In Strabo's description of Corinth (Geography 8.6.20–3) we find three anonymous citations about the city's famed prosperity. The first relates to Corinth's appeal to merchants as a means of avoiding travelling around Cape Malea, a treacherous sailing route (8.6.20):
ὁ δὲ Κόρινθος ‘ἀφνειός’ μὲν λέγεται διὰ τὸ ἐμπόριον. ἐπὶ <γὰρ> τῷ Ἰσθμῷ κείμενος καὶ δυεῖν λιμένων κύριος, ὧν ὁ μὲν τῆς Ἀσίας, ὁ δὲ τῆς Ἰταλίας ἐγγύς ἐστι, ῥᾳδίας ποιεῖ τὰς ἑκατέρωθεν ἀμοιβὰς τῶν φορτίων πρὸς ἀλλήλους τοῖς τοσοῦτον ἀφεστῶσιν. ἦν δ’ ὥσπερ ὁ πορθμὸς οὐκ εὔπλους ὁ κατὰ τὴν Σικελίαν τὸ παλαιόν, οὕτω καὶ τὰ πελάγη, καὶ μάλιστα τὸ ὑπὲρ Μαλεῶν διὰ τὰς ἀντιπνοίας ἀφ’ οὗ καὶ παροιμιάζονται:
Μαλέας δὲ κάμψας ἐπιλάθου τῶν οἴκαδε.ἀγαπητὸν οὖν ἑκατέροις ἦν, τοῖς τε ἐκ τῆς Ἰταλίας καὶ τοῖς ἐκ τῆς Ἀσίας ἐμπόροις, ἀφεῖσι τὸν περὶ Μαλέας πλοῦν εἰς Κόρινθον κατάγεσθαι <καὶ διατίθεσθαι> τὸν φόρτον αὐτόθι.Footnote 1
Corinth is said to be ‘wealthy’ because of its trading-places. For it is situated on the Isthmus and has power over two harbours, one for Asia, and the other near Italy, making the transfer of goods from each one to the other easy for places at such a great distance. And just as the Strait of Sicily was not easily navigable in the past, similarly the open sea was not easily navigable, especially beyond Malea, because of the adverse winds. As a result, this saying arose:
After going round Malea, forget your home.And so it was desirable for the traders from both Italy and Asia to avoid the voyage around Malea and to put in at Corinth and unload their goods there.Footnote 2
The second and third citations come a little later in the same chapter when Strabo describes the famous Corinthian hetairai who inhabited the city's sanctuary of Aphrodite:
τό τε τῆς Ἀφροδίτης ἱερὸν οὕτω πλούσιον ὑπῆρξεν ὥστε πλείους ἢ χιλίας ἱεροδούλους ἐκέκτητο ἑταίρας, ἃς ἀνετίθεσαν τῇ θεῷ καὶ ἄνδρες καὶ γυναῖκες. καὶ διὰ ταύτας οὖν πολυωχλεῖτο ἡ πόλις καὶ ἐπλουτίζετο⋅ οἱ γὰρ ναύκληροι ῥᾳδίως ἐξανηλίσκοντο, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ἡ παροιμία φησίν
οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθόν ἐσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς.(καὶ δὴ καὶ μνημονεύεταί τις ἑταίρα πρὸς τὴν ὀνειδίζουσαν ὅτι οὐ φιλεργὸς εἴη οὐδ’ ἐρίων ἅπτοιτο εἰπεῖν ‘ἐγὼ μέντοι ἡ τοιαύτη τρεῖς ἤδη καθεῖλον ἱστοὺς ἐν βραχεῖ χρόνῳ τούτῳ’).
Aphrodite's sanctuary was so wealthy that it possessed more than a thousand temple-slave hetairai who had been dedicated by men and women. And because of them the city filled up and was enriched. The merchants spent their wealth readily, from which this saying arose:
Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth.(And it is said that a certain hetaira replied to a woman reproaching her for not being industrious and for not touching wool: ‘But I have already taken down three webs in this short time’).
As Janko has pointed out, the first two citations are comic trimeters, and although they are not explicitly connected together in the passage, it seems likely that they are both from the same work and form a couplet about the difficulties of navigating around the Peloponnese for both poor and rich travellers alike.Footnote 3 This couplet may be Aristophanic, since Hesychius attributes the words οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθόν ἐσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς to the playwright.Footnote 4
The chapter's closing citation concerning the words of a Corinthian hetaira has also attracted limited attention. Both Gilhuly and Roller have pointed out that her words depend on wordplay relating to the word ἱστός.Footnote 5 Not only does this word refer to the upright beam of a loom, the warp fixed upon the loom, and the web created on the loom, it also refers to the mast of a ship, and—by extension—becomes a euphemism for the erect penis.Footnote 6 The hetaira thus responds to the criticism that she does not spend enough time on wool-working, the respectable occupation of women, with the retort that she does in fact work phenomenally hard at the ἱστός multiple times a day. The Corinthian context lends a further resonance to this double entendre, since those engaging with hetairai in the famous-port city tended to be sailors and wealthy ναύκληροι, as Strabo had already pointed out at 8.6.20. Furthermore, it is likely that the phrase καθεῖλον ἱστούς has an inherently nautical flavour as this combination is later found in contexts relating to the disassembly of a ship's mast.Footnote 7 Nautical masts, erect penises and wool-working thus coalesce in the hetaira's witty response.
