From its origins, the institution of marriage has been associated with various forms of concubinage, systems that permitted and to some extent defined parallel and intimate relationships between men and women other than their wives. The Bible, which provides the underpinning of much of Western culture and literature, introduces us to scores of concubines. King Solomon had three hundred in addition to his seven hundred wives, and other biblical kings and patriarchs enjoyed the prestige of scores or hundreds of concubines. A concubine was used for sexual purposes and for what the Japanese called “borrowed wombs.” If a man’s wife was barren and he needed heirs, he might impregnate a concubine, then acknowledge and raise her child as his own. Concubines had the status of secondary wives, without a wife’s security or rights. Concubines were often slaves. The law stipulated that even if a wife’s slave was designated her husband’s concubine, that concubine remained her owner’s property.
Over the centuries, changing circumstances and mores altered concubinage. By late antiquity, Roman law extended some protection to concubines, notably by allowing their children a small share of their natural father’s estate, a claim made even stronger if he died intestate or without legitimate heirs. The early-4th-century Christian emperor Constantine, who died in 337, sought to discourage concubinage by granting men the right to marry their concubines and thereby legitimize their children. But no law could eradicate concubinage when Greco-Roman culture generally accepted male infidelity in marriage. Saint Augustine, who for over a decade lived with his beloved concubine and their son, explained that men justified concubinage on the grounds that they would otherwise be driven to seduce other men’s wives or to resort to prostitutes. The concomitant of the notion that males were innately incapable of monogamy was that concubinage was an essential adjunct to marriage.
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| Hagar |
The first concubine to be named in recorded history may well be Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman who might have been black. Hagar was the bondwoman of the matriarch Sarah, the wife of the patriarch Abraham (c. 2000–1720 B.C.). We know nothing about Hagar’s circumstances, or how and when she came into Sarah’s possession. Her biblical biographer, who clearly considered her a minor character and would no doubt be astounded by the fascination she continues to provoke four millennia later, introduced her as a subtext in the ongoing tragedy of Sarah’s infertility and devoted only seven tiny biblical chapters to her.
Sarah and Abraham had many adventures, including a dangerous sojourn in Egypt, where the lovely Sarah unwittingly attracted the attention of Pharaoh, who wanted to induct her into his harem. Abraham saved the situation by claiming her as his “sister,” after which Pharaoh showered them both with gifts of sheep, oxen, donkeys, camels and slaves, both male and female, and likely black.
When Pharaoh learned that Abraham and Sarah had duped him, he ordered Abraham to take his wife and get out of Egypt. Considerately, he permitted them to keep all their livestock and slaves.
Abraham had become a man rich in everything but progeny, for Sarah was barren. This was not likely to change because she was by then seventy-six (or so the author of Genesis reports). No wonder Abraham despaired and prayed about his childlessness. Sarah blamed herself for her barrenness, which the ancient world considered such a curse that it was even grounds for divorce. But her society had a solution to infertility—a fertile concubine.
Which is where we first meet Hagar. “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children,” Sarah said to her husband; “go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”
Abraham was agreeable, and Hagar had no say in the matter. Soon, despite being eighty-six, Abraham managed to impregnate her. But Hagar’s swelling belly transformed her. To Sarah’s astonishment, her docile and companionable slave woman metamorphosed into a self-confident, even arrogant, woman who looked down at Sarah with “contempt.” And why not? Hagar might be enslaved, but her womb was good enough to provide her owner’s husband with a legitimate heir.
Sarah was confused and vexed by Hagar’s attitude. She complained bitterly to Abraham, but he merely reminded her that as Hagar’s rightful owner, she could chastise her bondwoman however she wished. We do not know what Sarah did—one prescribed remedy for insolence was to scour the offender’s mouth with a quart of salt—but she acted so harshly that Hagar decided to run away.
Fortunately, an angel of the Lord found Hagar as she wandered in the wilderness: “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai [‘Sarah’ is a variation of ‘Sarai’], where have you come from and where are you going?” Hagar explained her predicament. “Return to your mistress, and submit to her,” the angel ordered, but he softened this admonition by promising her children too numerous to count. “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael [meaning ‘God hears’], for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.”
After this encounter, Hagar returned and gave birth to Abraham’s son, who was duly named Ishmael. Quite likely she delivered him squatting between Sarah’s legs, assisted by a midwife, in the customary “bearing on one’s knees” of a child destined to become the heir of its “social” mother rather than of the mother of its flesh and blood.
Hagar remained with Abraham and Sarah for thirteen more years, suckling and caring for Ishmael. Then came a miracle. God made a complicated covenant with Abraham that ended Sarah’s infertility. At first, Sarah laughed at so preposterous a notion. She was too old. How could she have sex, much less a child? But the Lord reproached her for laughing and asked her, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”
Apparently nothing was, and Sarah conceived her son, Isaac. By then she was ninety, and Abraham one hundred. “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age,” Sarah rejoiced.
Isaac grew into a robust child and Sarah weaned him. But one day, as she watched her little boy playing with his older half brother, Ishmael, she felt intense resentment. As Abraham’s first son, Ishmael would share his father’s inheritance. “Cast out this slave woman with her son!” Sarah cried to Abraham, “for this son of a slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”
Abraham was deeply disturbed, though only on Ishmael’s account, not Hagar’s. He prayed for guidance, and God instructed him to do as Sarah demanded, for both Isaac and Ishmael would found great nations. The next morning, Abraham got up early, fetched a loaf of bread and a goatskin container of water, and called Hagar. Then this exceptionally wealthy man gave her these meager provisions and told her to take Ishmael, their adolescent son, and go away.
Bewildered, Hagar and Ishmael roamed about in the wilderness. Before long, they had eaten and drunk the last of their puny rations. In despair, Hagar led Ishmael to a bush, then walked away and sunk to the ground. “Do not let me look on the death of the child,” she wept.
But God was watching over her and again sent an angel. God will not let Ishmael die, the angel said, because he plans to build a great nation from his descendants. Hagar opened her eyes in amazement and saw that God had provided a well. She filled her goatskin and gave her thirsty son a drink.
For years Hagar and Ishmael lived out in the wasteland. They had contact with other people, and enough financial resources for Hagar to arrange Ishmael’s marriage to an Egyptian girl. Though the Hebrews had enslaved her, Hagar remembered and reclaimed her Egyptian heritage.
This is the end of Hagar’s story, though presumably not of her life. Biblical references to Ishmael tell us that God kept his promise to Hagar, because Ishmael had twelve sons, the princely founders of the Ishmaelite tribes. Ishmael himself survived until he was 137, the long-lived son of a long-lived father. (Abraham died at 175 years old, and Ishmael and Isaac together buried him in the cave of Machpelah.)
