Nicarete from Corinth

Nikarete was a brothel landlady from Corinth who lived in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Lived.

Nikarete ran an upscale brothel in Corinth, a city famous in ancient times for its thriving prostitution economy. The verb korinthiazein, which has been handed down in the literature and which can be roughly translated as "(around) whores", testifies to this. She bought young girls at the Corinthian slave market and trained these slaves to become hetaerae , so that they could eventually work for her. Nikarete passed at least some of these girls off as their daughters and provided them with "training" to become prostitutes. Due to the given family relationship, higher prices for the services of the hetaires could be achieved, since free women were usually more sought after. The best-known hetaera of Nikarete was Neaira , whom she bought with six other girls and passed all seven off as biological daughters. There is also the assumption that Nikarete was possibly not a real person, but an artificial figure developed from several people (Neaira or Nikarete from Megara ) or simply an error of interpretation or tradition.

swell

• Pseudo-Demosthenes or. 59 in the edition by Rennie (1931) in the Perseus project
  German translation in: Kai Brodersen : Antiphon, Against the Stepmother, and Apollodoros, Against Neaira (Demosthenes 59). Women in court . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2004 (Texts on Research, 84), ISBN 3-534-17997-8 .

literature

• Debra Hamel : The Neaira Case. The true story of a hetaera in ancient Greece . Primus-Verlag, Darmstadt 2004. ISBN 3-89678-255-X