e in dress, customs, and language, but seeing it all from afar,
and vaguely, like images in a dream, never setting foot on terra firma.

Before she became a woman she was the mistress of the owner of the ship,
a pilot from Samos, who, grown tired of her, or tempted by money, sold
her one night to a Boeotian who maintained a _dicterion_ in the
Piraeus. She was not yet twelve years of age, and little Sonnica
attracted special attention among the _dicteriadai_ who swarmed by night
in the Piraeus, the chief centre of Athenian prostitution.

The floating population of the city, composed of foreigners, gamblers,
and young men thrown out of their homes by severe fathers, congregated
in that suburb of Athens which surrounded the ports of the Piraeus and
Phalerum and formed the deme of Estiron. No sooner had night closed in
than the whole noisy and corrupt world gathered in the great square in
the Piraeus, between the citadel and the port, and prostitutes began to
circulate, who with the coming of the shadows, were privileged to leave
the _dicteria_ in which they had been confined. On the porticos around
the square the gamblers shook dice, wandering philosophers argued,
vagabonds slept, mariners told of their voyages, and through this
confusion of diverse peoples passed the _dicteriadai_, with painted
faces, almost nude, or wearing striped mantles of vivid colors which
revealed an African or Asiatic origin. There the young daughter of
Cyprus grew up and became acquainted with the world, seeking each night
some wheat merchant from Bithynia, or some exporter of hides from Magna
Graecia, rude and merry people, who, before returning to their native
lands wished to spend some of their earnings on the courtesans of
Athens. By day she was a prisoner in the _dicterion_, a house of sordid
aspect, without other ornamentation on the facade than an enormous
phallus which served the establishment as a sign, the door standing open
at all hours without the chained dog customary at other dwellings, and
displaying, immediately the heavy curtain was raised, an open courtyard,
in which, near the entrance to the rooms, squatting or lying on the
pavement, were all the wares of the house, women worn and consumed by
the fires of concupiscence and girls barely arrived at puberty. All were
nude, the dark and velvety skin of the Egyptians contrasting with the
pale countenance of the Greeks and the white and silky flesh of the
Asiatics.

Sonnica, who wa