ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the Greek literary tradition, from Attic Old comedy to the Second Sophistic period, constructs the body of the courtesan around ideas of performance and display. The chapter shows how a hetaera with no hips might become eupygia. The gesture of anasyrma, the raising of the garments to reveal the buttocks, is an erotic schma that figures in impromptu competitions of kallipygia at the symposium. Courtesans also engaged in this male performance culture from the classical period onward, whether as bodies displayed in the brothel or on the street, or as performers in the theater, the symposium, or even the courts. The bodies of courtesans thus provide a convenient metaphor for literary artifice, epideictic display, and rhetorical persuasion from the classical period through the late second century CE. Socrate's visit to the salon of Theodote no doubt influenced subsequent literary narratives that depicted courtesans as the models for artistic representations of Aphrodite.
