Cato The Elder Understood Pythionice’s Public Prominence

Anyone who doesn’t consider Eros the most important god
is either stupid, or lacks experience of what is good
and fails to realize who the most significant god for mortals is. [1]

By Author Douglas Galbi: In ancient Greece, the largest tomb monument on the Sacred Way into Athens didn’t belong to any of the great Athenian political leaders, who were all men. The largest tomb monument honored Pythionice. She was a beautiful prostitute who helped to realize the progressive, democratic welfare program of the wise law-maker Solon. Comparing the formal status of women and men has promoted the false cult of patriarchy. Women like Pythionice have always been the most powerful persons in urbanized human societies.
Pythionice was a pioneer of democratic welfare reform. Prostitutes throughout history have favored serving the men who would pay the most money for sex. Pythionice, however, burned with the democratic spirit kindled in fifth-century Athens.
Herself a third-generation descendant of slaves and whores, she made herself “available to anyone who wanted her at a minimal price.”[2] She thus worked to reduce the most significant inequality in human societies.
Pythionice was honored in death beyond any man. Harpulus, an aristocrat who served as director general of the royal treasury for his childhood friend Alexander the Great, adored Pythionice. She was everything he wasn’t and could never be. He built great tombs for her in Athens and Babylon. A ancient historian complained to Alexander about Harpulus’s honoring of Pythionice:

neither he nor any other official has yet set up a marker at the burial spot of the men who died in Cilicia to secure your kingdom and the freedom of the Greeks … {yet Harpulus} had the audacity to construct a temple and a sanctuary in her honor, and to refer to the temple buildings and the altar as belonging to Pythionice Aphrodite, both ignoring the revenge the gods might take on him and doing his best to trample in the mud the honors due to you. [3]

Men conscripted into armies and dying fighting for their country matters little in public discourse relative to women’s voluntary, non-fatal sexual service. Men honor women as de facto the greatest gods.
Women rule as gods in mundane ways. Consider the ancient Greek courtesan Gnathaena:

Gnathaena was extremely witty and sophisticated in conversation, and composed a set of dinner regulations, which her lovers were required to follow when they visited her and her daughter, in imitation of the philosophers who put together similar documents. … This set of regulations was drafted to be equitable and to apply to everyone: 323 lines long. [4]

Highly detailed sex regulations currently being enacted at U.S. colleges and universities are much more extensive than Gnathaena’s regulations, but the spirit is the same. So is the attitude in enforcing them:

after all these dishes, {a slave} came carrying a large number
of testicles. The other women pretended not to notice them,
but the man-slaying Gnathaena laughed
and said, “What nice kidneys, by the beloved
Demeter!” And she grabbed two and gobbled them down [5]

The ancient Greek goddess Demeter was often known under the cult title Thesmophoros (“Bringer of Divine Law”).[6] The real threat of castration, obscured with ridicule, trivialization, and scholarly verbiage, serves to suppress men’s sexuality and keep men subordinate to women.
In Rome about 2200 years ago, Cato the Elder (also known as Cato the Wise) understood women’s rule. Cato quickly became a stock figure for the traditionalist — the white-knight woman server ridiculed for supporting enormous gender inequality in instructing children. Yet alongside his silly traditionalism, Cato had keen insight into women’s power:

He used to say that the man who struck his wife or child, laid violent hands on the holiest of holy things. Also that he thought it more praiseworthy to be a good husband than a good senator … Discoursing on the power of women, he said: “All other men rule their wives; we rule all other men, and our wives rule us.” [7]

Of course, rational, forward-looking men don’t get married. Moreover, one shouldn’t be too traditionalist, prudish, or idealistic to recognize that many women effectively work as prostitutes or courtesans (as do many men more metaphorically in their workplaces). Yet Cato with his wisdom recognized a subtle, fundamental truth: women rule. Liberation from ancient, oppressive structures of gynocentrism is the greatest social-justice challenge facing societies today.

