Alexis, the Clepsydra of Eubulus—and the woman who bore this name, had it because she used to distribute her company by the hour-glass, and to dismiss her visitors when it had run down; as Asclepiades, the son of Areas, relates in his History of Demetrius Phalereus; and he says that her proper name was Meticha.
22.
There is a courtesan . . .
(as Antiphanes says in his Clown)—
. . . who is a positive
Calamity and ruin to her keeper;
And yet he's glad at nourishing such a pest.
On which account, in the Neæra of Timocles, a man is represented as lamenting his fate, and saying—
But I, unhappy man, who first loved Phryne
When she was but a gatherer of capers,
And was not quite as rich as now she is,—
I who such sums of money spent upon her,
Am now excluded from her doors.
And in the play entitled Orestantoclides, the same Timocles says—
And round the wretched man old women sleep,
Nannium and Plangon, Lyca, Phryne too,
Gnathæna, Pythionica, Myrrhina,
Chrysis, Conallis, Hieroclea, and
Lapadium also.
And these courtesans are mentioned by Amphis, in his Curis, where he says—
Wealth truly seems to me to be quite blind,
Since he ne'er ventures near this woman's doors,
But haunts Sinope, Nannium, and Lyca,
And others like them, traps of men's existence,
And in their houses sits like one amazed,
And ne'er departs.
23. And Alexis, in the drama entitled Isostasium, thus describes the equipment of a courtesan, and the artifices which some women use to make themselves up—
For, first of all, to earn themselves much gain,
And better to plunder all the neighbouring men,
They use a heap of adventitious aids.—
They plot to take in every one. And when,
By subtle artifice, they've made some money,
They enlist fresh girls, and add recruits, who ne'er
Have tried the trade, unto their cunning troop,
And drill them so that they are very soon
