The Objective of Obscenity — Hyperides in Action
A cloudy winter’s morning in Athens. Small pillars of swirling dust ascend from ancient marble seating as the members of the Areopagus shiver in the biting cold. An hour goes by, two even…Phryne, the famous and beautiful Athenian prostitute, is losing her case…
The judging crowd thinks in unison: she must be guilty. Nobody could deny that Phryne had breached public decency by striding naked into the sea to replicate the birth of Venus, an act for which she was now being prosecuted.
As the elders begin to rise, Phryne’s advocate Hyperides does the unthinkable. Clothing torn from her body, he leaves her standing there in complete nudity for all the judges to gaze at.
Despite having committed the self-same offence in front of the very jurors themselves, Phryne struts proudly out of the courtroom with all charges dropped, stunning the thronging crowds awaiting her conviction. Why would Hyperides do such a thing? What caused the minds of the jurors to switch? What can we learn from this account?
Here begins our journey.
Granted a little poetic licence, this is largely how the trial is recounted by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 13.590). But to understand the case, we must first understand its characters…
Hyperides was one of the ‘Ten Attic Orators’, a canon of some savoury and unsavoury individuals. I’ll leave you to judge which group he falls into.
Rumours abound throughout the ancient world of his gluttony and lust. In fact, it is in the wider discussion of Hyperides’ numerous affairs with courtesans (including Phryne herself) that Athenaeus draws reference to this trial. Despite all this, Hyperides was a successful orator who could set a courtroom ablaze with his witty jibes, even aiming them at the great Demosthenes himself.
Phryne’s affections for Hyperides were most likely based on money, of which she would later have an astronomical amount. So much so that she would later offer to rebuild the walls of Thebes so long as they added the inscription: “Whereas Alexander demolished it, Phryne the courtesan restored it.”
She was the muse of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite. The renowned sculptor seems to have been smitten by her beauty, and one doesn’t have to read between the lines to detect Athenaeus’ fascination with her either, despite the half-millennium age gap.
With a basic view now of the people involved, we can begin to answer the questions posed earlier.
From his surviving oratory, it is clear that Hyperides was a man who could think quickly on his feet, and the trial of Phryne is no exception. He correctly judged that if he were to remove her clothes in front of the Areopagus, it would astound the elders, and perhaps we can imagine that this would have been his last-ditch attempt at a dramatic appeal. Whether this desperate and violent act (“περιρήξας”) was committed in order that his professional record be left untarnished by an unfavourable result, or out of the love that he might still have felt for this courtesan, or even simply due to Hyperides’ slightly wild temperament, we shall never know.
However, it certainly did the trick. To the sound of Hyperides’ characteristically bombastic ‘laments’, the judges begin to wonder at the pristine nature of this ‘‘handmaid and ministrant of Aphrodite’’, and, spooked by her beauty, decide to acquit her out of pity and superstition. At least so we are told.
Athenaeus goes on to say that as a result of this event various pieces of legislation were introduced that stopped speakers from lamenting in this way and forbade nudity in the court room. About time!
Another version of the story states that she simply approached each of the elders in turn and, through demonstrating her gentle acquaintance, secured acquittal by becoming familiar with each man in turn. Some believe that this is the series of events as they actually occurred, and perhaps I would agree.
But there is something in this extraordinary case that I am reminded of when reading other speeches. It is not just the similarities of Hyperides’ appeal to the gestures Antony makes with Caesar’s bloody robe. It is the reminder that the visual nature of the graphic, and even the obscene, when used as persuasive appeals, can arrest not only our eyes and our thoughts, but also our hearts.
Further reading:
Cooper, Craig. “Hyperides and the Trial of Phryne.” Phoenix, vol. 49, no. 4, 1995, pp. 303–318
http://mkatz.web.wesleyan.edu/Images2/cciv243.athenaeus3.html
Edwards, Michael. “The Attic Orators”
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