Talk:Phryne

Not mentioned?

"However, this episode probably never happened. It was not mentioned in Posidippus' version of the trial in his comedy Ephesian Woman (produced c.290 BC)". But according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posidippus_(comic_poet) only fragments of the Posidippus' plays survive. If this is true and the full text of Ephesian Woman does not survive, how can one confidently say that the scene wasn't included? Perhaps the fragments covering the trial, or at least its climax, survive? I think we need more information though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.138.36.64 (talk) 07:23, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

• Though Posidippus' play survives only in fragments, one of the fragments is the account of the trial of Phryne, quoted by Athenaeus (13.591e-f). I've expanded on the article text slightly to hopefully make this clearer. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 08:27, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Small corrections to citations of ancient sources

I've made a few corrections to the old citations of ancient sources and updated them to bring them into line with current practice in classical scholarship:

• Citations of Plutarch's Moralia require Stephanus page numbers (the ones with the letter suffix); this is separate from the chapter numbers cited within the individual essays (like De Pyth. or.) gathered under the Moralia umbrella title.
• Athenaeus requires Casaubon page numbers (the ones with the letter suffix), since that is the standard system of reference in contemporary scholarship; I have added these, but I have also retained the chapter numbers from Kaibel's edition, for readers who consult Gulick's older Loeb translation, which is online at the Perseus Project.
• Both citations in note 49 (Hermippus on Euthias) were incorrect: in Athenaeus, this is Kaibel chapter 13.59, not 13.60; and in Muller's FHG the fragment number is 66, not 50 (50 is the page number). But for most historical fragments Muller has been superseded by Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, so I've replaced the FHG citation with a ref to FGrH 1026 F 46a. I've also given Hermippus a little gloss in the text, to distinguish him from the homonymous Athenian comic poet and the Roman guy who wrote the book about the interpretation of dreams.
• It is perhaps worth noting that Athenaeus does not report the name Mnesarete on his own authority; his stated source was Aristogeiton's speech against Phryne, so I've added that information to the relevant footnote. (Plutarch doesn't state his source, but it was presumably Aristogeiton as well.)

— Choliamb (talk) 15:00, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Pre-FAC comments

By request: I hope these are helpful. I still check back at this article from time to time to remind myself of how to do a multiple image template.

