Trying Neaira: Preface
The prosecutor was in his early fifties, boorish and unattractive, to judge by the description he had given of himself some ten years before, and with a booming voice that carried well in the court. It was early yet, an hour or two into a trial that would last the rest of the day. The 501 jurors hearing the case were not yet distracted by grumbling stomachs and the thought of collecting their wages when the verdict was in. Apollodoros was just getting started on his denunciation of the defendant, Neaira (pronounced "neh-EYE-ruh"). "A bunch of them had sex with her while she was drunk," he tells the jurors, describing the aftermath of a dinner-party given some thirty years before. "Even the slaves." And Apollodoros had the testimony of witnesses to substantiate the story. The lurid account of Neaira's alleged youthful revelry was at best only tangentially related to the prosecution's case. But in the Athenian lawcourts of the fourth century B.C., relevance, and the truth itself, very often took a back seat to a more urgent concern, rousing the jurors' hostility, by any means possible, against one's opponent.
At the time of her trial Neaira was a foreigner resident in Athens. "Foreigner" in this context means only that Neaira was not an Athenian citizen. She had emigrated to Athens from Megara, another one of the some 750 independent city-states (or poleis, the plural of polis) into which Greece was divided at the time. (The emergence of Greece as a united nation awaited the Greek War of Independence in the early nineteenth century.) Neaira had grown up in another Greek polis, Corinth, in the northeast of Greece's Peloponnese, but we cannot know whether she was herself of Greek extraction: Corinth was a flourishing center of commerce, and traders from throughout the Mediterranean regularly passed through its ports. We know, at least, that Neaira lived in Corinth from a very young age, and possibly from birth. She would therefore have spoken Greek fluently—but the Doric dialect of Greek that was prevalent in the Peloponnese, not the Attic dialect of Athens. Neaira's speech would have been perfectly understandable in her adoptive polis, but unless she had managed in adulthood to change her pronunciation, her accent would have distinguished her from native Athenians.
Neaira was born in the decade after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta and the Peloponnesian League (404 B.C.). (All the dates in the narrative are B.C. unless otherwise indicated.) By the time of the trial, sometime between 343 and 340, she too was in her fifties. She had spent much of her life working as a courtesan, her fate largely sealed when she was enslaved as a child to a Corinthian brothel-keeper. But in many ways Neaira had been successful. She had gained her freedom and eventually settled into a thirty-year relationship with a certain Stephanos, an Athenian citizen. The nature of that relationship was the central question in her trial.
Apollodoros was attempting to show in his speech that Neaira had broken the law by living with an Athenian citizen as his wife (rather than, for example, as a mistress): at the time of Neaira's trial, marriages between citizens and noncitizens in Athens were illegal, though less formal relationships between lovers were unproblematic. Conviction in the trial would result in Neaira's enslavement—Athenian courts regularly imposed what most of us would consider impossibly harsh sentences—while Stephanos would be punished with a stiff fine, the equivalent of two or three years' worth of a skilled laborer's wages. Apollodoros was not particularly interested in destroying Neaira. Her enslavement, if he managed to persuade the jurors that punishment was called for, would merely be collateral damage in the feud he was pursuing with Stephanos: the two had faced one another in court before. Humiliating Neaira in public, dredging up—or inventing—sensational details about her past, was simply a means of retaliating against Neaira's lover.
We can be excused for taking pleasure, two and a half millennia after the fact, in Apollodoros' attack on Neaira. The speech he delivered in court has been preserved and is an important source of information about Athenian law and social history. It has something to tell us about a host of different subjects—prostitution, adultery, religious practices, slavery, enfranchisement procedures, private arbitration, homicide law, and so on. Not least, it has preserved for us most of what we know of Neaira's story, a rare view of a woman's life—admittedly an unusual life—in ancient Greece.