Hagar’s tenure as a concubine was short, but her plight resonates through the ages, in an extensive and growing literature. Millennia after she lived, her existence recorded in a few brief sentences, Hagar has become a symbol for the dispossessed and persecuted of the earth, a woman sexually and economically exploited, deprived of rights, cast out without succor. But unlike other women to whom these terrible things also happen, Hagar was saved from misery and doom by God himself.
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| Aspasia and Pericles |
In the mid-5th century B.C., the city-state of Athens eclipsed the rest of Greece; the democracy that prevailed there epitomized the finest of ancient Greek achievement. But Athens’s golden age did not gild Athenian women, who spent most of their lifetimes confined to their quarters. Foreign women were doubly damned, by their gender and their caste. One of them, Aspasia, an immigrant from Miletus in Asia Minor, attempted to overcome her disadvantaged status through her relationship with Athens’s leading statesman, Pericles.
Aspasia arrived in Athens after the debilitating Persian Wars had ended and the Five-Year Truce of 451 had halted hostilities between the Greek states. She came with her relatives, whom unspecified circumstances had forced out of Miletus. Despite the presence of her family members, her aristocratic birth and her good connections, she had no financial resources and was forced to seek paid employment.
Unfortunately for Aspasia, her arrival in Athens coincided with a glut of postwar immigration, which had driven Pericles to enact draconian measures to ensure the social superiority of the Athenian citizenry. He restricted citizenship to Athenians with two Athenian parents and drastically limited the rights of metics, foreigners such as Aspasia and her family. Anyone caught impersonating an Athenian citizen could be enslaved. Thanks to Pericles’ legislation, Aspasia could never marry an Athenian or enjoy even the meager rights of Athenian women.
These rights were few. Unlike their brothers, Athenian women were not potential warriors, so infant girls were often left exposed on hillsides for wild beasts to maul or devour. Those permitted to survive were indifferently educated, kept cloistered at home and taught only household skills. At the onset of sexual maturation, usually about age fourteen, their parents would marry them off to much older men who had completed their military obligations and were at last free to marry.
Married life was no liberation for Greek wives ensconced in their new homes. Athenian homes, like Greek houses generally, reflected the superior status of men. They were small, because men spent many of their days elsewhere, with other males. Most rooms opened onto a central courtyard. The dining room, or andron, was the largest and best-furnished room in the house, because men entertained there. But they excluded their wives, daughters and other female dependents from these events. They often invited hetaerae— top-drawer courtesans—or, if they were poorer, prostitutes to entertain them.
Women in ancient Athens had minimal rights and could only divorce their husbands if the latter consented. Their dowries alone provided some financial protection. In a society that praised decent, submissive and hardworking matrons, the most a woman could aspire to was a good reputation.
What, then, was the young metic to do in this macho city? Aspasia was not merely beautiful. She was also unusually intelligent, and unlike most Athenian women, she had managed to acquire an education, though she never revealed how. She began to teach rhetoric and philosophy, and soon earned such a reputation that Socrates himself claimed her as his teacher, or so Plato tells us in his Menexenus.3
Quite likely, Aspasia had initially supported herself by joining the nebulous world of the hetaerae, foreign-born women who traded sex, companionship and friendship for valuable gifts and money. Unlike prostitutes (and most wives), hetaerae were educated and cultured, elegant and sophisticated. Their wit, knowledge and ease of discourse distinguished them from other Greek women, and they conversed and debated on terms of intellectual equality with their male companions. Vase paintings depict them as slender, small breasted and ornately dressed, easily differentiated from heavier, unadorned Greek matrons.
Aspasia was about twenty-five when she met Pericles and inspired the passionate love that lasted until his death. But Pericles’ own laws of citizenship condemned her to life as his concubine and never his wife. Because he felt he could not live without her, Pericles moved Aspasia into his house. When Aspasia gave birth to baby Pericles, his illegitimacy and metic status did not trouble his father, who already had two legitimate sons.
Pericles was far from being the only admirer of Aspasia’s compelling intellectual and erotic presence. When she established a salon, Athens’s leading intellectuals, scholars and statesmen flocked there to debate politics and philosophy, and to maintain their social and political networks.
Aspasia did not confine her analyses to affairs of state. She also turned rigorous Socratic reasoning to the issue of spousal relationships, a subject that her own status must have spurred her to contemplate. Later writers Cicero and Quintilian reported a dialogue witnessed by the philosopher Xenophon, which Aspasia conducted with Xenophon’s wife. “Tell me,” Aspasia asked,
“if your neighbor’s gold jewelry was finer than yours, would you rather have hers or yours?”
“Hers.”
“So if her gown or accessories were more costly than yours, which would you prefer?”
“Hers, of course.”
“Well then, if her husband were better than yours, would you want hers or yours?”4
Xenophon’s wife reddened. Aspasia broke the embarrassed silence. To satisfy a longing for excellence in a partner, she explained, one must perforce be the best partner. Though eroticism is the dimension through which men and women express their devotion to each other, the key element in the attraction is virtue.
Fabricated or real, this argument suggests to us Aspasia’s views on relationships between men and women—that they enter them on the same terms and must be equally committed to seeking the path of virtue. In other words, Pericles’ mistress seems to have been an advocate of an egalitarianism monumentally at odds with the rigid stratification and codified inequality of her time and place.
Meanwhile, Pericles spent much of his time at home so he could be with Aspasia, but nonetheless devoted himself to the business of government and directing the restoration of the Athenian temples that were damaged or destroyed during the Persian Wars. Athenians by and large supported Pericles’ public policies, but the same could not be said for his not-so-private life. Citizens accused him of having ejected his wife from their home so he could install Aspasia in her place, ignoring the fact that he and his wife had divorced more than a decade before he ever met Aspasia. They also muttered that he should keep his concubine discreetly in the background as other men did—advice that Pericles disregarded. A groundswell of opposition to Aspasia mounted, and she, rather than Pericles, bore the brunt of it. She was slandered mercilessly in public forums and political broadsides. Comic poets outdid themselves with bawdy ripostes, likening Aspasia to Thargelia, the powerful Ionian courtesan and wife—of fourteen husbands!—who had used her immense influence to aid the enemy during the Persian Wars.
In 440 B.C., after the important city-state of Samos revolted against Athens, this campaign against Aspasia intensified. Though Pericles eventually quashed the revolt, his sneering opponents charged that his whore Aspasia had, for personal reasons stemming from her Miletian origins, convinced him to wage the ensuing Samian War. In Cheirones, the satiric writer Cratinus ridiculed both Pericles and Aspasia, whom he cursed as the Dog-Eyed Whore.
