The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone (review)

Abstract

Glazebrook overstates the rhetorical and ideological polarisation of prostituted and citizen-status women. She writes that “In oratory, female sex laborers’ associations with citizens disrupt the social fabric, in contrast to citizen kinswomen” (42); the “blame discourse lobbed against [wives and daughters] in Archaic and earlier Classical texts [as “weak links” in the household] is . . . replaced by a discourse of risk centring on the sex laborer” (61). The suggestion of a chronological or generic shift in anxiety or blame away from wives and daughters and onto “sex laborers” does not stand. The accusations made against Alke in Isaios 6, that she has damaged the oikos’s integrity by introducing illegitimate children (with implications for the integrity of genos, phratry, deme, and polis), and exercises undue influence over the oikos by manipulation, are levelled in the same or similar forms against citizen-status women in late Classical forensic speeches: Euphiletus’s wife in Lysias 1; Khrysilla in Andocides 1; arguably Eleios’s wife in the lost counter-argument to Isaios 2. Even in Isaios 6, Euktemon threatens to marry Demokhares’s sister and use her to introduce further illegitimate children. Similarly, Glazebrook’s argument about Neaira culminates in an extended quotation of §§110-111, where Apollodoros asks the jurors how their wives, daughters, and mothers will respond if they say they have acquitted Neaira. Her quotation (80) ends with the imagined fury of the sophronestatai (morally superior) “of the women,” cutting off before Apollodoros warns that acquittal will vindicate the anoētoi (silly, perhaps “susceptible,” [morally] careless). Glazebrook argues that “describing the women with the superlative sōphronestatai . . . differentiates citizen women from Neaira and her daughter”; differential vocabulary “highlights the importance of sexual behaviour to the concept of sōphrosunē and citizenship in this speech”—but Apollodoros’s phrasing allows that jurors may imagine anoētoi among their female kin. When Glazebrook continues the quotation on p. 88, her argument about the wording of the longer passage acknowledges and even relies on imagined anoētoi kin, undermining her earlier reading. Glazebrook explicitly focuses on rhetoric rather than reality: Lysias 4 and Isaios 6, she writes, “offer a rare glimpse into the possible lives of marginal women in the Athenian household and polis” (61)—but she leaves it at that. The book examines “sexual labor” as a rhetorical tool rather than a reality, but the examination is illuminating and useful.