But in addition to a clever play on words, this reply also contains a literary joke. On hearing the hetaira's claim that she spends her time industriously ‘taking down webs’, the reader may be reminded of the only figure in the Greek tradition renowned for the frequent erection and deconstruction of webs: Penelope. In the Odyssey Penelope famously ‘set up a great web in her halls’ (στησαμένη μέγαν ἱστὸν ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν, 2.94; cf. 19.139, 24.129) and then deceived the suitors in Ithaca for three years by weaving this web by day before taking it down at night (ἔνθα καὶ ἠματίη μὲν ὑφαίνεσκεν μέγαν ἱστόν, | νύκτας δ᾿ ἀλλύεσκεν, ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθεῖτο. | ὣς τρίετες μὲν ἔληθε δόλῳ καὶ ἔπειθεν Ἀχαιούς, 2.104–6; cf. 19.149–50, 24.139–41). Moreover, the fact that the force of the hetaira's words depends partly on the connection between ἱστός as a term related to both wool-working and seafaring is also uniquely redolent of the Odyssey, since in that poem the word is one that links Penelope, who toils with the loom at home, to Odysseus, who frequently erects and eventually even lashes himself to a mast during his troubles at sea: this parallelism emphasizes the marital bond between them.Footnote 8 The echo of Penelope's ‘taking-down’ of her ἱστός in the Corinthian hetaira's response is ironized by the fact that Odysseus’ wife famously undertook her repetitive work at the loom as a means of remaining faithful to her husband by deceiving the suitors; the hetaira's work at the ἱστός, however, has precisely the opposite effect.
This ironic reversal is complicated further by the fact that it hints at a certain aspect of Penelopean reception that was familiar to ancient readers. Though Penelope remains faithful to her husband in the Odyssey itself, the later literary tradition was not so sure of her chastity. For example, Herodotus claimed (2.145) that the Greeks said that the god Pan was the son of Penelope by Hermes, a genealogy that was also found in Pindar's Hymn to Pan (fr. 100 Snell).Footnote 9 In the third century b.c.e. this slur against Penelope's chastity became even harsher: Duris of Samos, for example, plays on etymological explanations for Pan's name and goes so far as to claim that Penelope gave birth to the god after sleeping with all of the suitors (καὶ Δοῦρις δὲ ἐν τῷ Περὶ ᾽Αγαθοκλέους μάχλον φησὶ τὴν Πηνελόπην καὶ συνελθοῦσαν πᾶσι τοῖς μνηστῆρσι γεννῆσαι τὸν τραγοσκελῆ Πᾶνα, ὃν εἰς θεοὺς ἔχουσιν, BNJ 76 F 21).Footnote 10 The hetaira's words therefore take on a further ironic aspect for the reader who knows these stories, since in this tradition Penelope's openness to all suitors makes her seem like a sort of archetypal proto-Corinthian hetaira.
Furthermore, if we read the hetaira's words in conjunction with the other citations in this passage, there seems to be another Odyssean connection in play here. In the first trimeter, ‘after going round Malea, forget your home’ (Μαλέας δὲ κάμψας ἐπιλάθου τῶν οἴκαδε), there is a clear allusion to the Odyssey, since it was precisely at the point when Odysseus rounded Cape Malea that the previously geographically-plausible route of his course home to Ithaca was derailed by the intervention of Boreas (9.67–81).Footnote 11 After being swept away from Malea Odysseus’ encounters with fantastical people and places begin, starting with the Lotus-Eaters (9.82–104)—a people who literally encourage those they encounter to eat lotus fruit and ‘forget their home’ (λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι, Od. 9.97; cf. οὐκέτ᾿ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι, 9.95). If it is correct, as Janko suggests, to link this trimeter about Malea with the following trimeter, οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθόν ἐσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς, then this allusion relating to the dangers faced by Odysseus on his travels is also linked to the idea of Corinth's hetairai and the equally impossible obstacles—and temptations—that they offer to male seafarers. Moreover, if the Corinthian hetaira's salacious reply about her ἱστός humorously hints at the figure of Penelope, as argued above, then we can see that all three citations in this passage are related to the Odyssey.
This thematic use of related textual references accords with Strabo's practice elsewhere in the Geography, where multiple citations, either from the same work or different literary sources, are often quoted, summarized or paraphrased.Footnote 12 Though the hetaira's words do not form a trimeter, it is possible that they constitute a paraphrase of a comedic joke found either in the comedy to which the other two trimeters in this chapter very probably belong, or to a different comedy. This former suggestion is particularly attractive because of the thematic connections to the Odyssey which the citations in the chapter share, and because of Strabo's tendency to include multiple examples from the same work to support his arguments. If the hetaira's words at the close of this chapter also hint at the Odyssey and relate to the same, possibly Aristophanic comedy from which the two trimeters most probably originate, then the idea that this play contained an Odyssean joke relating to seafaring, Corinthian hetairai and sexual availability and exclusivity becomes attractive.Footnote 13 In this case, the line οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθόν ἐσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς would also possibly relate to both Penelope and the Corinthian hetaira as women who both paradoxically hold themselves aloof—or pretend to—from every man, while simultaneously being known as figures with potentially unlimited sexual availability for the right kind of suitor.
Though we cannot attribute the Corinthian hetaira's paraepic joke to the possibly Aristophanic play from which the trimeters seemingly originate with absolute certainty, the idea that the hetaira's words may ultimately derive from a comedy is further supported by the particular significance of the Odyssey in paraepic passages in that genre, which drew predominantly on that poem for material.Footnote 14 The ultimate derivation of the Corinthian hetaira's joke from a comedy is thus a distinct possibility. But regardless of whether Strabo's citation originates from a comedy or not, one thing we can certainly say is that much of the force of the hetaira's innuendo-laden quip results from its connection to the Odyssey, and specifically to Penelope. As such, Strabo's account of Corinth at Geography 8.6.20 is an intriguing addition to our knowledge of the ancient reception of Odysseus’ supposedly ever-faithful wife.
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