Neaera and Aspasia are to good examples of hetaerae that had interesting lives. Both women are not from the idealised background that would have allowed them to be citizen wives however both women managed to marry important Athenian citizens and both had their children legitimised.
For a woman involved in this most sacred of rituals, to be exposed as non-Athenian, to be in fact the child of an ex-slave, and a whore, was a scandal that involved not just Neaera, but her daughter, her grandson, and all the other Athenian families that had been affected by these marriage relations. Now unfortunately this is going to be something of an anti-climax. We can't say how the case ends, because in many instances from the Athenian law courts, we know of the prosecution or of the defense, but don't have the other side, nor the result. We also have no way of independently assessing how much of the speech against Neaera is true. It may be, if we applied the skepticism we applied to Aspasia's story, that in fact Neaera was a perfectly nice housewife who got married to a somewhat low-class character as and simply dragged into a dreadful legal dispute that involved her husband and children. Yet the point we can make is the following. For the speech against Neaera, to be written with such invective and detail, it demonstrates something of the anxiety of being Athenian in the Classical age. The great anxiety was that the privilege of citizenship was being diluted. From Pericles on, the Athenians were addicted to the idea that citizenship was available to them, because they were a club. It is ironic to imagine that in the world's first and greatest democracy, the mindset of the Athenians was that you were a member of the demos, the people, not because you were a human being, but because you were a member of the club, the club of citizens whose fathers were citizens, and now more importantly, whose mothers were citizens. As women and as foreigners, Aspasia and Neaera labored under a double disadvantage. It's those double disadvantages of being women and foreign, that are reflected in the incredibly hostile and misogynistic traditions that survive concerning them. What the truth is about either women, we don't know. Yet we do know that the hatred directed against them, does not speak well of Athenian men.
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