Apollodoros' speech is one of about a hundred Athenian lawcourt speeches that have survived completely or largely intact. Between roughly 420 and 320, speechwriters in Athens, probably several score of them, were regularly composing speeches for delivery by themselves or others either in court or before the Athenian assembly of citizens. (There was another recognized type of speech as well, however, the "epideictic," display oratory written for the amusement of an author's audience or for a public occasion such as the burial of Athenian soldiers.) Speeches written by or attributed to ten of Athens' speechwriters were collected in antiquity and preserved. The canonical authors, the so-called Ten Orators, are Aeschines, Andocides, Antiphon, Demosthenes, Dinarchus, Hyperides, Isaeus, Isocrates, Lycurgus, and Lysias. (We will be hearing more about the last of these men in Chapter 1.) A number of speeches attributed to the more distinguished orator Demosthenes are believed to have been written in fact by Apollodoros, Neaira's prosecutor, who is sometimes referred to as the eleventh Attic orator (by, for example, Lionel Pearson in the title to his 1966 article, "Apollodorus, the Eleventh Attic Orator"). In particular, the speech Apollodoros delivered at Neaira's trial was very probably composed by him as well. (There is general agreement that the following six speeches in the Demosthenic corpus were composed by Apollodoros: 46 Against Stephanos II, 49 Against Timotheos, 50 Against Polykles, 52 Against Kallippos, 53 Against Nikostratos, as well as 59 Against Neaira.)
Like any of the extant Athenian lawcourt speeches, Apollodoros' Against Neaira has to be used with care. Litigants in Athenian trials regularly distorted the information they presented to juries, misrepresenting the situations under discussion or indeed lying outright in order to achieve their purposes. A prosecutor might even misrepresent the law or laws at issue in a case in order to confuse jurors and exaggerate the defendant's culpability. This degree of prevarication may seem surprising: we in modern democracies are accustomed to a legal system in which trials are overseen by professional judges who instruct jurors in the correct understanding of the laws pertinent to a trial. But there were no professional jurists in Athens. What litigants could get away with in a courtroom was defined not by rulings from the bench but by the response of the jurors themselves, from supportive murmurs to heckling to questions shouted from the floor to the final verdict. We can assume that Apollodoros, like any Athenian orator, was less than truthful in his speech when he needed to be and when he thought he would not be found out.
This book tells the story of Neaira's life and of her family's experiences, culminating in Apollodoros' prosecution of her in the late 340s, with attention given also to the feud that occasioned the trial. Apollodoros' speech, inevitably hostile to Neaira, must be the principal source for her biography, though we will need very often to question and reject the information he provides. Where what he tells us is not inherently unlikely, however, or contradicted by other sources, and when lying about the issue under discussion would not have furthered the prosecution's case, we can feel reasonably confident about accepting Apollodoros' testimony. Fleshing out Neaira's story, too, will require frequent dips into other source material.
Any citations by section number alone in this book are to be understood as referring to Apollodoros' speech against Neaira (unless some other referent is obvious). All translations from the Greek are my own.
Konstantinos Kapparis (1999) and Christopher Carey (1992) both provide translations of the complete text of Against Neaira in their commentaries. A recent translation by Victor Bers of this and nine other speeches in the Demosthenic corpus can be found in the Oratory of Classical Greece series published by the University of Texas Press. Because Against Neaira was preserved in the Demosthenic corpus, texts and translations of it will almost invariably be found in compilations of his work (as speech 59) rather than under the name of Apollodoros. Readers may also be interested in Carey's Trials from Classical Athens, a selection of sixteen Athenian lawcourt speeches by various authors, with introductions and explanatory material.
Every classicist writing in a modern language about ancient Greece must decide what transliteration scheme to adopt—whether to write Peiraieus or Piraeus, for example, Eunikos or Eunicus. I follow the majority in opting for inconsistency. I use Latinate spellings (c for k, -us for -os, etc.) for the more familiar terms and names while transliterating less well-known words directly from the Greek.
