then broadens to review international exchange, first by unraveling the complex procedures attested at designated venues, the emporia (chap.
12, an exemplary demonstration of reconstructive scholarship), and then by showing how trade networks encouraged specialization and exemplified comparative advantage (chap. 13). Chapters 14 and 15 show how they were
both fostered and shaped (or distorted?) by cities as partners-cum-arbiters.
Bresson has been trained both as a historian and as an
economist, and it shows: structure and content alike display the value added to the antiquarian descriptive mode
by an injection of serious economic analysis. Any economic historian of ancient Greece, whether would-be or
established, must work through this volume and ponder
every page. And yet I have three reservations: they concern absences. Non-polis entities within the Greek cultural orbit—monarchies, “federal” states, and (semi-)autonomous sanctuaries—barely appear save in walk-on
roles. However, since they proved to have greater stayingpower and adaptability than the single polis (that “evolutionary dead-end,” in W. G. Runciman’s bleak but accurate phrase), they were more integral to “the logic of
[the] development of the ancient Greek economy” (96)
than Bresson allows. Also near-absent are non-Greeks.
Bresson acknowledges Phoenician priority in post-Mycenaean Aegean trade (101), but the strong emphasis
throughout on Greece and Greek practice gives a very
one-sided view of a complex and shifting relationship between a single ethnically defined region and the much
larger multiethnic milieu of Pan-Mediterranean interaction. The steady recent increase in the archaeological evidence for a widespread and very early Phoenician-Carthaginian presence reinforces the need to see that milieu
as primary in time and influence while simultaneously
recognizing that economic history is intrinsically non-ethnic.
“Demand” is the third absence. Part I prioritizes production, part II focuses on the management of supply,
and outside chapter 8 the word sporadically appears until
the final pages of the text (427–438). Chapter 1 is the key,
identifying New Institutional Economics as the only ana-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
lytical system that has adequate explanatory force. So it
has, but mainly for the supply side: while demand for survival goods such as grain may be (relatively) non-elastic
(432) and therefore amenable to institutional management, demand for commodities that carry social or symbolic meaning has also to be analyzed in terms of values
and behavior, and is much more bottom-up than the topdown systems that this book describes and celebrates.
These critiques are not intended to impugn the book’s
fundamental, correct, and painfully contemporary message, that, in firm opposition to much recent professional
orthodoxy, “trade, commerce, and the market were at the
heart of economic growth” (72). It has, however, to be
combined with a recognition that the two other readings
of Greek economic life sketched at the start of this review
also have some force and cannot be ignored. Bresson has
given us a brilliantly detailed working model of Greece as
proto-Hansa, but the task of devising a format that models the interactions among all three readings has yet to be
tackled.
JOHN DAVIES
University of Liverpool
EDWARD E. COHEN. Athenian Prostitution: The Business
of Sex. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp.
xix, 243. $74.00.
In Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex, Edward E.
Cohen attempts to deal with the very practical realia of
the business of prostitution in fifth- and fourth-century
B.C.E. Athens. This is not a simple task, for as Cohen himself notes in his introduction, the three sources of information on ancient Greek prostitution are ambiguous at
best. Dramatic comedies, mainly New Comedy and its
Roman imitators, are fiction and often far removed in
time from their subject matter. Legal oratory is more concerned with persuasion than with accuracy, and the iconographic evidence is often indecipherable in the absence
of written texts (on which, see the two preceding statements).
As such, Athenian Prostitution is a careful combination
of the existing data pertaining to prostitution in the written sources (Cohen mostly eschews the iconographic and
archaeological data) and hypotheses regarding how aspects of business and legal life in Athens would have affected the quotidian practice of prostitution, both on the
streets and in high-class mansions.
Chapters 1 and 2, “Aphrodit^e’s Workers in Democratic Athens” and “Prostitution as a Liberal Profession,”
both deal with Cohen’s longstanding thesis that any labor
other than agriculture was denigrated in (elite, androcentric) Athenian society, especially labor that was done on
behalf of another. With such a mindset, prostitution was
comparable to any other profession if one puts modern
puritan sexual hang-ups aside. Within this rubric, Cohen
argues that the long-debated difference between the elite
hetaira and the common porn^e should be understood as
the difference between one who works for herself on her
own terms (the hetaira) and one who is forced to work for
another (the porn^e). Chapter 2 continues with the heights
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Europe: Ancient and Medieval
of wealth and status to which a successful hetaira might
aspire.
Although chapter 3, “(Commercial) Sex and the City,”
begins with a look at whether female prostitutes in Athens were citizens, metics, or slaves, Cohen soon switches
focus to consider the male sex workers in the city of
Athena. Here he discusses how the accusation of prostitution affected male citizens’ political careers. It is a welcomed study, finally setting on an even playing field the
too often separated topics of male prostitution and politics versus female prostitution and sexual oppression. Cohen presents evidence from the law courts, and especially
Aiskhenes’s Against Timarkhos, while also discussing the
ongoing problem of distinguishing between payment and
gifts, and thus between clear prostitution and egalitarian
homoerotic courtship.