This label stuck, and more and more Athenians condemned Aspasia as a filthy and despicable harlot. Her reputation as a hetaera evoked other images, the crudely sexual ones on Greek vases and drinking cups that depict hetaerae naked, or lifting their robes to display their genitalia to potential clients. These clay-fired hetaerae engage in group sex, take a variety of positions and even obligingly bend over, bracing their hands against the floor to permit anal inter-course. Sometimes clients beat them on their bare buttocks with a shoe or other object to force them into unwelcome or painful sexual acts. Likening her to these caricatured women was the gutter level of the crusade against Aspasia, the refined intellectual, devoted mother and Pericles’ beloved companion.
The real reason for the backlash of bitterness and hatred against Aspasia was that she threatened the social fabric of Athens’s slave-based, male-run society, which expected its women to live as domestic drones or, if they were metics, forced them into even grimmer existences. Aspasia, female and foreign, should have borne the legislated burden of her dual disability. But she had escaped and somehow bamboozled their foolish old leader into disregarding both her gender and her status. Clearly, Aspasia was a danger to the established order, a revolutionary disguised as a seductress.
For a decade after the Samian debacle, Aspasia’s life continued to be domestically harmonious and intellectually enriching, but publicly nightmarish. In 431 B.C., at the onset of the Peloponnesian War, the verbal assaults intensified. The comic poet Hermippus launched a new attack, accusing her both of impious behavior and of pimping free-born Athenian women for Pericles. He succeeded in whipping up such public outrage that charges of immorality and treason were laid against Aspasia. Pericles notwithstanding, the popular will would prevail.
As a foreigner, Aspasia could not appear in court to defend herself. Instead, Pericles pleaded on her behalf. He wept as he spoke, his voice shaking with emotion, and communicated with such eloquence and conviction that the jury accepted his argument that Aspasia had been slandered, and it acquitted her of all charges.
This victory over malice and vilification bound Aspasia and Pericles even closer together. Soon after, she was publicly acknowledged as Pericles’ mate. But the loving couple was not destined to enjoy a comfortable old age together. Pericles’ military strategy of defending the Athenian empire by safeguarding its citizens and army within the city’s walls led to severe overcrowding and rampant disease. In 430 B.C., a terrifying plague killed one out of every three soldiers and one out of four civilians.
Pericles himself lost his first two sons, his sister and most of his relatives and friends. But most other Athenians also suffered terrible losses and in their frantic grief looked for someone to blame. Pericles was the obvious scapegoat, and he was ousted from office, charged and convicted of accepting bribes.
Pericles was now disgraced and dishonored, and without any heirs. Bad as this was, it provided Aspasia an unexpected benefit—her son Pericles Junior’s status had suddenly improved. Pericles, desperate for an heir, had to plead before Athenian officials that Pericles Junior, bastardized by his own xenophobic legislation, be legitimized. Athenians at last took pity on the ruined old man and granted young Pericles—but not Aspasia—citizenship. Nonetheless, her son’s success must have provided Aspasia with a good deal of satisfaction.
Pericles and Aspasia enjoyed a brief respite from persecution, during which he was rehabilitated and restored to office. But the pestilence in Athens raged on and soon carried him off as well, leaving his concubine alone and unprotected in the hostile, plague-stricken city.
Without Pericles—or should we say after Pericles?—Aspasia turned to another man, a sheep-dealer who was also a rising general. Her haste in establishing this relationship may seem to reflect badly on the sincerity of her affection for Pericles. She was probably not destitute; her son had inherited Pericles’ estate. Perhaps she felt she needed protection against a citizenry that hated her. Perhaps, too, she was attracted to Lysicles, who was dynamic, am bitious, wealthy and much closer to her age than Pericles had been. And after all, she must have concluded, given that Athenian laws stigmatized her as a foreigner and the Athenian citizens tormented her, her wisest course would be to replicate her relationship with Pericles and become the concubine of another powerful man capable of fending off her legions of enemies.
Aspasia had almost certainly become acquainted with Lysicles through Pericles. Perhaps Lysicles had been among those impressed by her intelligence and good looks. Her position as Pericles’ concubine might have appealed to him as well; after all, Pericles had defied his people in order to live with and honor this woman.
Whatever had motivated it, Aspasia’s union with Lysicles was brief. She had just borne him a son when Lysicles died in battle, and she was once again left to fend for herself, this time with an illegitimate baby.
But the Athenians could not leave her alone. When Aspasia was forty-five, Aristophanes launched a new and breathtaking attack. In his play Acharnians, he accused her of nothing less than causing the Peloponnesian War. The character Dikaeopolis details the events that triggered the war. According to the story, some young drunks sneaked into Megara and stole a whore called Simaitha. Furious, the Megarians retaliated—and stole two whores from Aspasia, whom they called a female pimp. Enraged by the theft of her whores, Aspasia hounded Pericles into launching the Peloponnesian War.
We do not know what happened to Aspasia after Lysicles’ death, though to this day her story generates scholarly debate and analysis. What is certain is that Aspasia was astute enough to assess her personal situation in middle age just as she had in her youth. She was aging and unprotected, a foreign woman in a society that feared and despised her. She had certain assets: fading good looks, a reputation for scintillating wit and formidable powers of reason, and a son who was Pericles’ legitimate heir. And she had a reputation as a whore, something that would certainly appeal to some men.
The likelihood is that Aspasia sought refuge in the protection of another man, just as she had very soon after Pericles died. A less likely scenario is that her eldest son, Pericles, assumed the role of her protector. Had that happened, we would expect some literary allusion, sardonic or otherwise, to mother and son. But Aspasia’s playwright tormentors were silent, and we may reasonably conclude that Aspasia allied herself with a man too insignificant to mention, moved away from Athens or died in obscurity.
Judging from the available traces of her teachings and beliefs, Aspasia was the champion of justice and virtuous living, and of balance in an unbalanced world. But as a perpetual alien and a woman governed by harsh Athenian laws and mores, she had to rely on her relationship with Pericles to achieve a measure of power and financial security.
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| Corinna |
One of the most enigmatic and sensational of mistresses was “Corinna,” whom the great poet Ovid celebrated and immortalized in his collection of poems, Amores, though he never divulged her real identity. Corinna and Ovid conducted their tumultuous relationship in a Rome whose decadence was the target of imperial moral-reform legislation that hedonistic citizens observed mostly in the breach.
Two decades before the rise of Christianity, the Rome of Ovid and Corinna was a city both magnificent and terrible. It was crowded with fine villas and teeming slums, mighty aqueducts and public baths. It boasted sophisticated theaters but, at the same time, reveled in circuses where citizens cheered or jeered as trained lions eviscerated bound criminals (and later Christians), and archers slaughtered herds of terrified wild elephants and panthers. Roman markets were emporiums of produce from all over the empire, crammed with foodstuffs, silks and woolens, wine and fermented fish sauce.
