Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson

were empowered by law to sort out disputes peacefully, making sure that the flute-girls and other musicians did not themselves profit from the demand for their services. A maximum fee for the night was set at two drachmas. If more than one man wanted the same woman the matter was setted by drawing lots; she herself was not consulted.³⁰ This was not an idle statute and we know of prosecution through the heavy-handed mechanism of eisangelia (public impeachment) against men who paid more than the law allowed.³¹

      The other duties of the Astynomoi involved disposing of the corpses of those who died in the street and making sure the shit-collectors dumped their shit at a requisite distance from the city walls, and this seems a fair summary of the spatial, administrative and symbolic position of street-women in Athens, occupying the places where bathmen poured the effluent of public baths, where those who needed to might take a casual crap, where the city buried its dead. A street-woman was not just on the streets, she was somehow of the streets as well, a ‘public thoroughfare’ in the words of the poet Anacreon, a public convenience for bodily functions, a ‘cistern’ for collecting the effluent of surplus sexual desire.³²