Famous were the Philainidos Deltas mentioned by Lucian (Pseudologist or about the Aphrodite 24).
Clement (Proteptikos 4,53P) who calls them "Filainidos form" i.e. sexual attitudes of Philainidos. It was an illustrated sex guide, an ars amatorial with pornographic attitudes. THE Luciano (Erotes 28) he talks about trivades who also use artificial phalluses to make androgynous love affairs. Polybius (12.13.1) counts her among the shameless writers. Palatini's comment says that she was a Samiotissa unchastised courtesan from Elephantine, Egypt.
Philaini, Lefkadia and the culture of love. The first sex education manual in the European secretariat
In his book entitled: Gynaikologion - That is, O wise women of all nations and all ages, a strange, alphabetical anthology of important women throughout time, with brief biographical references, the important scholar Ioannis Stamatelos (1822-1881), also mentions the ancient poet Philainida, originally from Lefkada.
The fact would not be of particular importance, apart from this locality, as poetry - and women's poetry -, and despite the social position of women, is also documented by many sources of antiquity. But this particular poet is referred to as a "disgraceful writer", a designation (equivalent today to immoralist and pornographer), which concerns the free and daring character of her poetry, a challenge to the female morals of the time and the forbidden presence of women in the public space. The work for which Philaenis - who seems to have lived in the second half of the 5th century BC - is characterized as an anesthetographer, is entitled On Aphrodisia, or On Forms of Intercourse and is the first sex education manual in European erotic culture, written by a woman.
The mention of the name of Philaenidos by Athenaios (2nd-3rd AD), in his famous work Dinner sophists (5,220,f), identifies Lefkada as her place of origin (Dioscorides considers Samos as her homeland). In this book, "about time disappeared", information is contained, according to him Athens, for "erotic and intercourse forces" and "movements and shapes during intercourse" are described. The same author Athenian, also mentions Archestratus, the well-known poet and philosopher of the 4th BC. century, who was the first, in his famous poem "Idypathia", to study the rules of nutrition, under the prism of the pleasure (pleasure) it causes in humans, that is, he defined gastronomy as the art and science of human nutrition. Gastronomy - the enjoyment and rituals of food - will be an important chapter of folklore and anthropology, economics and sociology, intertwined with the local cultures and traditions of the peoples. Material pleasures, in which love and food occupy an important place, are reduced to a philosophy of life by the founder of the Hedonist School, a student of Socrates, the philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene (435-355 BC) and will cover, together with a more general pragmatic shift in philosophy, the needs of the people of Hellenistic times.
The presence of Philaenidos in the literature of the classical times, and the scandalous writing of this first guide to sexual behavior - which only, centuries later, in the context of Sanskrit literature, the West came to know through the Indian Kama Sutra (3rd-4th AD) h.)- illustrates and is connected to the chapter on the social perception of love in Greek antiquity, its institutional expression and the hierarchy of racial and social love roles.
Philaenis seems to have belonged to that special category of gifted women, whose creative gift also offered them a moral freedom, forbidden to other women, and therefore the transcendence of the boundaries of the home and the conquest of the public space.
It is about the institution of the courtesan, the educated, cultured woman, who not only offered superficial recreational eroticism (like the prostitute - from the verb pernymi, which meant: to offer in exchange, to sell), but also exercised a higher-textured spirituality in the inversions of her in the public sphere and her identification with the male gender. That's why its role is important in the ecstatic cultural environments of the ancient world and famous company names are found in the close social connections of significant people (Aspasia-Periklis, Phryni-Hypereidis, Lais-Apellis, Timandra-Alkibiadis, etc.). In the symposia-classical image of personalities, in which they also exerted influence, the Platonic offers us Banquet and the later Dinner Sophists of Athens-the courtesans conversed and enjoyed material and spiritual pleasures equally with the men who participated, they discussed, played various musical instruments, sang and danced, while in the second part, the como, climax of blissful revelry, the courtesans offered to comers (according to the dictionary of Suidas, komastis, the treacherous one with an odium of chastity) the art of their love affairs. An image of this erotic activity is provided by the narrative compositions and the figurative visual activity of the vases of the time.
However, the writing of such a daring pain by a woman, even with the role and experiences of a courtesan, seems to exceed the limits of the institutionalized principles of love and the tolerance of the Greek culture of the classical times.
Despite the frequent references in antiquity to the attribution of the work to Philaenida, there are also related disputes: the Choliambian poet Aeschyreon Samios and the epigraphist Dioscorides argue that the attribution of the work About patterns of intercourse in Philainida, it is the product of malice and hostility towards the poetess. And Aeschylion mentions the Athenian Polycrates as the real author of the love story.
And defending Philainida, he will compose an epitaph with which he tries, years after her death, to restore her honor:
I Philaenis the ᾿pivotos people
In old age I lie down for a long time.
don't, oh, it's in vain, the endless bends
make fun of someone and laugh and make mistakes.
ὐ γὰρ with Life, not with the lower bodies, |
The duke was a macho man, not a commoner.
But Polycrates the Athenian race,
why, what playfulness and bad language,
They wrote what you wrote, for I did not see it.
(See Anthology palate 7,345)
(I Philainida maligned in the world/here I sleep in the depths of my old age./Sailor recklessly crossing the gallows/don't mock me and laugh and don't mock me./But God and my children who are in the underworld/ I was not a prostitute, nor was I a common woman. the bad-tongued, but I have no idea.
(Translated by P.G. Rontogianni, History of the Island of Lefkadas, 1980st, Society of Lefkada Studies, Athens 234, p.235-XNUMX).
English translation
“I, Philaini, circulated among men
Lie here thanks to great old age.
Don't laugh, foolish sailor, as you trace the cape
Nor make me a target of mockery or insult
For, by Zeus and his sons in Hell
I was never a slut with men nor a public whore.
Polycrates, Athenian by birth,
A bit clever with words and with a nasty tongue,
Wrote what he wrote. I don't know anything about it.”
Goes on