Up on the Palatine Hill, the urbane and autocratic genius Caesar Augustus surveyed his empire and was dismayed by what he saw. Before the end of his reign in A.D. 14, he would recast his beloved but decaying Rome into marble buildings—the Marcellus Theater, Circus Maximus and eighty temples—as durable as his Pax Romana. He would also try to reform its citizens’ jaded morals with the Leges Juliae, laws that governed marriage, sexual relations and inheritance.
Decades of anarchy, insurrection and military campaigns had corroded Roman social values. Augustus, nostalgic for the old days, was especially concerned that Roman women were no longer like their virtuous foremothers, unassuming and devoted drudges. But why would they be? By conscripting men, war also transformed women.
When their husbands were away soldiering, most wives ran their households on their own, with wealthy women even administering large estates. With the sense of entitlement and contact with the outside world that this brought, inevitably, some women took lovers.
In peacetime, Romans did not revert to the mores of yesteryear. They delayed marriage but not sex, and higher-ranked men took concubines they could repudiate when it came time to wed a suitable bride. Many marriageable but unmarried women were left without any expectation that a suitable man would ever marry them. In this state of uncertainty, some women experimented with erotic if forbidden pleasures.
Rome’s collective self-indulgence at this time has never been rivaled. The citizenry was obsessed with amusements, and flocked to parties, theaters, sports events and circuses. Wealthy Romans gorged and vomited in a kind of socially sanctioned bulimia. When respectable women had retired for the night, their husbands often caroused with courtesans or prostitutes. Even the righteous Augustus, who made a fetish out of revering Livia Drusilla, his wife, had a well-deserved reputation as a philanderer.
In Augustus’s Rome, two standards coexisted, the legal and the actual. Like Greece, Rome was a slave-owning democracy whose free men—but nobody else—had rights and power. Free and freed women were substantially better off than slaves, but no woman, no matter how rich and powerful her family, had even a fraction of the rights that her brother was raised to expect or that her father already held.
The paterfamilias was a legal regime breathtaking in its subjugation of women. A father’s legal authority—patria potestas— was rooted in his own interests, not his wife’s or his children’s, even when the latter were adults. It began when the newborn was deposited at his sandaled feet so he could exercise his right of mortal triage. If Papa picked up the mewling boy or ordered that the girl be fed, he granted life. Otherwise, the little ones were smothered, starved or left on hillsides or riverbanks to be killed by wild animals. Not surprisingly, far fewer sons than daughters suffered this fate.
Most exposed baby girls died. A few were rescued by kindly well-wishers. Others were sought out and, after miserable childhoods in domestic servitude, sold into slavery or—much more commonly—raised to be prostitutes.
Even children not condemned at birth were far from safe. At any given moment, a father could sell them into a form of bondage, causa mancipii—slavery by another name. Angering Papa was a life-risking enterprise, and many fathers willfully destroyed vexatious offspring.
Marriage brought a daughter no relief. Her husband, chosen for her, replaced her father, often when she was still a child. If she dared to commit adultery, her husband could kill her. He could also beat her, even to death, for drinking wine. Wine testing (as opposed to wine tasting) developed into investigatory kissing, the ius osculi, which males exercised if they suspected their female relatives of imbibing anything alcoholic. Such was the condition of free women, and freed and slave women were still more degraded.
A Roman concubina had even less status than a wife. She was a free or freed woman who cohabited with a man who was not her husband. Men were not supposed to have both wife and concubine, at least not simultaneously. It made sense, then, for a man to take a concubine of inferior social status. That way, he could kick her out if she bore his illegitimate children or if he decided he was ready to marry.
Widowers also preferred to take a concubine rather than remarry. There was no commitment, and no threat to the inheritance of legitimate offspring should the concubine produce a bastard. Conveniently, neither she nor her child would have any legal claim on her lover or, after his death, on his estate.
Concubinage had a few benefits. It was a legal practice, and concubines were exempt from prosecution for adultery, though not from the charge of fornication. Occasionally, a lover managed to circumvent Rome’s oppressive laws and legally adopt his concubine’s child. Even less frequently, he would marry his concubine.
But privileged Romans acted as if none of the unforgiving laws existed. Unlike Livia Drusilla, Augustus’s wife, who wore determinedly simple and unflattering garments, the new Roman woman was neither unpretentious nor absorbed by her children. In fact, the birth rate had plunged because of the lead poisoning from the otherwise admirable aqueducts, as well as the effects of primitive forms of birth control and abortion.
Privileged women from good families no longer began the day with prayers then settled down to relentless domestic tasks. Now, a privileged woman awoke taut-faced and ghostly under the dried milk-and-flour mask she had applied before bedtime. After a slave girl brought water, the woman would rinse off the paste, then soak in her bath until the masseur, or unctor, appeared with his unguents to knead her limbs into suppleness. Immaculate and fragrant with scented oils, this lady dressed and had her hair combed, pinned, ironed or coaxed into a wreath of curls or prettily trailing plaits.
Afterward came whitening face powder, reddening cheek and lip rouge, and blackening ash or kohl eyeliner. The final touch was jewelry, fine stones from the vast empire, set in silver or gold and fashioned into rings, bracelets, necklaces, brooches and anklets.
For women attracted to this new and indulgent way of life, the rigorous beauty routine was a prelude to sexual adventure. Some women even modeled themselves on the Greek hetaerae. Augustus, horrified and disgusted to learn that females were just as interested in extramarital dalliance as he was, acted decisively against them.
This was the background to Augustus’s Leges Juliae (18–17 B.C.), famous for their repression of adultery, which was transformed into a criminal act and severely punished. But adultery applied only to wives who cheated on their husbands and to men who slept with other men’s wives, not to husbands who indulged with unmarried women. Widows and unmarried free women who dared to be sexually active risked being charged with the lesser crime of fornication. These new laws were designed to force women—in particular those of the elite class—to marry or remarry, and remain virtuous, submissive and housebound.
But as so often happens when penalties are too severe—convicted adulteresses lost half their dowry and one-third of their property, adulterers half their property, and all were exiled to faraway islands where enforcement was virtually impossible—the laws were rendered almost meaningless. Augustus did have one spectacular victory: the successful prosecution of his own daughter, Julia, one of Rome’s most notorious adulteresses.