• before 370 BC – after 316 BC: could drop the first BC, as she could hardly have been born 650 years after her own death.
  • Done
• Born Mnesarete: perhaps a little unclear at first: how about "[she was] named Mnesarete at birth"?
  • I think "born X" to mean "given the name X at birth" is a common enough construction that it's unlikely to cause major confusion here; MOS:BIO uses the construction in several examples without comment.
• The IPA pronunciation is modern Greek, I think: I'm rubbish with getting the transcriptions right, but I think we want something like Ancient Greek pronunciation: ['pʰry.nɛː] (approximately P^hROO-neh rather than FRY-nee).
  • Oh, IPA my beloathed. I think the current IPA transcription is meant to be the English pronunciation (I have always pronounced it /frɪni/, but as far as I can tell I'm just wrong here and nobody else does) and you are right for the ancient Greek pronunciation, but I'm also fairly rubbish here. I've added the Greek IPA but relegated the pronunciation information to a footnote because the lead sentence was getting unwieldy...
• Phryne is best known for her trial for impiety: some editors push back at "best known" as unverifiable: unless a source actually says this precisely, advise simply "Phryne was tried for impiety..."
  • I think in the case of Phryne, this is defensible: McClure 2014 says "she is best known for her impiety trial"; McClure 2024 says that her disrobing at her trial is "the most famous of her ancient narratives"; Funke calls it "perhaps the most famous story in her biographical tradition".
• Largely ignored during the Renaissance, artistic interest in Phryne: a dangling clause: it's Phryne, not the interest, that was ignored. Easy fix is to push her to the start: "Phryne was largely ignored..."
  • Good point.
• Her trial was famously depicted by Jean-Léon Gérôme : famously gets the same alarm bells as "best known for", as well as possibly being WP:PUFFERY: advise cutting. See also, later, Famously, Phryne was said to have been acquitted.
  • I think the point that Gérôme's painting in particular was famous is worth making and I can provide citations if necessary; I've cut the other.
• The "Sources" section reads as slightly sparse to me: not just in that there aren't very many of those sources, but also that we go only into very small detail as to what these sources are and their background. For FA, I think there's room to be a bit more comprehensive. In particular, we could do with setting out in a little more detail what Athenian comedy was.
• Hypereides' defence speech: I think we've discussed this before, but MOS:' prefers adding the s.
• it is now lost, with only a few fragments surviving.: except for a few fragments or similar?
  • Adopted
• His Deipnosophistae ("The Scholars at Dinner") is the source of the "vast majority" of extant ancient writings about Phryne.: per MOS:QUOTEPOV, lose the quotes on "vast majority": they read as scare quotes and the phrase isn't distinctive or creative enough to need attribution anyway.
  • Yes, done.
• Perhaps not easily fixed, but the Sources section makes a few references to elements of her biography, which we don't get until later. There's a balancing act here: is it more detrimental to read the Life section in ignorance of the sources, or the Sources section in ignorance of the life? I'm not proposing a particular solution, but wanted to raise the problem.
  • Yes, I'd also noticed that issue. I think they are sufficiently minor references, both to things already mentioned in the lead, as to be justifiable, but it's good to keep in mind.
• I have had pushback on pull quotes before, though never really tried to get one through FAC -- there's a WP:DUEWEIGHT concern that pulling them out at the start of a section gives them massive prominence in the article, and it's usually difficult to demonstrate that they hold commensurate prominence in the scholarly literature. Again, I'm not telling you to remove it, but it might be worth considering where you stand on that question, and how much you think would be lost by working it into the prose.
  • I won't die on the hill of that pull quote, so if it's challenged at FAC I'll pull it. no pun intended
• Per the template documentation, don't give publisher locations where it's obvious from the publisher name (e.g. Oxford for OUP, Cambridge for CUP)
  • Has that always been there? Huh. Removed.
• She apparently grew up poor – comic playwrights portray her picking capers: this needs a bit of an explanation, I think.
  • Unfortunately I have not found a source which gives any further explanation; presumably the context is that caper-picking is a undesirable job done by poor people (or simply that doing manual work in your youth is a sign of poverty?) but I don't have a source for that. (Funke notes in an aside that it might instead be a sex joke, but she gives no further explanation and I'm completely in the dark as to what the point of that might be.)
    • This book, p. 65 explains it as "a painful and exhausting job that leaves no doubt she came from a modest family". I'm not sure it's the most scholarly of sources, but the point seems reasonable.
• Hetairai were known in ancient literature for their wit and learning: reading the remainder of this paragraph, I'm unsure of where you stand on this: here, it sounds like it's as close as we can get to a biographical detail, but you then seem to row back and suggest that it might just be a literary stereotype (and indeed a lot of the reading I've done points towards the latter).
  • Yes, I think the sources generally come down on "this is a literary stereotype; we cannot know if it was actually true in Phryne's case". Perhaps s/were known/had a reputation/ would make this clearer?
    • I think the current phrasing of were known to... implies that this was true, so another more ambivalent phrase might be a good idea. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:42, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
      • Fair enough, changed. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:50, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
• Helen Morales writes that separating fact from fiction in accounts of Phryne's life is "impossible": another MOS:QUOTEPOV case. I would also consider rolling this short paragraph into the one before it.
  • Removed the quotes. I think semantically the paragraph needs to be on its own, though I can see the argument that it's too short and should be joined with the previous one.
    • I wonder if it would be better nearer the beginning of this section -- perhaps with the pull quote merged into it? There's a slight whiplash effect to telling the reader a bunch of information and then clarifying that it might all be a bit dodgy. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:52, 26 October 2024 (UTC)
• was accused of being a sycophant.: this needs an explanation, as the Athenian meaning (to be honest, I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what the Athenians meant by it) was not the same as the English one, which is the subject of the linked article.
• Phryne was defended by Hypereides, a well-known and wealthy orator who had a reputation for associating with hetairai: I wonder if it would help, a little earlier, to sketch out the reputational implications (or lack thereof) attached to men who associated widely with Hetairai? The next sentence alludes that it was somehow shameful, but then we have a whole bunch of men who were perfectly happy to put their names to it on the Aineta aryballos. Pericles is skulking in the background here somewhere, too...
• Link Esther Eidinow in the biblio?
  • Indeed, may as well link all the authors in the biblio what have wikipedia articles
• If Anaximenes did compose the speech for the prosecution, it must have been before he moved to Macedon, and therefore was perhaps between 350 and 340 BC: begging the question, slightly: perhaps start with "Anaximenes left Athens for Macedon in 340 BC: if he did compose..."?
• I don't totally understand the point of footnote c: are we saying that it's fairly certain that the charge was asebeia, but debated whether the mechanism was the usual graphe asebeias or the more deadly eisangelia?
  • Reviewing this, I'm not sure how necessary the footnote is. The point is that Phillips argues, based on the fact that ancient sources assume that Phryne was liable to be executed if she was convicted, that the mechanism must have been the eisangelia rather than the graphe asebias, but nobody seems to agree with him: Kapparis argues against him at length; Funke says that the charge was a graphe in the text and notes Phillips' eisangelia theory in a footnote; McClure ignores the eisangelia possibility entirely. I've cut it as I suspect it leads to more confusion than it does elucidation.
• According to an ancient tradition: can we be more specific on "ancient": fourth century BCE or sixth century CE?
  • Source says it was Athenaeus, so we can just say that; not sure why I previously was so vague!
• debauched meetings: is it worth pointing out that there's a specifically Dionysiac context here?
• "non Hyperidis actione... sed conspectu corporis": quotes that are italicised for language don't then go into quote marks as well. Is there a particular reason to quote in Latin here -- we haven't quoted everyone else in Greek?
  • You're better at MOS-wrangling than me – does the "quotes that are italicised for language don't go inside quotation marks" rule come from somewhere there? I'm not seeing it. As for why the Latin is quoted at all, I don't recall if I had a particular reason and on reflection it's probably just distracting to the general reader; specialists can look up the Quintilian themselves.
    • Hm -- I'm not sure it actually is in the MoS! I got it from one of my undergraduate supervisors, and it follows established practice in just about every classical HQRS that I've seen (see for instance the Tacitean quote at the top of p. 221 here. You could perhaps read it into MOS:NONENGITALIC, which has plenty of examples of italics used where quote marks would be used for English words, but there are no quote marks on display. It's certainly the house style in all the major classical journals, as far as I know, and the general rule around here is to do as the professionals do, when in doubt. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:42, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
      • Well, I'm certainly not qualified to gainsay either your supervisor or the major classics journals' house style, though no doubt I will have forgotten this by the next time it comes up. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:50, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