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Notes:
[1] Euripides (from Auge, according to Stobaeus), quoted in Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophistae 13.600d, from Greek trans. Olson (2006-12) vol. 7, p. 33. I’ve adapted the translation to be non-sexist.
[2] Theopompus, Letter to Alexander, quoted in Athenaeus 13.595b, trans. id, p. 7. The subsequent quote is from id., 13.595b-c. Pythionice lived in Athens in the fourth or third century BGC. McClure (2003) p. 192. In addition to Athenaeus, the Greek historians Diodorus Siculus (first-century BGC) and Pausanias (second century GC) tell of Harpalus building a massive funerary monument for Pythionice. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History (Bibliotheca historica) 17.108.5. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.37.5.
[3] The men who died fighting for Alexander’s empire in Cilicia fought in the battle of Issus (333 BGC).
[4] Athenaeus 13.585b-c, trans. Olson (2006-12) vol. 6, p. 381. The text before the ellipsis is from the deipnosophist Myrtilus; the text after the ellipsis is quoted from Callimachus, Laws, third tablet.
[5] Philippides, Ananeosis (Rejuvenation), quoted in Athenaeus 9.384e-f, trans. Olson (2006-12) vol. 4, p. 281, 283, using the more literal “man-slaying” for Olson’s “bloodthirsty.” Gnathaena in ancient Greek means “Jaws.” McClure (2003) p. 89. Id. shows no awareness of the prevalence of violence against men, and no awareness that trivializing violence against men’s genitals is part of the structure of gender oppression.
[6] A tenth-century Greek scholion to Lucian, Dialogs of the Courtesans 2.1, declares:

Demeter is given the epithet “Lawgiver” for having set down customs, which is to say laws, under which men have to acquire and work for their food.

Rabe (1906) translation, quoted (with incorrect attribution) in O’Higgins (2003) p. 22. Women set the laws by which men work. The scholion further stated that the festival Thesmophoria “civilized the race of humans.” The gender-derogatory banality that women are necessary to civilize men became a key component of the late-twentieth-century celebration of men-oppressing courtly love. With respect to the Thesmophoria:

Only women took part, although it required the support — financial and otherwise — of the men in the community.

Id. p. 22. The Thesmophoria thus provided a forerunner of the gender structure of today’s child custody and child support laws in action.
[7] Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Life of Cato the Elder 20.2, 8.2, from Greek trans. Bernodotte Perrin (1914), Loeb Classical Library, adapted non-substantially. Plutarch stated that this is wisdom that Cato translated into Latin from a Greek saying of Themistocles:

This, however, is a translation from the sayings of Themistocles. He, finding himself much under his son’s orders through the boy’s mother, said: “Wife, the Athenians rule the Greeks, I rule the Athenians, you rule me, and your son, you. Therefore let him make sparing use of that authority which makes him, child though he is, the most powerful of the Greeks.

Id. 8.3, modernized English. Themistocles jokingly referred to the child as the ultimate ruler. On the solicitousness of fathers toward their daughters, Hallett (1984) pp. 109-14. Cato more insightfully recognized that wives rule. Leading scholars today are beginning to recognize seriously that women rule.
Men’s sexed protest existed even in Cato’s time. Aulus Gellius reports:

Marcus Cato, when recommending the Voconian law, spoke as follows: “In the beginning, the woman brought you a great dowry. Then she holds back a large sum of money, which she does not entrust to the control of her husband, but lends it to her husband. Later, becoming angry with him, she orders a servus recepticius, or ‘ slave of her own,’ to hound him and demand the money.”

Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 17.6.1, from Latin trans. John C. Rolfe (1927), Loeb Classical Library. Today, government agencies perform this role of servus recepticius.
Illumination on folio 8r of fifteenth-century French manuscript, Le Livre que fist Jehan Bocace, de Certalde, des Cleres et nobles femmes, lequel il envoya à Andrée des Alpes de Florence, contesse de Haulteville. ark:/12148/btv1b10515437z  Thanks to Bibliothèque nationale de France.
References:
Hallett, Judith P. 1984. Fathers and daughters in Roman society: women and the elite family. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
McClure, Laura. 2003. Courtesans at table: gender and Greek literary culture in Athenaeus. New York: Routledge.
O’Higgins, Laurie. 2003. Women and humor in classical Greece. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Olson, S. Douglas ed. and trans. 2006-2012. Athenaeus of Naucratis. The learned banqueters {Deipnosophistae}. Loeb Classical Library vols. 204, 208, 224, 235, 274, 327, 345, 519. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

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