The great Roman poet Ovid, an aristocratic, wealthy and supremely talented young man obsessed with women, love and sex, fit perfectly into this permissive world. At sixteen, Ovid married the first of his three wives, a teenaged bride he never ceased to belittle. At twenty-three, in his Amores, he introduced Corinna, his willful, sensual and unfaithful mistress. Romans responded with fiery enthusiasm, and a few ardent fans scribbled his verses on public walls. Quite possibly the content and great success of the Amores helped push Augustus to enact his puritanical legislation.
To this day, scholars still speculate about the identity of the pseudonymous Corinna. The most tantalizing suggestion is that she was actually Julia, Augustus’s defiant daughter, but the evidence for this hypothesis is shaky. Whoever she was, Corinna rises up from the couplets of Ovid’s searing poetry. With imagination, sympathy and shrewdness, we can come to know her.
Facts easily extrapolated from the Amores: Corinna was slightly older than Ovid and married to a much older man (a senile dodderer, in Ovid’s unkind words), and she cheated on both of them. Before she was twenty, she became the mistress of the man with whom she had her first orgasm. Afterward, she pouted and complained if a lover did not make her writhe during intercourse.
Corinna was as vain as she was lovely, and adept at applying cosmetics. She was self-possessed, tempestuous and passionate. She liked to tease Ovid and inflame his jealousy.
Corinna was also addicted to luxurious living. She shunned men who lacked the means to help her, and expected expensive gifts. Under the guise of being a fan of horse racing, she flirted with jockeys. She took risks, and she co-opted her servants, notably her maid Nape, into her amorous intrigues. She loved her poetic young lover, and he loved her even more.
Or perhaps Ovid was really in love with love, because in the midst of begging Corinna to love him forever, he admitted that
"... when you give me yourself, what you’ll be providing
Is creative material. My art will rise to the theme
And immortalize you...
Through poems, of course.
So you and I, love, will enjoy the same world-wide publicity,
And our names will be linked, for ever, with the gods."6
Ovid was right. Their lengthy affair provided him with material galore, a veritable soap opera of misery, ecstasy, miscommunication, intrigue, danger, threats, lies and comic surprise. The Amores is a brilliant depiction of the intimate workings of an elite Roman relationship.
Visualize this bitter exchange between the lovers as they discuss an upcoming formal banquet. Ovid fantasizes about the fun they will have together, until Corinna cautions him: I won’t be alone. My husband is also coming. Ovid, clearly not expecting this, responds with sullen fury, “I hope he drops down dead before dessert!”7
Ovid then reverts to suggesting coded gestures that only they will share: pretend to be the Respectable Wife, he urges Corinna, “but nudge my foot as you’re passing by.” During the general chatter, he would send her secret messages by raising his eyebrows or by tracing his words in wine. Corinna should touch her cheek whenever she thought about the last time they made love, or pinch her earlobe to signal that she was cross with him. At other parties, he reminds her, he sneaked his hand under her garment and masturbated her to climax, all sight unseen!
Ovid’s reflections prompt a gush of jealousy: don’t drink from a wineglass your husband’s lips have touched; spurn his embraces, especially those fingers roving under your dress to squeeze or caress “those responsive nipples.”
... Above all, don’t you dare
Kiss him, not once. If you do, I’ll proclaim myself your lover,
Lay hand upon you, claim those kisses as mine...
Ovid cannot bear the thought of Corinna’s husband making love to her. Pretend you’re frigid! Make sex a dead issue, he orders her, and, in parentheses, implores the goddess Venus to grant his prayer that neither his mistress nor her husband should enjoy sex together, “and certainly not her!”
Ovid reveled in Corinna’s physical beauty, and unhesitatingly described its intimate details: her lustrous long auburn hair as fine as a spider’s web, her soft white throat, her suggestive way of dressing, reminiscent (to him) of either an Eastern queen or a courtesan of the highest rank. When he stripped off these shimmering clothes and Corinna stood before him utterly exposed, Ovid catalogued the wonders of her nakedness: smooth shoulders, seductive nipples that invited fondling, flat belly beneath magnificent breasts, sweetly curvaceous rump and long lean thighs, and then.… At the genitals, even the uninhibited Ovid stopped his recital and simply described his own surrender to his mistress’s sensual perfections.
But when the lovers quarreled, Ovid could be cruel in his mockery, employing his sharp wit and critical eye to detail Corinna’s flaws. Once she dyed her masses of hair one time too many with a harsh compound made of leeches and vinegar, and also used hot irons to curl it into ringlets. Then her hair fell out in clumps, and she wept as she looked sadly into her mirror. Until it grew back, she would have to content herself with the false glory of a wig made from the hair of conquered German maidens. Ovid reproved her: And it’s all your very own fault!
Ovid also recorded his own reactions when Corinna got pregnant and, without telling him, had an abortion that nearly killed her. I should be furious but I’m only frightened, he noted with self-absorbed righteousness. Please, never again, he finishes.
Ovid felt sorely tried when Corinna “nagged” him for gifts. Weren’t his brilliant verses the most wonderful offering any woman could desire? But when Corinna, who loved silk gowns and gold jewelry, expected more tangible tokens, Ovid found her repellent. Stop making demands, he advised her coldly. I’ll give, but only when I feel like it.
When vexed, the impetuous Ovid succumbed to rages so fierce he later admitted he would have been capable of horsewhipping his own father or even the gods. Once, he yanked Corinna’s hair and raked her face with his fingernails, then watched, appalled, as she shrank in bewildered terror from him. But his self-recriminations lasted only seconds, and he could not refrain from chiding her: “At least remove the signs of my misdemeanor / Just rearrange your hair as it was before!”8
The mechanics of conducting the relationship also preoccupied Ovid. He and Corinna were excellent strategists, but they were helpless without the cooperation of Nape, Corinna’s personal maid. Nape was the perennial go-between, carrying notes and arranging meetings, often persuading a reluctant Corinna to slip out to Ovid’s house.
Despite their mutual passion, Corinna and Ovid deceived each other with different lovers. There was an awful night when Corinna barred Ovid from her home, then made love in her bedroom while he stalked her house like a specter. When his exhausted rival staggered out the next morning, he caught Ovid in the humiliating act of watching him. Whenever Corinna and Ovid quarreled and broke up, she would sit on his lap, stroke and sweet talk him into taking her back, and she was so beautiful that Ovid always melted. Please, he pleaded in his poetry, just don’t flaunt your infidelities. You’re far too lovely to be virtuous, because beauty and virtue are incompatible. But at least hide the hickeys, smooth your hair and make your bed before you receive me.
After several years as Ovid’s mistress, Corinna ended the relationship. Why? The Amores suggests she left him for a soldier, a virile brute with illicitly obtained financial resources. Did she catch Ovid in flagrante with her own hairstylist, whom he seduced, or with another dissatisfied wife? Or was it because Ovid, despite boasting that Corinna had once driven him to reach nine climaxes in a single night, suffered from more than occasional bouts of impotence, likely caused by lead poisoning from Rome’s famous aqueducts? As he confessed in wry verse in his Amores,
"When I held her I was limp as yesterday’s lettuce
a useless burden on an idle bed.
