Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold by Leslie Kurke;

Author:Leslie Kurke; [Kurke;, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691223322
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

And as when a man skilled in riding horses, when he yokes together four horses from many, driving them from the plain he speeds toward a great city along a highway (lit., a people-bearing road). And many men and women marvel at him, but he keeps leaping and shifting continuously from horse to horse, and they fly along.

Gentili cites this passage to parallel the crowd of admiring citizens in lines 10-12 and to justify the reading as variatio for the Homeric but he does not seem to register the precise context of Given the allusion, Anakreon's climactic use of represents a brutal and sudden demotion, as it were: in Homeric terms, Herotime has been abruptly transformed from a horse (9) or a rider (10) to a public thoroughfare.47

By my reading, gives the game away: it registers aristocratic loathing for the commonality or universal availability of resources in the public sphere. It is significant, then, that the same implication of too-great accessibility characterizes a whole string of abusive epithets for pornai attributed to Anakreon by later commentators and lexicographers. Thus, in addition to the Suda offers the terms and while Eustathios adds to the list (fr. 163 Gentili = 446 PMG). signifies the mad (and therefore indiscriminate) lust of the pornē, since "garden" or "orchard," figures the female genitalia. share the same ironic compound structure: their second elements, "giving" and "hymning," normally positive in aristocratic terms, are negated by their first elements, which signify the universal scope of the activities. She who "gives herself to everyone" is not participating in gift exchange, but in the common traffic of the marketplace; she who is "hymned by many" incurs not praise but blame.48

The proliferation of references to pornai in the corpus of Anakreon is itself intriguing. Other scholars have recently noted the diversity of Anakreon's poetic output even in its fragmentary state. Thus both Christopher Brown and Patricia Rosenmeyer have emphasized the existence of blame poetry as another facet of Anakreon's rich poetic talent, opposing it to the light, witty sympotic verse of the traditional conception.49 Yet I would suggest that behind this apparent diversity of forms—praise and blame, sympotic celebration and abuse—there is a coherent political agenda. While the sympotic fragments constitute an ideal world of aristocratic habrosunē, much of Anakreon's abuse vilifies the tenets of egalitarian ideology and the civic center that is their symbolic site. The poet is not simply lampooning contemporary individuals who have crossed his path (like Artemon and Herotime), but the nonelite "other" through these representatives. And the frequency of his abusive references to whores, I would suggest, is an index of the level of aristocratic anxiety at the emergence of the public sphere.

In a sense, the argument for the political significance of the ready availability of the pornē has already been made for a later period by David Halperin. Halperin brilliantly analyzes what we might call the somatics of Athenian democratic ideology: the bodily integrity of the male citizen (first instituted by Solon's abolition of debt-bondage) and his "democratic right" to penetrate others.

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