For the convenience of the reader, I summarize here the relationship among the ancient monetary units mentioned in the text:
6 obols = 1 drachma
1 mina = 100 drachmas
1 talent = 6,000 drachmas
The prosecutor was in his early fifties, boorish and unattractive, to judge by the description he had given of himself some ten years before, and with a booming voice that carried well in the court. It was early yet, an hour or two into a trial that would last the rest of the day. The 501 jurors hearing the case were not yet distracted by grumbling stomachs and the thought of collecting their wages when the verdict was in. Apollodoros was just getting started on his denunciation of the defendant, Neaira (pronounced "neh-EYE-ruh"). "A bunch of them had sex with her while she was drunk," he tells the jurors, describing the aftermath of a dinner-party given some thirty years before. "Even the slaves." And Apollodoros had the testimony of witnesses to substantiate the story. The lurid account of Neaira's alleged youthful revelry was at best only tangentially related to the prosecution's case. But in the Athenian lawcourts of the fourth century B.C., relevance, and the truth itself, very often took a back seat to a more urgent concern, rousing the jurors' hostility, by any means possible, against one's opponent.
At the time of her trial Neaira was a foreigner resident in Athens. "Foreigner" in this context means only that Neaira was not an Athenian citizen. She had emigrated to Athens from Megara, another one of the some 750 independent city-states (or poleis, the plural of polis) into which Greece was divided at the time. (The emergence of Greece as a united nation awaited the Greek War of Independence in the early nineteenth century.) Neaira had grown up in another Greek polis, Corinth, in the northeast of Greece's Peloponnese, but we cannot know whether she was herself of Greek extraction: Corinth was a flourishing center of commerce, and traders from throughout the Mediterranean regularly passed through its ports. We know, at least, that Neaira lived in Corinth from a very young age, and possibly from birth. She would therefore have spoken Greek fluently—but the Doric dialect of Greek that was prevalent in the Peloponnese, not the Attic dialect of Athens. Neaira's speech would have been perfectly understandable in her adoptive polis, but unless she had managed in adulthood to change her pronunciation, her accent would have distinguished her from native Athenians.
Neaira was born in the decade after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta and the Peloponnesian League (404 B.C.). (All the dates in the narrative are B.C. unless otherwise indicated.) By the time of the trial, sometime between 343 and 340, she too was in her fifties. She had spent much of her life working as a courtesan, her fate largely sealed when she was enslaved as a child to a Corinthian brothel-keeper. But in many ways Neaira had been successful. She had gained her freedom and eventually settled into a thirty-year relationship with a certain Stephanos, an Athenian citizen. The nature of that relationship was the central question in her trial.
Apollodoros was attempting to show in his speech that Neaira had broken the law by living with an Athenian citizen as his wife (rather than, for example, as a mistress): at the time of Neaira's trial, marriages between citizens and noncitizens in Athens were illegal, though less formal relationships between lovers were unproblematic. Conviction in the trial would result in Neaira's enslavement—Athenian courts regularly imposed what most of us would consider impossibly harsh sentences—while Stephanos would be punished with a stiff fine, the equivalent of two or three years' worth of a skilled laborer's wages. Apollodoros was not particularly interested in destroying Neaira. Her enslavement, if he managed to persuade the jurors that punishment was called for, would merely be collateral damage in the feud he was pursuing with Stephanos: the two had faced one another in court before. Humiliating Neaira in public, dredging up—or inventing—sensational details about her past, was simply a means of retaliating against Neaira's lover.
We can be excused for taking pleasure, two and a half millennia after the fact, in Apollodoros' attack on Neaira. The speech he delivered in court has been preserved and is an important source of information about Athenian law and social history. It has something to tell us about a host of different subjects—prostitution, adultery, religious practices, slavery, enfranchisement procedures, private arbitration, homicide law, and so on. Not least, it has preserved for us most of what we know of Neaira's story, a rare view of a woman's life—admittedly an unusual life—in ancient Greece.
