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Abstract
This paper examines Aeschines’s speech Against Timarchus to offer frameworks for rhetoric to examine the historical particularities of sex work. Drawing on feminist and queer rhetorics, this paper rereads Against Timarchus as well as scholarly receptions of the speech to discuss how Timarchus has been positioned outside definitions of rhetoric in ways that highlight the instability of definitions of rhetoric and state power. This paper argues that kakos and atimia are useful concepts for rhetorical historiographers for examining sex work in classical Athens, as well as interrogating the power structures upon which a given definition of rhetoric is derived from.
Notes
1 I would like to thank RR reviewers John Belk and another anonymous reader for their generative and thoughtful feedback on this essay. I would also like to thank Lois Agnew, Eileen Schell, and Brice Nordquist for their feedback on earlier iterations of this essay.
2 Euruprôktos literally translates to “wide-anus” and was an insult directed at men who were penetrated during same-sex sex; however, as T.K. Hubbard notes, the epithet was not only thrown toward men known to have been penetrated as many Greeks assumed that the beloveds grew up to be lovers in pederastic relationships (55).
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Notes on contributors
T Passwater
T Passwater is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a PhD candidate at Syracuse University. Their research focuses on the intersection of rhetorical theory, histori(es/ographies), and queer and trans theories and lives.