McClure, Laura. Courtesans At Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus. New York: Routledge, 2004. 242 pp.

by Anna Andes

Laura McClure's latest book, Courtesans At Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus (2004), continues her work as one of today's leading feminist classicists. Her two previous works, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society (co-edited with Andre Lardinois, Princeton University Press, 2001), explored the discrepancies between fictive and genuine, private and public, literary and non-literary representations of women and women's lives in ancient Greek culture. In Courtesans At Table McClure explores these issues further by focusing upon a heretofore little studied and little understood category of ancient woman, the courtesan.