Apollodoros' speech is one of about a hundred Athenian lawcourt speeches that have survived completely or largely intact. Between roughly 420 and 320, speechwriters in Athens, probably several score of them, were regularly composing speeches for delivery by themselves or others either in court or before the Athenian assembly of citizens. (There was another recognized type of speech as well, however, the "epideictic," display oratory written for the amusement of an author's audience or for a public occasion such as the burial of Athenian soldiers.) Speeches written by or attributed to ten of Athens' speechwriters were collected in antiquity and preserved. The canonical authors, the so-called Ten Orators, are Aeschines, Andocides, Antiphon, Demosthenes, Dinarchus, Hyperides, Isaeus, Isocrates, Lycurgus, and Lysias. (We will be hearing more about the last of these men in Chapter 1.) A number of speeches attributed to the more distinguished orator Demosthenes are believed to have been written in fact by Apollodoros, Neaira's prosecutor, who is sometimes referred to as the eleventh Attic orator (by, for example, Lionel Pearson in the title to his 1966 article, "Apollodorus, the Eleventh Attic Orator"). In particular, the speech Apollodoros delivered at Neaira's trial was very probably composed by him as well. (There is general agreement that the following six speeches in the Demosthenic corpus were composed by Apollodoros: 46 Against Stephanos II, 49 Against Timotheos, 50 Against Polykles, 52 Against Kallippos, 53 Against Nikostratos, as well as 59 Against Neaira.)
Like any of the extant Athenian lawcourt speeches, Apollodoros' Against Neaira has to be used with care. Litigants in Athenian trials regularly distorted the information they presented to juries, misrepresenting the situations under discussion or indeed lying outright in order to achieve their purposes. A prosecutor might even misrepresent the law or laws at issue in a case in order to confuse jurors and exaggerate the defendant's culpability. This degree of prevarication may seem surprising: we in modern democracies are accustomed to a legal system in which trials are overseen by professional judges who instruct jurors in the correct understanding of the laws pertinent to a trial. But there were no professional jurists in Athens. What litigants could get away with in a courtroom was defined not by rulings from the bench but by the response of the jurors themselves, from supportive murmurs to heckling to questions shouted from the floor to the final verdict. We can assume that Apollodoros, like any Athenian orator, was less than truthful in his speech when he needed to be and when he thought he would not be found out.
This book tells the story of Neaira's life and of her family's experiences, culminating in Apollodoros' prosecution of her in the late 340s, with attention given also to the feud that occasioned the trial. Apollodoros' speech, inevitably hostile to Neaira, must be the principal source for her biography, though we will need very often to question and reject the information he provides. Where what he tells us is not inherently unlikely, however, or contradicted by other sources, and when lying about the issue under discussion would not have furthered the prosecution's case, we can feel reasonably confident about accepting Apollodoros' testimony. Fleshing out Neaira's story, too, will require frequent dips into other source material.
Any citations by section number alone in this book are to be understood as referring to Apollodoros' speech against Neaira (unless some other referent is obvious). All translations from the Greek are my own.
Konstantinos Kapparis (1999) and Christopher Carey (1992) both provide translations of the complete text of Against Neaira in their commentaries. A recent translation by Victor Bers of this and nine other speeches in the Demosthenic corpus can be found in the Oratory of Classical Greece series published by the University of Texas Press. Because Against Neaira was preserved in the Demosthenic corpus, texts and translations of it will almost invariably be found in compilations of his work (as speech 59) rather than under the name of Apollodoros. Readers may also be interested in Carey's Trials from Classical Athens, a selection of sixteen Athenian lawcourt speeches by various authors, with introductions and explanatory material.
Every classicist writing in a modern language about ancient Greece must decide what transliteration scheme to adopt—whether to write Peiraieus or Piraeus, for example, Eunikos or Eunicus. I follow the majority in opting for inconsistency. I use Latinate spellings (c for k, -us for -os, etc.) for the more familiar terms and names while transliterating less well-known words directly from the Greek.
For the convenience of the reader, I summarize here the relationship among the ancient monetary units mentioned in the text:
6 obols = 1 drachma
1 mina = 100 drachmas
1 talent = 6,000 drachmas