More to follow, I'm afraid. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:20, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

• Thanks for all of these helpful comments – I've replied inline to a bunch. A couple require more thought! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:27, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
• On Athenian sycophants, MacDowell has a short, clear explanation in the OCD. On the question of pronunciation, I think it varies greatly depending on geography: here in the US I have never heard the name pronounced /ˈfraɪ.ni/, and the diphthong sounds ghastly to me. Those with classical backgrounds say /ˈfru.nɛ/ or /ˈfry.nɛ/, and those without classical backgrounds say nothing at all, because they've never heard of her. YMMV. Choliamb (talk) 00:51, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

More follow:

• In Quintilian's account, along with those of Sextus Empiricus and Philodemus: I think it would be helpful to put dates on all of these, at least vaguely, to be clear that these accounts postdate the events by a great deal.
• In Quintilian's account, along with those of Sextus Empiricus and Philodemus, Phryne makes the decision to expose her own breasts; while in Athenaeus' version Hypereides exposed Phryne as the climax of his speech, and in Plutarch's version Hypereides exposed her because he saw that his speech had failed to persuade the jury: we should stick to the present tense here.
• Ephesian Woman was produced c.290 BC: I think we want a space after the circa.
• the story of Phryne bearing her breasts: baring?
• the Hellenistic biographer Idomeneus of Lampsacus: again, I think a rough date would help here: not all will know what "Hellenistic" means (and it's a big window anyway)
• Though all of the ancient accounts assume that Phryne was on trial for her life, asebeia was not necessarily punished by death; it was an agōn timētos, in which the jury would decide on the punishment if the accused was convicted: does any of the earlier stuff about eisangelia have a bearing on this?
  • Yes, this is why Phillips proposed that she was prosecuted through an eisangelia rather than the graphe asebeias. Possibly I can work him in here – will think about it.
• I don't think metic is generally italicised, as it's an Anglicised version of the Greek term. It isn't in the eponymous article, or in any of the hits I can find on Google (see Rebecca Futo Kennedy's 2014 book here).
  • Ah, possibly not. MOS:FOREIGN says Loanwords and borrowed phrases that have common usage in English – Gestapo, samurai, vice versa – do not require italics. A rule of thumb is to not italicize words that appear in major general-purpose English dictionaries. Going by the OED metic, hetaira, and thiasos can all be in roman type.
• I wonder if there's any space for modern receptions of Gerome's painting -- two political cartoons here and here, for instance.
• monumentally-sized female nude: MOS:HYPHEN doesn't hyphenate when the first term is a regular -ly adverb (though I admit ignorance as to why not).
• both Phryne and the Knidia: we haven't used this term yet: suggest either explaining it earlier or simply "Praxitiles' statue" vel sim.
• Pliny the Elder, and Clement of Alexandria : another plea for dates and context!
• the only statue of a woman alone: a mortal woman?
• Captions that are not full sentences should not end in a full stop (see the Aphrodite of Knidos)
• Note d: can we introduce who Campaspe was, to save people a click?
• his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene: not sure about the formatting here: if this was a title, it would be italicised, but I think it's a description, so we should deitalicise, following Havelock here.
• in favour of more heroic female figures such as Lucretia: I see the point here, but I don't think we can pass "more heroic" as a statement of fact: needs to be couched with a little more nuance (that Lucretia fitted European men's ideals of what women 'should' be like -- married, chaste, selfless and conveniently dead -- but Phryne -- independent, sexual, wealthy and victorious -- fitted uncomfortably with them)
• an eroticised and Orientalised nude: anything more to say here? Seems interesting (and odd) that a figure from ancient Greece, at a time when the French and other European cultures are trying to claim the Greek heritage for themselves, would be consciously Othered like that.
• Phryne before the Areopagus: generally speaking, capitalise "long" prepositions (over five letters) in titles.
• which was controversial for showing her covering her face in shame, in the same pose that Gérôme used in several paintings of slaves in Eastern slave-markets: might be worth taking another look at this, and possibly expanding -- what exactly was the point of controversy? Was it that Phryne was ashamed, or that this (white, European) woman was being portrayed like a (black, African?) slave? You could put her next to Slaves at auction in Rome, which has the same pose and (I think) the same model (Christine Roux).
• Would a gallery be appropriate to get a few more of these receptions in? We talk about a lot of paintings by some big-name people, but only really have space for two.
• I added a few lang templates in Reception: you might want to check for more.
• You might wish to consider adding DOIs to books accessible online (particularly Brill/CUP/OUP, which are available via TWL) and ISSNs to journals.
• The MythiMedia website looks a little uncertain to me as WP:HQRS: can you either vouch for Cavallini in her own right or perhaps find the same ideas in more traditional print sources?
  • Yes, I've been putting off doing this but Cavallini has published what I think is essentially this article as "Phryne: From Knidian Venus to Movie Star" in more traditional HQRSes. The version available online is in Italian, but there is an English article under the same title in Hellas on Screen: cinematic receptions of ancient history, literature and mythology. So I need to either get out the Italian dictionary or get myself to the library.
• There's quite a bit in McClure about the supposed contrast between Phryne's inner beauty and other courtesans' highly manicured outward beauty: is this worth a mention?
  • Funke has something on this too; I will have a think about what I can write up here...