Although I wanted to do it, and she was more than willing,
I couldn’t get my pleasure-part to work.
... A sorry sight!
I lay there like a rotten log, a dead weight.
I even thought that I might be a ghost.”9
Whatever her reasons, Corinna disappeared forever from Ovid’s life, but not from the speculation of historians, who have tried and failed to identify her. What was her experience as Ovid’s mistress? How did she feel when she read her ex-lover’s new work, Ars Amatoria—a didactic poem that offered specific advice on love affairs?
Picture the middle-aged Corinna, a still-lovely widow whose ailing old husband has recently passed away. The Ars Amatoria is the season’s literary sensation. Her friends are all exclaiming over it, and her intimates know how much it owes to the tumultuous years Corinna spent as Ovid’s mistress.
Surely she was struck by Ovid’s cynicism, the barefaced effrontery of his calculated and analytical approach to mistressdom, when he had spoken with such heartfelt conviction of loving her forever! Now, he had sunk so low as to write an actual manual, with Book One advising how to find and win a mistress’s heart, Book Two how to keep her affections and Book Three, for mistresses, how to do the same with men.
How would the jaded Corinna react? Not with outrage or even surprise, for she had always known that Ovid’s art reflected his life, and that with every kiss, every lyrical sentiment, every provocative touch and every volcanic orgasm, he was taking mental notes. And Corinna had assumed the role of mistress knowing at least the outlines of the game. As the much younger wife of a man her parents had probably pressed her to marry, she had no interest in the old Roman wifely values of fidelity and child rearing. Instead, she had chosen to dissipate the long hours of her childless days in frenetic partying and entertainment, particularly at the racecourse, where the riders were as sleek and conditioned as their steeds.
Ars Amatoria must have seemed liked déjà vu, a replay of her early years as Ovid’s mistress. Technique is everything, Ovid began, and Corinna must have nodded knowingly. First, where to look for a mistress? Theaters, racecourses, circuses, banquets, even temples have excellent possibilities. (We met at a dinner party. I was wearing my purple silk dress, and my hair was coiled atop my head. You sat nearby and would not stop staring at me.) And remember, women are lustier than men and cannot resist a really skilled and persistent suitor. (How true, at least about the lustiness. But skill and persistence pay off only so far and, as you yourself discovered with me, can become annoying.)
Win over and bribe her servant to act as go-between and spy. (Ah, Nape, do you remember those days?) Make extravagant promises, spend little money. Seduce her with eloquent words, and indulge in marathon letter writing. (Cheap as ever, are you? I’ll take solid gold and emeralds any day.) Dress neatly, keep fit and clean. Feign drunkenness and declare your undying love. (So I was right to call you a liar! But I didn’t realize you weren’t really drunk.) Flatter her mercilessly, weep supplicating tears. If she barricades her door, climb onto the roof and slip down through a skylight or a window. Then, should she hesitate, take her by force, for women adore rough treatment and are disappointed if you allow them to fight you off. (So in the end, you learned nothing. You scorned soldiers, but you assaulted me so violently I was too terrified even to tell you to leave.)
If you cannot avoid quarreling, patch it up in bed. (We spent our time doing both.) If you need to, kiss her feet. When you make love, it’s essential that she, too, reach—or dramatically fake—orgasm. (Oh, so you hate it unless both lovers reach a climax? But what about all those nights when no matter how hard I tried, you stayed as limp as yesterday’s lettuce?)
Book Three must have put into stark perspective just how cavalier and condescending Ovid’s view of women must always have been. Don’t neglect your looks, for few of you are natural beauties. (But I was, and even now I am far from unattractive.) Hair is especially important. Style it elegantly, keep gray at bay with dyes or wigs. (I have to rely on a wig—my fine hair still can’t bear the harshness of dye.) Guard against stinking armpits and pluck away leg hairs. Use cosmetics: rouge, powder, eyebrow pencil. Keep teeth white and breath pure, or else a chuckle might cost you a lover. Learn music, poetry, dancing and games. Play hard, but not too hard, to get. During the act of love, adopt a sexy position, whisper forbidden words, moan with delirious pleasure and don’t open windows—your naked body is best left in semidarkness. (But not mine, O Poet—mine was perfection itself.)
Even when their mutual passion was at its steamiest, Ovid had not worried about Corinna’s possible reactions to his poetry. He had, however, feared a much more dangerous critic: Augustus himself. In 2 B.C., after having charged his daughter, Julia, with, adultery and exiling her, and a decade later banishing Julia’s daughter Vipsania Julia as well, Augustus turned on Ovid. He accused the great poet of encouraging adultery and exiled him to a far-off port city in present-day Romania. Ovid spent the remaining ten years of his life pleading, lobbying and groveling to return, but Augustus was adamant, and Ovid died in unhappy exile.
If she was still alive, Corinna must have been shocked. She, like most of her social circle, had been equally guilty. Ovid, however, had called attention to himself by becoming the Latin world’s supreme chronicler of illicit love, the world of mistressdom. She, Corinna, had merely indulged in it.
In choosing the pleasures of child-free mistressdom, Corinna rebelled against her arranged marriage and fashioned her own kind of life. She made choices: to reject Old Rome for the New, to seek out constant pleasure, to exact precious tributes to her loveliness, to decline motherhood. By her daring and cavalier disregard for the rituals of yesteryear, Corinna had dignified and made sense of her womanhood, if only in her own eyes.
 |
| Book cover "The Saint's Mistress", 2014, by Kathryn Bashaar despicting Dolorosa |
In the historical record, Dolorosa—my imagined name for this sorrowful concubine—fares worst of all, for despite all his Confessions,11 the man who became Saint Augustine never once identified this woman who shared his life for fifteen years and bore his only son, Adeodatus.
This omission is not evidence of Augustine’s indifference. Indeed, he named Monica, his beloved mother, only once in his writings, though his best friends, Alypius and Nebridius, figure often, as do other males. In Augustine’s society, men mattered, but women, in all ways subordinate and lesser beings, did not. Nonetheless, Augustine shared the first half of his life with Monica and Dolorosa, and the depth and fervor of his attachment to them both was crucial in his development as a Christian, a teacher, a theologian and a careerist.
Of Dolorosa’s childhood and adolescence we know nothing. Her documented existence begins in A.D. 370, in Carthage, where she met the eighteen-year-old student Augustine, who loved her profoundly for far longer than the fifteen years they lived together. Alas, we can only extrapolate from Augustine’s childhood something of what Dolorosa encountered.
