Aphrodite Coming Down from Acrocorinth to Visit Laïs

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Laïs lived in Corinth when beauty was still a kind of currency and the gods had not yet been informed that they were going out of business.

Men came to see her carrying philosophy, silver, poetry, military victories and other things they hoped might impress a woman who had already seen everything twice.

Aristippus came too.

He was a philosopher and therefore arrived carrying almost nothing except an explanation for why almost nothing was better than something.

Laïs charged him anyway.

Corinth was good for this sort of thing. Ships came in from two seas loaded with wine, pottery, lies and men who had been away from home long enough to believe almost anything.

Above the city Aphrodite watched from her hill.

She had the best view.

Perhaps she laughed.

There may have been two Laïses.

History sometimes does that when one beautiful woman becomes too heavy for it to carry. It divides her in half.

One Laïs was Corinthian.

The other came from Sicily, perhaps captured when armies were doing what armies have always done: turning somebody else’s afternoon into history.

Eventually the two women became tangled together until nobody could remember which Laïs had loved whom, charged what, died where, or said the clever thing that everybody kept repeating.

This probably would have amused them both.

Outside Corinth there was a cypress grove called the Kraneion.

Laïs was said to be buried there.

Her tomb had a lioness holding a ram beneath her paws.

No inscription could have improved it.

The lioness does not explain herself.

Neither does the ram.

Two thousand years pass.

The philosophers disappear.

The customers disappear.

The silver changes emperors and countries and finally becomes something behind glass that children hurry past on their way to the bathroom.

Even Aphrodite’s temples become stones lying around in the sun.

But somewhere beneath Corinth, Laïs continues her appointment with eternity.

The lioness still has the ram.

Perhaps that was the joke all along.

Every man thought he was purchasing an hour of Laïs.

Actually Laïs was purchasing centuries.

She paid with beauty, which was the only money she had that everybody wanted and nobody could keep.

Corinth vanished around her like a ship sailing into fog.

And Laïs remained—

not quite a woman anymore,

not quite a story,

just a lioness with her paw resting gently on time.