History, Philosophy and The High-Class Escort

There’s no roadmap for the high-class escort working today. She has virtually no-one, past or present, to admire, be inspired by, or learn from. The truth as to why this is, remains firmly buried in the archives.

In Alicphron’s Letters of the Courtesans, high-class escorts, from late-2nd century AD, live, work, and love together, weaving their magic to pleasure both themselves and their suitors. In one fragment, even a simple meal is rarefied into an enticing and sensual work of living poetry, both for a high-class escort’s suitor, and, vicariously, for a second lover learning about it in a letter:

The ground was soft from clover and trefoil. In the middle circle some hyacinths and a variety of flowers made the sight beautiful. Nightingales, perched amid leaves of spring, sang in a pleasant and twittering way; the drops of water that gently dripped like sweat from the rock made a pleasant sound befitting our springtime drinking party. Here were eggs, which quivered like buttocks, slices of tender lamb and homebred hens. There was wine, not domestic but Italian […]

Alicphron’s is, of course, a pastoral romance but there’s something about the Letters that rings true to the lived experience of high-class escorts. Together, the Letters offer a nuanced vignette of early high-class escort life: the men fall rapturously in love; while the high-class escorts themselves have their favourites, yearn for them, and even bump against the realities of making ends meet. ‘I wish a high-class escort could be maintained by tears;’ writes one high-class escort to her favourite, ‘You are crying, but you will soon stop. As a high-class escort, if I don’t have a generous lover, however, I will surely starve’.

Yet, more than financial concerns, the high-class escorts of Alicphron’s Letters are threatened by something darker: the propagation of early, western philosophy. Writes another high-class escort to her young suitor:

Ever since you got into your head to study philosophy you’ve become a solemn kind of guy with your eyebrows raised to the top of your head. Then you stroll to the Academy with a pompous appearance and with a booklet in your hands, and walk by my house like you’d never seen it before. Do you think a philosopher is any different from a high-class escort? […] Perhaps we high-class escorts seem inferior, to you, because we don’t know where the clouds come from or what the atoms are like.

Western philosophy was a wrecking ball to the bower of bliss built by Alicphron’s high-class escorts, severing the rational mind from the feeling body, and arbitrarily assigning a gender to each. The philosopher’s academy that the high-class escort speaks of, here, is a guardedly male space, where a form of rational thinking is taught, one that is cold, hard, ascetic, and unflinchingly unemotional. Anything warm, soft, playful, intuitive, or loving, becomes coded feminine, and Alicphron’s high-class escorts are quickly devalued and made inferior in the process.

This didn’t have to be the case. Five hundred years earlier, Xenophon’s Memorabilia (c. 370BC) describes an encounter between Socrates, the godfather of Western Philosophy, and a high-class escort. Socrates overhears someone exclaiming that words cannot describe this high-class escort’s great beauty. Methodical, rational, and in good humour, he says to his friends, ‘We had better go and see her; what beggars description can’t very well be learned by hearsay’. They arrive at the high-class escort’s house where she is sitting for a painter. The high-class escort’s exquisite beauty opens up opportunity for Socratic dialogue: ‘My friends, ought we to be more grateful to this high-class escort for showing us her beauty, or she to us for looking at it?’ asks Socrates, ‘Does the obligation rest with the high-class escort, if she profits more by showing it, or with us, if we profit more by looking?” His speculative genius quickly gathers momentum:

[…] she already has our praise to her credit, and when we spread the news, she will profit yet more; whereas we already long to touch what we have seen, and we shall go away excited and shall miss her when we are gone. The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.

It’s an assured and elegant synthesis, but the relationship between the high-class escort and her suitor is more complex than even Socrates can imagine, and he’s unprepared for what happens next. The high-class escort answers back: ‘If that is so,’ she replies, ‘I ought to be grateful to you for looking’.

Considering her suggestion and clocking the high-class escort’s beautiful home and sumptuous clothes, Socrates probes more deeply into the high-class escort lifestyle. The high-class escort explains she has no farm or property to leverage, but that she relies solely upon the generosity of her friends for her livelihood. ‘Do you trust to luck, or have you some contrivance?’ he asks. Guileless, she responds with a question: ‘And what kind of contrivance could do that?’