I think that's my lot -- I enjoyed the read, and was greatly impressed with how you navigate the different layers of myth and myth-making while keeping the whole thing coherent. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:41, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

• Still working through these, but this has been immensely helpful – your eagle eye for nitpicking as ever catches things which I'm way too close to the article to notice. The few more substantive points you pick up on are all I think good things to consider; I will give those all another look-over. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 13:36, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Messalla's Latin translation of Hypereides's speech

Caeciliusinhorto, UndercoverClassicist: Today while reading Horace's Ode 3.21 with the commentary of Nisbet and Rudd I learned that Messalla (that is, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus) translated Hypereides's speech for Phryne into Latin. Perhaps you knew this already, but it was a surprise to me. Quintilian (Inst. Or. 10.5.2) singles it out among Messalla's translated speeches because he had to wrestle with the well-known subtilitas of the original, which was particularly difficult for Romans to capture (etiam cum illa Hyperidis pro Phryne difficillima Romanis subtilitate contenderet). It's not clear to me exactly what quality subtilitas denotes here (subtlety? refinement? precision of expression? D. A. Russell in the Loeb translates it as "delicacy"), but it was evidently a characteristic that was not easy to render accurately in translation. In any case, given that Messalla was, among other things, probably the most famous orator of the generation after Cicero, I wonder if the translation might be a detail worth adding to the article as an illustration of how widely admired Hypereides's speech was in antiquity. I haven't done it myself, but perhaps it could be tacked onto the sentence Hypereides's defence speech survives only in fragments, though it was greatly admired in antiquity? (E.g., "though it was greatly admired in antiquity, and was even translated into Latin by the Augustan orator and statesman Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus", or something along those lines.) If you need a modern source to cite in addition to Quintilian, I found it in R. G. M. Nisbet and N. Rudd, A Commentary on Horace, Odes, Book III (Oxford 2004), pp. 246–247, but no doubt you could find it elsewhere if you looked. Happy holidays to you both. – Choliamb (talk) 23:00, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

I've added a little bit to the start of the "Legacy" section. Not totally sold on the placement and I'm happy to be persuaded that not all the details are strictly needed here. Lewis and Short think that subtilitas, when applied to rhetoric (at least by Cicero), indicates a lack of ornament and general fussing about, though part of me would like to check that in a more recent dictionary. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:56, 17 December 2025 (UTC)