Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan?s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece by Debra Hamel

by Unknown Author

Paperback

About the author

Books with known authors are imported from Amazon to this profile. Please do not merge this profile into Unknown.

Reviews

[bookboundb!]

I’m not rating this, because it’s an academic text and I don’t have enough expertise on the subject to say how well the author expressed their point.

This essay details what little we know of a particular Athenian legal case against Neaira, an enslaved courtesan from Corinth who bought her freedom and lived out most of her freed life in the household of an Athenian man.

There were plenty of interesting facts presented in this essay. While the focus wasn’t as much on Neaira as I expected, I learned a great deal about the political, cultural, and legal landscape of ancient Athens.

Spoilers: You find out on the last page that there’s no record of the verdict in this case. Obviously this frustrated the hell out of me…But again, this is an academic essay and, as is almost always the case with history, we’ll never have all the answers. That’s not really the point of studies like this. We can only speculate and work with what little we have.