Leaena
Leaina (Λέαινα "lioness") was a hetaera and the mistress of Aristogeiton the Tyrannicide.[1]
When Anaxandridas II was king of Sparta in the 6th century BC, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were inspired to overthrow the tyranny of Hippias and Hipparchus.[2]
Hipparchus was murdered, but Hippias escaped, and seized the surviving conspirators. Among those captured was the hetaera Leaina, lover of Aristogeiton. Leaina was tortured to get information about the conspiracy.[3] Leaina rose to the occasion; to preserve her silence, and to frustrate her torturers, she bit her tongue off, and so died.[4]
According to Athenaeus, Leaina's lover was Harmodius: "There was also a courtesan named Leaena, whose name is very celebrated, and she was the mistress of Harmodius, who slew the tyrant. And she, being tortured by command of Hippias the tyrant, died under the torture without having said a word." [5]
According to Pausanias, the Athenians, unwilling to openly honour a courtesan, set up a statue of a bronze lioness on the Acropolis in her memory.[6] The brass lioness statue at the entrance was without a tongue[7] and it was made by the Athenian sculptor Amphicrates according to Pliny,[8] or made by Calamis and dedicated by Callias according to Pausanias.[9]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Polyaenus, Stratagems, 8.45
- ^ The Death of Hipparchus
- ^ Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Volume I, Book II, Chapter III, Section III
- ^ Beginning of the Consuls of the Romans
- ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 13.596.f
- ^ Pausanias 1.23.1–2.
- ^ Plutarch, On Talkativeness, Moralia 505.E
- ^ Entry Amphicrates at the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
- ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece, Paus. 1.23.2
References
Primary sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History VII.23.87, 34.19.72
- Eusebius, Chronicon 106.1-7
- Plutarch, Moralia On Talkativeness 505E
Secondary sources
- Plutarch, The Morals, volume 4, trans. William W. Goodwin w/ Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1878) The Online Library of Liberty
- The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens By Eva C. Keuls, p. 194, University of California Press (1993), ISBN 0-520-07929-9
- Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Volume I, Book II, Chapter III, Section III, by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Project Guttenberg
- Eusebius, Chronicon, ed R. Helm (Leipzig, Germany 1913), 106.1-7
External links
Media related to Leaina at Wikimedia Commons
