Phryne
[4] By the mid-fourth century, Athenian comedy had moved away from the mythological subjects popular in earlier periods, and more often satirised real people.
Two other plays, Antiphanes' The Birth of Aphrodite and Alexis' The Woman from Knidos, might have alluded to her association with the artists Apelles and Praxiteles.
[7] What we "know" of Phryne consists of a random collection of anecdotes, much of which resists efforts to construct a coherent biography.Phryne was from Thespiae in Boeotia.
[18][17] She apparently grew up poor – comic playwrights portray her picking capers[d] – and became one of the wealthiest women in the Greek world.
[21] Phryne probably lived beyond 316 BC, when Thebes was rebuilt;[13] according to Plutarch her fame meant that she could continue to charge high fees to her clients in her old age.
[34] Alternatively, Craig Cooper argues that the trial was likely after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, while Eleanora Cavallini suggests that it was after 335 BC.
An anonymous treatise on rhetoric, which summarises the case against Phryne, lists three specific accusations against her – that she held a "shameless komos" or ritual procession, that she introduced a new god, and that she organised unlawful thiasoi or debauched meetings.
He observes that Aristogeiton, to whom Athenaeus attributes a speech against Phryne, was a political enemy of Hypereides and prosecuted him for illegally introducing a decree after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338.
[42] Phryne was said to have been acquitted after the jury saw her bare breasts – Quintilian says that she was saved "not by Hypereides' pleading, but by the sight of her body".
[44] Christine Mitchell Havelock notes that there is separate evidence for women being brought into the courtroom to arouse the sympathy of the jury, and that in ancient Greece baring the breasts was a gesture intended to arouse such a compassionate response, so Phryne's supposed behaviour in the court is not without parallel in Greek practice.
[45] Ioannis Ziogas observes that it particularly recalls Clytemnestra's plea to Orestes in Aeschylus' play The Libation Bearers, and the story of Helen appealing to Menelaus for mercy after the fall of Troy.
[48] The story of Phryne baring her breasts may have been invented by the Hellenistic biographer Idomeneus of Lampsacus,[f][49] who wrote a treatise on Athenian demagogues.
[51] Phryne's trial is, along with those of Ninos and Theoris of Lemnos, one of three known from the fourth century in which a metic woman was accused of a religious crime.
[53] Kapparis suggests that in fact he was disenfranchised, possibly because he failed to gain one fifth of the jurors' votes and was unable to pay the subsequent fine.
She is most famously associated with Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos,[56] the first three-dimensional and monumentally sized female nude in ancient Greek art.
[g] This was displayed at the sanctuary of Asclepius on the Greek island of Kos before being taken to Rome by the emperor Augustus; by the first century AD it appears to have been one of Apelles' best-known works.
[68][67] Phryne was largely ignored during the Renaissance, in favour of more heroic female figures such as Lucretia,[70] but interest in depicting her increased in the eighteenth century with the advent of Neoclassicism.
[69] From the eighteenth century French artists focused on portraying Phryne as a courtesan, particularly depicting her public nudity at religious festivals or during her trial; by the mid-nineteenth century artists such as Gustave Boulanger painted Phryne without any reference to the ancient context as an eroticised and Orientalised nude.
[1] The story of Phryne bathing at Eleusis, which according to Athenaeus inspired Apelles to paint the Aphrodite Anadyomene, was also a subject for nineteenth century painters.
[79] A third Italian film, La Venere di Cheronea ("The Venus of Chaeronea"), focused on the story of the relationship between Phryne and Praxiteles.
