Parker (1992) points out, "the scientific classification extended not only to the parts of speech but also the figures of speech, the Skhêmata (Latin figurae), a word ambiguous between the positioning of words in a sentence and the positioning of bodies in a bed" (p. Their appearance coincides with an era (between the end of classical Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic age) when the episteme becomes dominated by a compulsory taxonomic attitude, stemming from the canonization of Aristotelian philosophy, and by the proliferation of systematic treatises on rhetoric. Scholars have suggested a close relationship between sex manuals and other "technical" books such as cookbooks, medical treatises, and other scientific works. In the case of the scholar and philosopher Pamphile of Epidaurus (first century ce), the hypothesis, quoted in the Suda, that her treatise (titled, traditionally, Peri Aphrodision) might have been authored by her father or her husband shows how problematic (either for the scandalous nature of the work or for the erudition that writing per se required) was the notion of a woman author who was not even a prostitute. This feminine authorship is almost certainly a (slanderous) fictional cliché. As in the case of this mythical inventor, sources attribute almost all of the ancient manuals on sexual schemata to female writers, usually slaves or hetaerae who wrote drawing on personal experience. According to the Suda the originator of the genre was a woman, Astyanassa, a maid of Helen of Troy who wrote a treatise on sexual positions. This fragment, highly damaged, contains the introduction to a work ( Peri Aphrodision, i.e., "On the Things of Aphrodite") attributed to Philaenis (fourth century bce). The only surviving textual fragment was found in an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (early second century ce) and published by Edgar Lobel in 1972 (see Cataudella 1973). Evidence of the existence of this literary genre (as distinct from other forms of licentious literature) relies almost entirely on quotes found in repertories or encyclopedias (Athenaeus, second to third century ce the Byzantine Suda, tenth century ce) or in parodies (most notably in Ovid's Ars Amatoria).
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