Jonathan’s Reviews > Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World > Status Update

"what is socially peripheral is symbolically central"

As an antidote to the perceived immorality of democratic states, elite writers advocated an ethics and politics of self-mastery. The ethical demand to be sovereign over oneself and one's pleasures in critical writing was less a prescription for ordinary citizens than a justification for a paternalist politics headed by either a small ruling ing class or a monarch.23