Two courtesans gossip. Clonarium has heard that Leaena is living with Megilla, a rich woman from Lesbos, and wants to know everything. Leaena isn't sure she should tell.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Dialogues of the Courtesans, and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like. A few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Dialogue 5 · Leaena and Megilla and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Dialogues of the Courtesans’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Lucian wrote a set of short comic scenes in which courtesans talk among themselves about money, lovers, mothers and rivals. The fifth is the one people remember. Leaena tells her friend how Megilla and Demonassa invited her in, and how Megilla pulled off a wig, showed a head shaved close like an athlete's, and said her name was Megillus. We are pressing dialogue 5 first. It is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens sooner.
Lucian was born in Samosata on the Euphrates in the second century AD, wrote in Greek, and made his name as a travelling speaker before he turned to comic dialogues. His True Story, a voyage to the moon, is in the press here too.
Asked if she is a man, Megillus says: I was born a woman like the rest of you, but I have the mind and the desires of a man. When Clonarium asks what happened next, Leaena stops. By Aphrodite, she won't say.
Making an interlinear Dialogues of the Courtesans is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Dialogue 5 · Leaena and Megilla gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy; you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Dialogues of the Courtesans that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the Dialogues of the Courtesans opens. No other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.