Augustine’s father, Patricius, was a pagan member of the civic aristocracy of Thagaste in what is now Tunisia. His was a prestigious but impecunious livelihood, so he and Monica worried constantly about how to finance the education of their son Augustine, an academic star in his village school and much brighter than Navigius, his brother, or Perpetua, his sister.
In 371, after one year at a provincial university and another spent restlessly waiting for Patricius to save up more money, Augustine arrived in Carthage to complete his education. For the young student and his fellows who converged on the great city from all over Africa, Carthage was a boiling cauldron of cosmopolitanism, licentiousness, danger and freedom. Augustine took up with a so-called demonic fraternity called Eversors—“shit-disturbers” would be an apt modern translation—who tormented newcomers and teachers by playing vicious pranks. He haunted theaters, seeking out tragedies so with his tears he could express and exorcise his personal sadness.
Augustine was tormented by lust as well, for at seventeen he was “in love with love” and driven by “a hidden hunger.” He sought out sexual adventure, later recalling how he had “raced headfirst into love, eager to be snared.”12 He was also jealous, suspicious and fearful, which led to angry outbursts and quarrels between Augustine and his companions. A few months into this libertine life, however, he met the submissive young Dolorosa.
At about the same time, Patricius died, leaving Monica alone to finance her son’s education. Augustine was by then acknowledged as the best student of rhetoric, and like other impoverished academic stars, he began to focus on a career—in his case, a lucrative position in imperial legal administration—and on honing the talents and social connections that could make it a reality.
Dolorosa fit perfectly into this scenario. Even in the Christianizing 4th century, students routinely kept concubines they later abandoned when they found suitable women to marry. Neither centuries nor Christianity had altered this institution. Concubinage was a long-term union and, for the woman, monogamous. Concubines were either slaves or social inferiors whom their lovers would not marry, an elitist perspective that the Christian Church Fathers supported. In fact, these men taught that sending a concubine (and her children) away was a moral improvement.
Concubines did, however, merit the honorific “Matron,” and though dis-empowered in their relationships, they were by no means social pariahs. Dolorosa was so devout and upright that the widowed Monica had no hesitation moving in with her and Augustine.
Later, Augustine described his years with Dolorosa: “In those years I had a woman. She was not my partner in what is called lawful marriage. I had found her in my state of wandering desire and lack of prudence.”13 Dolorosa understood and accepted her situation, and made a lifelong commitment to Augustine.
Augustine and Dolorosa had their frictions. Though both were intensely spiritual, they had crucial religious differences. Like Monica, Dolorosa was an orthodox Christian, and Augustine’s conversion to Manichaeism, a sect the Church later decreed heretical, must have deeply troubled her. Just as serious was Augustine’s perpetual struggle with the conviction that he was sinfully lustful, and that each surrender to his urges was a testimony to her overpowering sexual allure and a betrayal of his moral purity.
Postcoitally, Augustine berated himself for his insatiable lust, the “disease of the flesh” that afflicted him. His very vocal anguish must have pained and frightened Dolorosa, who believed that monogamous sexuality should be enjoyed as a God-given gift. Augustine insisted that concubinage was a mutual pact to indulge in physical lust, and so should not produce children, whereas Dolorosa disapproved of and, at least at the beginning, apparently resisted using birth control. The consequence was that when Augustine was nineteen, Dolorosa gave birth to their son, Adeodatus—“Given by God,” a popular name among Carthage’s Christians. Adeodatus was unplanned and unwanted (Augustine later said), but as soon as he was born, he became a much-beloved little boy.
For the next thirteen years, Augustine, Dolorosa and Adeodatus lived together happily. Unlike Patricius, who did not hide his extramarital love affairs, Augustine was monogamous, a considerable achievement in an age of flagrant male infidelities. He had, he said, taken up with Dolorosa in a period of raw emotion and reckless sexual appetite, yet “she was the only one, and I remained faithful to her.”
Like Monica, Dolorosa was probably an uneducated but intelligent woman who had much to contend with: Augustine’s soaring intellect; the intense male friendships he valued over his union with her; his complaints that her sensuality wrought havoc with his attempts to focus on studying philosophy; his Manichaeism; his internal turmoil as he debated his future; their shared parenting of little Adeodatus; and the news that Monica was moving in.
At the same time, much else about Dolorosa’s situation was good. Augustine excelled as a rhetoric teacher and earned them a decent living, though he complained about the unruliness of Carthaginian students. He never betrayed her with other women, and he doted on Adeodatus, a gifted and obedient child. When Monica arrived, she proved to be very friendly, sharing Dolorosa’s religious convictions and her uneasiness at Augustine’s erroneous views. Above all, Monica adored her brilliant grandson.
Nonetheless, Dolorosa’s life with Augustine and his mother was often troubled. Manichaeism preached that childlessness was the least sinful form of concubinage, and so after Adeodatus was born, Augustine insisted on birth control. And though he loved his son, Augustine was tormented by guilt that he had created Adeodatus in sin, a thought he voiced openly and repeatedly. He never referred to Dolorosa as a mother, only as his concubine. He also debated, with his friends and his mother, sometimes presumably in Dolorosa’s presence, the advisability of marriage—not to Dolorosa—as a career move.
Monica’s love was obsessive—this most pious of mothers pursued her son over land and sea so she could live with him, Augustine recalled—and also became burdensome. Though he rationalized and accepted it, he also craved independence, or at least a brief respite from his mother’s overbearing presence. In 383, more than a decade into his union with Dolorosa, Augustine took action. He fled in the night, secretly, with Dolorosa and Adeodatus, and sailed away to Rome. For Dolorosa, his accomplice, their joint getaway must have been fraught with nuances, most of them unpleasant.
Rome proved disappointing. Augustine attracted an abundance of followers, but quickly learned that Roman students, too, were no angels: they learned as much as they could from one teacher, then transferred en masse to a new one.
Frustrated and in financial difficulty, Augustine prevailed on his Roman Manichaean contacts to obtain for him the position of public orator in Milan, where he had previously traveled and heard the great Ambrose (who was later to become Saint Ambrose). Ambrose had not encouraged the young rhetorician with the awkward African accent; nonetheless, Ambrose’s impressive oratory had convinced Augustine that his own future lay in Milan. Soon, Augustine converted from Manichaeism to mainstream Christianity. Then Monica arrived from Carthage and settled down in their new home. Dolorosa undoubtedly rejoiced with Monica at Augustine’s newfound religious conviction, the bedrock of her own spirituality, but the next stage of his personal development could only have grieved her.