Socrates’ imagination runs wild, advocating variously for: ‘an agent who will track and find rich men with an eye for beauty’; ascribing to the high-class escort knowledge of ‘what glance will please, what words delight’; arguing that suitors ‘will appreciate your favours most highly if you wait till they ask for them’. Socrates attempts to reverse-engineer what it is the high-class escort does. But the high-class escort herself seems unfamiliar with any of it, gently insists that nothing she does is premeditated in the way Socrates suggests, and thanks him for his wisdom. ‘Why don’t you become my partner in the pursuit of friends? Come and see me often!’ she implores. ‘By all means’, replies Socrates, who has a wife at home and finds no impropriety in this. The deal is struck. The philosopher and the high-class escort – what will, in time, differentiate into masculine and feminine energies – co-exist without hierarchy here, exploring and sparking off one another. Across the exchange, their different registers click, co-operate, and both parties emerge with their hearts’ desire.

This moment of egalitarian acceptance for the high-class escort is, however, all too brief. Using parts of the model proposed by Socrates, Ancient Greece created a new kind of companion, the porne (from which we derive the modern word, ‘pornography’) who mimicked affection and attachment, ignored mutual companionship and respect, traded in exploited bodies rather than mutual pleasure, and often lived and worked in poor and unsanitary conditions. In the five hundred years between Xenophon and Alicphron, the high-class escort and the porne existed side by side, with the noble virtues of the former eroded by the sad and exploited depravity of the latter. Grudgingly, as seen in the writings of St Augustine, the early church tolerated the porne, which they regarded as a transactional, physical safety valve for a pent-up frustration that could otherwise turn into a mutual and adulterous relationship.

By the Renaissance, all that was left of classical civilisation’s high-class escorts were bawdy caricatures in the plays of Terence and Plautus, frequently staged in England’s new universities.  Shakespeare imagined the high-class escorts of Italy as exotic but ruinous temptresses, but the reality in real-world Italy was an altogether more sombre affair. In an effort to stamp them out entirely, high-class escorts came to be treated like witches.

In 1580, the high-class escort, Veronica Franco was accused of using consecrated artefacts to summon unholy demons. She was, thankfully, acquitted, but fellow high-class escorts, Emilia Catena and Isabella Balochi were not so fortunate: they were publicly flogged and forced to stand on the Rialto with paper bags over their heads.

By the 17th century, high-class escorts, as they had been conceived by the Ancients, moved in aristocratic circles in very limited numbers only. They were, otherwise, all but forgotten, rendered invisible by the ubiquity of porne. But the Enlightenment’s neoclassical revival sent scholars back to the times and cultures in which the high-class escort had once flourished.  Significantly, Descartes would pick up Aristotle, the student of Plato, who was, himself, the student of Socrates, and rearticulate classical dualism for contemporary times, asserting, once again, the essential separateness of the thinking mind and the feeling body. In doing so, Descartes laid down the template for the very idea of what it meant to be human in modern times. The fashionable salons, the last remnants of the type of community created by the first high-class escorts, constituted his only resistance.

Descartes assertion that the ‘mind has no sex’ had been welcomed by Bluestocking feminists, determined that women were every inch as good as men. But, like the earliest high-class escorts, the salons were wary of the thinking body becoming cut off from its vital emotions, feelings and sensibility. Descartes’ niece, Catherine, argued for the restoration of ‘a form of attention to the natural world that is like one’s ideal attention to the human world […] a form of love’. Silently invoking the power of the ancient high-class escorts, she would insist upon that love, and she’d attempt to argue for it, not by rational thinking, but by sensual persuasion: ‘When truth comes from such lovely lips / It convinces the stubbornist mind’.

Catherine Descartes’s resistance ultimately proved in vain. The opening and cultural ascent of Europe’s Academies of Science doubled down her uncle’s rebooted dualism. Any chance of publicly restoring the co-created sanctuary of the first high-class escorts, which celebrated intuition, love, and reciprocity, was finally scuppered.

There’s no roadmap for the high-class escort. But there’s enough light to see by, for you and I to create something of that forgotten life together, that is beautiful, complete, and, dare I say without exaggeration, these days, so much more than human.

Portrait of Veronica Franco by Tintoretto (n.d.)