Courtesans' gifts to Aphrodite, by the two Antipaters

These epigrams are by the two Antipaters, of Sidon (late 2nd century BC) and Thessalonica (late 1st century BC, an Augustan court poet). They fall within a substantial run (6.206-211) of poems notionally written to accompany thank-offerings to Aphrodite by women retiring from careers as courtesans. 

The women are moving from the care of Aphrodite 'Pandemos' (vulgar) to that of Aphrodite 'Urania' (heavenly) because they are leaving the profession to enter a new chapter in their lives as respectable married women.

6.206 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF SIDON>

These sandals that were comfy on her feet,

Labour of love of skilful shoemakers,

Bitinna gives; Philaenis brings the net

That tamed her straying hair, dyed in the blooms

Of surging sea; and as for Anticleia,

She gives her fan; the veil that hid her face,

Worked delicately as a spider-web,

Is pretty Heracleia’s; and the snake,

Her shapely ankles’ golden ornament,

Well-coiled, from she who shares her father’s name,

Our Aristoteleia. These best friends,

Alike in age, now dedicate their gifts

To Cythereia the Uranian.

Philaenis' hair-net is dyed scarlet with orchil, made from seaweed.

Poems on retiring courtesans go all the way back to literary epigram's early years, with Philetas (4th-3rd century, 6.210) and Leonidas of Tarentum (3rd century, 6.211). How often they found good husbands in real life I would not care to guess, but in the epigrams of Book 6 the trope is so firmly established that the second of my poems can play around with it. 6.208 puts the scene in an ecphrastic frame. We do not see the women in the act of dedication; instead we take it in at second-hand, through art. If the other poems in the sequence are notionally dedicatory inscriptions, 6.208 is notionally the caption to a painting.

6.208 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF THESSALONICA>

The one with sandals is Menecratis;

It is Phēmonoe who brings the cloak,

And Praxo has the cup. That is the shrine

Of Aphrodite, and her statue too.

The work is Aristomachus’, of Thrace.

All three are citizens, and courtesans;

But they have chanced to meet the Cyprian

In mellow mood, and now each one of them

Becomes the property of just one man.