ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed preceding chapters of this book. The book examines some of the predominant aspects of the representation of hetaeras in the Greek literary tradition, and the genres and discourses that constructed them, from the perspective of Book 13 of Athenaeu's Deipnosophistae. It looks at the cultural forces that shaped this late second-century discourse on hetaeras, particularly the widespread nostalgia for a unified Hellenic past realized through the sophistic pursuit of classical paideia. In Athenaeus, this longing is expressed through the genre of the literary quotation, which simultaneously evokes a unity of origins and its subsequent loss; at the same time, it is a derivative and inauthentic discourse that replicates rather than originates. According to the scholiast, the treatise may have been aimed at Lucian's contemporary, the lexicogapher Pollux, who, like Athenaeus, hailed from Naucratis.
