Bacchis gives necklace to Colophon so he could sleep with Plangon

Prominent women writers of the European Middle Ages had loving concern for men. So too did some women in ancient Greece. About 2350 years ago on the Greek island of Samos, a beautiful young woman named Bacchis showed that she had the inner beauty of generosity and sympathy for men.

Bacchis, a courtesan, had as a lover a young man named Colophon. They had a torrid, wild love affair. Nonetheless, Colophon also fell in love with the extremely beautiful, notorious courtesan Plangon of Miletus.[1] Plangon first told Colophon that to have her he would have to give up Bacchis. But Colophon, like the big-hearted Ovid, sought to have more than one lover.

Plangon then concocted a scheme to pry Colophon from Bacchis. She told him that she would sleep with him only if he gave her a necklace that everyone knew belonged to Bacchis. She was trying to humiliate Bacchis and kindle her wrath against Colophon. Women are far superior to men in formulating such schemes.[2]

Lovesick for Plangon, Colophon urgently implored his girlfriend Bacchis for help. He explained everything to her. He put his life in her hands:

He was so passionately in love with Plangon that he begged Bacchis not to let him die before her eyes. When Bacchis saw how desperate he was, she gave it the necklace to him.

{ ὁ δὲ σφοδρῶς ἐρῶν ἠξίωσε τὴν Βακχίδα μὴ περιιδεῖν αὐτὸν ἀπολλύμενον· καὶ ἡ Βακχὶς τὴν ὁρμὴν κατιδοῦσα τοῦ νεανίσκου ἔδωκε. }[3]

Bacchis deserves to be as famous as Abelard’s wonderful lover Heloise. Bacchis’s loving care and generosity toward Colophon marks her as being at the summit of womanhood.

The story of Bacchis, Colophon, and Plangon ends with poetic justice. Imagine this:

Plangon recognized Bacchis’s lack of jealousy and sent the necklace back to her, but still slept with the young man. After that, the women were friends and treated him as the lover of them both.

{ Πλαγγὼν δὲ τὸ ἄζηλον συνιδοῦσα τῆς Βακχίδος τὸν μὲν ἀπέπεμψεν ἐκείνῃ, τῷ δὲ ὡμίλησε· καὶ τοῦ λοιποῦ φίλαι ἐγένοντο, κοινῶς περιέπουσαι τὸν ἐραστήν. }

You may say that the author is a dreamer. But he’s not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join him, and then the world will live as one.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• men’s desire in the Life of Saint Pelagia
• Heloise wholly innocent of disastrous marriage with Abelard
• laying down your wife for a friend: the tale of Attaf

Notes:

[1] McClure (2003), p. 192, dates Plangon of Miletus at 350-330 BGC. Plangon was also known as Pasiphile (“wide-loving”). Cf. Pasiphaë. Bacchis was from Samos. Samos was reputedly the hometown of the transgressive thinker Aesop.

Underscoring the young man’s marginal position in the story, he is actually unnamed. I use Colophon as his name because he was from Colophon, an ancient Greek City of the Ionian League.

Id., Appendix III, provides a useful table of all the courtesans and prostitutes explicitly named in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Bk. 13. But that table regrettably lacks information on customer service and customer satisfaction.

[2] Gynocentrism tends to repress recognition of this truth. Menetor in On Dedications reportedly wrote:

like a fig-tree among the rocks that feeds many ravens,
good-hearted Pasiphile {Plangon} who receives many strangers

{ συκῆ πετραίη πολλὰς βόσκουσα κορώνας
εὐήθης ξείνων δέκτρια Πασιφίλη. }

Quoted in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Book 13 / Casaubon section 594d, ancient Greek text and English translation from Olson (2010). Plangon wasn’t initially good-hearted toward Colophon and Bacchis.

[3] Probably from Menetor, On Dedications, quoted in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters 13.594b-c, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Olson (2010). The subsequent quote above is similarly from id.

[image] The Birth of Venus. Oil painting. By Sandro Botticelli, 1483-85. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

McClure, Laura. 2003. Courtesans at table: gender and Greek literary culture in Athenaeus. New York: Routledge.

Olson, S. Douglas, ed. and trans. 2010. Athenaeus VII, the learned banqueters. Loeb Classical Library 345. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.