First came relentless discussions about how marriage to an heiress would catapult the talented but unwealthy Augustine into a splendid career. Augustine wavered, torn between the argument of his best friend, Alypius—that marriage would quash their project of forming a monastic community devoted to the pursuit of wisdom—and his own conviction that marriage was the very thing to stoke his professional success. Monica assured him that marriage would ready him for the baptism that would wash away his sins, and she flung herself into the project of finding a candidate.
Did Dolorosa voice any objections, or did she—with sinking heart—agree with Monica? Augustine later portrayed her as a woman who subjected her will to his and accepted his decisions without objection. But she must have suffered; after fifteen years and a son together, she must have mourned and regretted and wept, even in silence, at this unraveling of her life.
Augustine and Monica, meanwhile, aggressively sought a suitable wife. They found a girl, still a child, whom Augustine met and “liked well enough” to demand in marriage. Her parents agreed, and the pair was betrothed, though her age required a waiting period of almost two years. But the continued presence of Dolorosa under Augustine’s roof, in Augustine’s bed—and, had they only known it, indelibly etched in his heart—distressed his future parents-in-law. Dolorosa, suddenly, was the proverbial fly in the ointment, and she had to be plucked out. Augustine, or perhaps Monica, gave her the bad news.
Meekly, without causing a scene, Dolorosa said she understood. For the sake of Augustine’s material and spiritual well-being, she would voluntarily remove her no-longer-welcome self from the premises. What did she feel besides racking grief as she said her final farewells to her beloved Augustine and her only child? Unlike almost all other men who sent away their concubines, Augustine had decided to keep his (illegitimate) son with him. What words of comfort did Dolorosa wrench out of her bursting heart for Adeodatus as he watched his mother pack her trunks?
Dolorosa set sail again for her African homeland, alone, pledging never to give herself to another man. Her departure broke Augustine’s heart, crushed it into a bleeding organ of pain (he said), and though the sharpness of his lust drove him to take up with another concubine while waiting for marital sex with his child bride, he never recovered from the blow of losing Dolorosa. Then God spoke to him, commanding him to refrain from sexual intercourse with a concubine and to rethink his plan to marry. Augustine responded instantly and became celibate.
We can assume that the aftermath of the ruptured love affair was at least as painful for Dolorosa as for Augustine, who never really recovered. He reneged on his betrothal and devoted himself to advancing in the Church, where he was becoming a major figure. But he continued to mourn his lost sweetheart. Their relationship might well have endured for a lifetime had not Augustine’s disgust at his powerful sexuality, reinforced by his personal ambitions, driven him to renounce his lower-caste concubine.
Dolorosa’s solitary life continued, for her death was an event Augustine would have noted. Yet he wrote only about his own agony, his own regrets, his own suffering. If he ever inquired about her, sent her money or notified her when sixteen-year-old Adeodatus died, he did not mention it. She must have known, however, that in 389 Augustine returned to Africa, that two years later he was ordained as a priest, and that in 396 he became bishop of Hippo. She must have felt great satisfaction that he had been ordained in her form of Christianity, and that he had soared in the Church hierarchy.
Centuries later, Augustine’s conversion to orthodox Christianity is still unfairly credited to Ambrose instead of to the woman who had urged it on him for fifteen years. Instead of being honored for her enormous contributions to her lover’s spiritual development, Dolorosa has passed into history unnoticed and unnamed, apart from her legal and sexual status as Augustine’s concubine.
Notes
1 The most important source for this section is the Book of Genesis, chapters 16–21:21 and 25:1–18. I used the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), supplemented by the following articles that clarify, illuminate and hypothesize about the relevant section in the Book of Genesis: John Otwell, And Sarah Laughed: The Status of Women in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977); Savina J. Teubal, Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition of the Matriarchs (San Francisco/New York/Grand Rapids: Harper & Row, 1990); Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia, USA: Fortress Press, 1984); John W. Waters, “Who Was Hagar?” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. The Book of Genesis, 16:1–16, 21:8–21, narrates the dramatic story of Hagar in a very few verses that remain tremendously contentious, as scholars continue to debate their true meaning. This includes rereading of the biblical texts and of legal documents and codes then operative, and rigorous analysis, comparison and deconstruction of the texts. I have read, reflected and—with some trepidation—arrived at my own understanding of this shadowy figure who has cast such a long shadow over the centuries. (Phyllis Ocean Berman’s article “Creative Hidrash: Why Hagar Left,” Tikkun 12, [March–April 1997], 21–25, notes that she and her fellow students in Hebrew school heard “the story of the competition between Sarah and Hagar not just once but twice a year in the Torah reading cycle.” No wonder Hagar continues to fascinate and attract such concentrated and sometimes bitter attention.)
2 The main sources for the following section are http://langmuir.physics.uoguelph.ca/~aelius/hetairai.html; Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing & Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Eva Cantarella, tr. by Maureen B. Fant, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); James N. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (London: HarperCollins, 1997); Nancy Demand, Birth, Death and Motherhood in Classical Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Robert Flacelieve, Love in Ancient Greece (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1960); Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London, New York: Routledge, 1989); Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Jill Kleinman, “The Representation of Prostitutes Versus Respectable Women on Ancient Greek Vases.” Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/classes/JKp.html (1998, Aug. 6); Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1932); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975).
3 Bell, 32–38, analyses the meaning of Menexenus’s many references to Aspasia as a teacher responsible for numerous political speeches attributed to her pupils, including Pericles.
4 Madeleine Mary Henry Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Bibliographical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 44, citing Cicero and Quintilian, who both preserved this fragment.
5 The main sources for the following section are Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1992); Eva Cantarella, tr. by Maureen B. Fant, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Jane F. Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Ellen Greene, The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation (2nd ed.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Sara Mack, Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Ovid, tr. and ed. by Peter Green, The Erotic Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); Ronald Syme, History in Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); John C. Thibault, The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955).
6 Ovid, tr. and ed. by Peter Green, “The Amores: Book 1,” in The Erotic Poems, 89.
7 Ibid., 89.
8 Ibid., 97.
9 Ovid, “The Amores,” III, 7, in Diane J. Rayor and William W. Batshaw (eds.), Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995).
10 The main sources for this section are Antti Arjava, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); St. Augustine, Confessions (London: Penguin Books, 1961); Gerald Bonner, St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1963); William Mallard, Language and Love: Introducing Augustine’s Religious Thought Through the Confessions Story (University Park: Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1994); Margaret R. Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1992); Kim Power, Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1996).
11 Like Pericles and Ovid for Aspasia and Corinna, Augustine is our primary source for Dolorosa. Hence the importance of his Confessions.
12 Bonner, 54.
13 Power, 98.
By Elizabeth Abbott in "Mistresses - A History of the Other Woman", Overlook Duckworth, New York/London, 2010, excerpts chapter one. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.