Glazebrook instead explores sexual labor principally through chapter-length explorations of five forensic presentations: two speeches that have been lately much parsed Aeschines 1 and pseudo-Demosthenes 59 and three still seldom studied Lysias 3 and 4, Isaios 6 ββ augmented by occasional detailed attention to a few other orations, especially pseudo-Demosthenes 48 and Hypereides Against Athenogenes.
Information from the Athenian courts, of course, is not our only important source for knowledge of sexual labor in Attica. Glazebrook finds valuable evidence in authors such as Aristotle, Plato and Xenophon.
Glazebrook also works with a wide variety of comic material, especially the plays of Aristophanes. Although scholars generally have guessed in the absence of preserved statistical evidence that in classical antiquity men and women working as prostitutes were predominantly unfree, not all sexual laborers in this period were enslaved.
Differentiation between free and enslaved sexual labor, however, is not an absolute determinant of the conditions under which prostitutes functioned at Athens. The polis is similarly threatened by the notorious former slave Neaira, the dominant character in [Demosthenes] In Aeschines 1, an alleged sex laborer is able to generate an unseemly struggle between a distinguished citizen and an affluent public slave, culminating in a physical altercation grossly violative of the fundamental Athenian masculine virtue of self-control sophrosune.
Although the status of this prostitute ββ free or enslaved? Scholars of Athens, and academics pursuing gender and liberation studies, are alike now indebted to Allison Glazebrook for an outstanding book, well-organized, well-researched and well-written, offering a pioneering approach to the writing of social history.
