Sarah Clegg Virgin Ghosts and Failed Mothers

Sarah Clegg

Virgin Ghosts and Failed Mothers

In 306BC, as the heirs of Alexander the Great fought over control of his empire, Ptolemy I’s fleet was captured at the battle of Salamis by the young ruler of Macedon, Demetrius Poliorcetes. Aboard one of Ptolemy’s ships was a courtesan by the name of Lamia, who was taken as a concubine by Demetrius. While we have little information concerning how she felt about this, we do know that she quickly became Demetrius’s favourite – not, apparently, due to her looks (as Plutarch insists on repeating throughout his account of her life she had ‘already passed her prime’ when she was captured by Demetrius), but because she was witty and ‘prompt in repartee’.1 She was also (supposedly) demanding and prone to extravagant whims, which were often indulged by a besotted Demetrius: we have multiple accounts of lavish feasts that he threw for her, and according to Plutarch he even levied a substantial tax on his citizens to pay for her soap.2 A curious anecdote about her has also survived, concerning a discussion between a group of Demetrius’s representatives and a Macedonian officer called Lysimachus. During a lull in the conversation, Lysimachus began showing off the scars on his leg and back, souvenirs from a time he had fought a lion. Demetrius’s men laughed, and claimed that their king, too, had scars on his neck from a ‘dreadful wild beast’ – Lamia. This was not just a reference to Lamia’s supposedly controlling nature, but also a pun – the king’s lover shared her name with a mythical monster.3 This monstrous Lamia was said to have been a beautiful queen of Libya who was loved by Zeus and forced by an envious Hera to devour her own children. Driven mad by grief

and guilt, Lamia turned into a demonic creature – serpentine, terrifying and vengeful. She spent her time slaughtering and eating mothers and their children, furious that they had what she had lost, sometimes ripping open the wombs of pregnant women to devour the fetus inside. This monster was the Greek and Roman equivalent of Lamashtu, a direct descendent of the Mesopotamian child-andmother-killing demon. Given this, Lamia might seem like a strange name for a courtesan, but although Lamashtu had never made a pretense at sexiness, Lamia was not just a child-killer. She was also given to seducing handsome young men, concealing her monstrous features so as to appear a great beauty, and eating men alive once their guard was down.4 Her name was perfect for a prostitute who, according to Plutarch, had ‘utterly vanquished’ her royal lover. The mythical Lamia, like her Mesopotamian counterpart, still gives us deep insight into the tragedies of infant and maternal mortality, and the desperation with which women struggled against these horrors. But Lamia has another side as well: she shows us how womanhood and femininity could be policed. In every way, the monstrous Lamia stood opposed to the Greek and Roman ideals of womanhood. Where a good woman should be a mother, Lamia murdered children and prevented pregnancies; where a woman should be a chaste wife, Lamia was unmarried and seductive; where a woman should be beautiful, Lamia was hideous (albeit able to appear a beauty when she needed to); and where a woman should be submissive and meek to men, Lamia manipulated and murdered them. In some cases, Lamia is even depicted with testicles or a phallus, a way of emphasizing how completely she was the antithesis of the ideal of femininity. The courtesan Lamia was breaking the standards of womanhood in similar (though less dramatic) ways – she, too, was the opposite of the chaste wife and mother she was supposed to be. She was seductive, unmarried, argumentative, ‘past her prime’, dominating her man as opposed to being dominated by him, refusing to conform to the societal standards by which women were judged.

The constant comparisons between the real-life Lamia and her mythical namesake make it clear that these characteristics did not just make the courtesan unconventional – in the eyes of some, they made her monstrous. And while comparisons between a woman and the monster who shared her name might seem fair enough, ‘Lamia’ would eventually become a more general insult, thrown at any woman who was deemed insufficiently feminine, a tool for literally demonising those who dared to break with the societal ideal of womanhood.

1 We have some examples of this wit, especially relating to the case of Thonis, another courtesan. A man offered Thonis a small fortune to sleep with him, but after the deal was struck, he dreamt he had sex with her, and, his desire sated, withdrew his offer. When Thonis took him to court, claiming that she was still owed payment, the judge ordered that the money be brought in and moved about in front of her so that she could only grasp its shadow, since ‘a thing imagined is the shadow of reality’. Lamia felt this was unfair, pointing out that ‘while the dream put an end to the man’s passion, the shadow of the money did not set Thonis free of her desire for it’. 2 As a captive of Demetrius, it’s unlikely Lamia actually had much control over him, but the ancient (male) authors certainly didn’t see it this way. Demetrius deferred to her publicly, abused his citizens and claimed he was doing so for her, and acted as if he were indulging her – the fact that he was her captor, and that she likely had very little say in this, gets no consideration in the ancient sources. 3 Demetrius’s representatives to Lysimachus were not the only ones to make this joke – Demetrius’s own father did as well, along with a man called Demochares of Soli, who called Demetrius ‘the fable’ because he had his own legendary beast. With this and the debate about Thonis, the long winter evenings must have flown by in Demetrius’s court. 4 It’s not entirely clear whether the courtesan Lamia’s name was a purposeful reference to the monster, or whether it was a coincidence (there was certainly at least one man with this surname – Lucius Aelius Lamia – who was teased about it by Horace), but people were certainly happy to draw the comparison. While we’re at it, this monster was not in any way connected to the popular Arabic girls’ name ‘Lamia’, which comes from the word for ‘radiant’ in the Arabic language.