Chapters 4 and 5, “Prostitution Pursuant to Contract”
and “Beyond Legalization,” delve into the hypothetical.
Both treat the potential legal aspects of life as a prostitute; the former deals with the attested but no longer existing contracts that bound prostitutes and clients, and
the latter focuses on the matters of proagôgeia (pimping)
and hybris (outrage/insult). These chapters are “hypothetical” because the historical record is bereft of any
documents dealing with these matters in regard to prostitution. Instead, Cohen considers how these matters
worked in other aspects of Athenian life (whether women
could effectively engage in legal or economic contracts, to
what extent the laws against hybris could protect slaves,
etc.), and he conservatively speculates on how, given such
parameters, they might have applied to male and female
sex workers. As in the other chapters, full documentation
is given of these issues in the literary corpus, with the inevitable caveats pertaining to anachronistic works of fiction.
Chapter 6, “Mothers and Daughters in a Family Business,” shows how prostitution, like other métiers in Athens, ran in families, in this instance matrilineally, and importantly discusses how the sex trade in ancient Greece
was predominantly in the hands of women, in stark contrast to the common modern view that it was principally
females (true) being exploited by men (only partially
true: they were exploited by women also). The final chapter, “The Costs, and Rewards, of Sexual Services,” estimates how much money sex workers actually earned, and
what they might have kept for themselves. Although records are sparse at best, the range seems to go from
enslaved brothel whore earning an obol or two per sex
act, to the megalomisthoi, who were remembered as
charging the equivalent of thousands of dollars for their
company. Some acquired extraordinary wealth; for example, Phryn^e, hetaira and reputed model for Praxiteles’s
Aphrodit^e of Knidos, once offered to rebuild the walls of
the city of Thebes, including the dedicatory inscription
“Alexander the Great had destroyed the walls, but
Phryn^e the Courtesan (hetaira) rebuilt them” (178).
The primary problem with Athenian Prostitution is that
it is squarely aimed at classicists. Although Cohen is careful to document his primary sources in his extensive footnotes, they are all in ancient Greek (very occasionally
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907
Latin), with no translations. This will not help the historian of sexuality, women’s studies, or masculinity studies
or the Assyriologist, who is forced to find translations
elsewhere should the reader be so inclined. Cohen also
offers no explanations for some rather technical aspects
of Athenian politics and economics. Thus on page 118
Cohen notes how tax collectors acted, “on information
and through procedures developed in conjunction with
the Boul^e, the pol^etai, the tamias of the stratiotic fund,
and the controllers of the theoric fund, as appropriate.” It
is to be hoped that the reader does not need to know
what pol^etai and tamias are, or a stratiotic as opposed to a
theoric fund. Finally, Cohen does seem to go off on the
occasional rather involved tangent. The end of chapter 3
deals with the ideals of citizenship for a male Athenian,
notably preservation of the household and landownership, while there is an extensive tract on Athenian governmental regulation of grain prices in chapter 7. Although
these are intended to strengthen Cohen’s arguments in
the relevant chapters, perhaps greater efficiency could
have been employed.
Nevertheless, Cohen’s book is an excellent study with a
focus on the practical aspects of prostitution and a careful
weighing of the available evidence. Anyone with an interest in ancient sex work, and with enough of a background
in ancient Greece, will find this book extremely useful.
STEPHANIE LYNN BUDIN
Independent Scholar
T. LESLIE SHEAR JR. Trophies of Victory: Public Building
in Periklean Athens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiii, 475. $65.00.
The extensive building program that Plutarch (Life of
Perikles, 12–13) attributes to Perikles is the subject of Trophies of Victory: Public Building in Periklean Athens, a
vastly expanded and updated version of T. Leslie Shear
Jr.’s 1966 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, which has been
honed by a longstanding familiarity with the archaeology
of Athens, including more than twenty-five years as director of the excavations in the Athenian agora. Plutarch explicitly attributes to Perikles the commissioning of the
Parthenon and the Propylaia (gateway) on the acropolis,
the Odeion on the southern slope of the acropolis, the
Telesterion (initiation hall) at Eleusis, and the third Long
Wall connecting Athens with the Peiraieus (Life of Perikles, 13). Analyzing both the archaeology of the monuments and the related inscriptions (usefully collated in an
epigraphical appendix), Shear devotes separate chapters
(chaps. 4, 6, 7, and 9) to the first four of these, but he
adds to the list the Hephaisteion in the agora (chap. 5),
the temples of Poseidon and Athena at Sounion, the
Athena temple at Pallene (physically relocated to the agora under Augustus), and the temple of Nemesis at
Rhamnous (chap. 8), as well as the temples of Artemis
Agrotera on the Ilissos River and Athena Nike on the
acropolis (chap. 9). The inclusion of these additional
monuments is justified on the grounds of similarities of
design and detail, which might suggest “teams of skilled
craftsmen moving from one building to the next” (11).
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