British Deliberation on Suppressing Prisoners’ Communication

British authorities strongly supported suppressing prisoners’ communication. British official William Crawford visited penitentiaries in the U.S. in the early 1830s. In his 1835 report to the British government, Crawford urged that prisoners be confined separately and not be allowed to communicate with each other. For prisoners convicted of an offense, Crawford also suggested, “All letters, as well as visits and messages from friends, should be strictly prohibited, under a penalty.”^ Later that year, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Gaols and Houses of Corrections heard testimony from judicial and prison officials. The witnesses generally endorsed suppressing communication among prisoners by keeping prisoners separate and silent. Under leading questions from the Select Committee, witnesses agreed that prisoners’ communication with family and friends “take up the Time of the Officers of the Prison,” “interfere very much with the Discipline of the Prison,” and “unhinge the Prisoner’s Mind.” A judicial official described family and friends visiting prisoners as highly injurious:

it completely neutralizes the Instructions of a good Chaplain; it takes away from the necessary Severity that was intended by the Imprisonment and by the Sentence, and is a constant Irritation.^

The Select Committee’s resolutions included:

That entire Separation, except during the Hours of Labour and of Religious Worship and Instruction, is absolutely necessary for preventing Contamination, and for securing a proper system of Prison Discipline.
That Silence be enforced, so as to prevent all Communication between Prisoners both before and after Trial.
That convicted Prisoners be not permitted to receive Visits or Letters from their Friends during the first Six Months of their Imprisonment, unless under peculiar and pressing Circumstances.^

In suggesting restricting prisoners’ communication with family and friends, the Select Committee remarked:

It is obvious that nothing could more tend to lighten the Weight of Imprisonment, as well as to unsettle the Minds of Prisoners, and thereby to diminish the Efficacy of Punishment, than frequent Visits from Friends, and frequent Communication by Letter.^

The phrase “it is obvious” often covers for lack of analysis. Contemporary debate, as well as subsequent experience, raised serious questions about effects on prisoners of depriving them of communication.

Officials associated with the Millbank Penitentiary argued in favor of prisoners’ communication with family and friends. Employing cost-benefit analysis with attention to deterrence incentives, the Chaplain of the Millbank Penitentiary strongly advocated allowing prisoners’ to communicate with family and friends:

As this Communication with their Friends and the World is no Doubt a considerable Solace both to the Prisoners and to their Friends, I admit that it takes away somewhat from the Rigor of the Imprisonment, and its Tendency to deter from Crime, yet the Advantages gained are, in my Opinion, so much greater than the Injury resulting from it, that I must strongly advocate the Continuance of this Indulgence. …Cut away the last Tie which connects the Convict with his family, and you remove One of the strongest Inducements to Reformation. And many of the prisoners have respectable Connexions, with whom it is most important they should be reconciled, and ultimately be reunited. I have frequently seen the greatest Advantage resulting from this Indulgence: offended Relations have been reconciled; an Interest with valuable Friends has been kept up; a Home and Employment, previous to Discharge from this Institution, have been provided. One Part of the Penitentiary System, the Reformation of the Offender, has thus been materially aided, without much Interference with the other, the deterring from Crime.^

The Governor of the Millbank Penitentiary supported the Chaplain’s position. The Governor emphasized to the Select Committee the importance of a prisoners’ communication with family and friends in securing employment for the prisoner upon discharge. He also asserted that a prisoner’s links with his wife and children should not be completely severed. By limiting the proposed ban on convicted prisoners’ communication with family and friends to the first six months of imprisonment, the Select Committee may have implicitly acknowledged some concern.

Transnational Consensus Supported Suppressing Prisoners’ Communication

By 1840, suppressing prisoners’ communication was a victorious idea within vigorous, transnational deliberation about punishment and prisons. The Eastern State Penitentiary became a leading exemplar of what was usually called the Pennsylvania system or separate system. The Auburn State Prison became the leading exemplar of what was usually called the Auburn system or the congregate system. Influential and highly respected persons, both in official and unofficial capacities, traveled from near and far to visit these prisons. Many of these eminent visitors wrote influential treatises that praised the Eastern State Penitentiary and extensively discussed means and consequences of suppressing prisoners’ communication. Other authorities advocated the Auburn System, or variants of it. The question for all was not whether to suppress prisoners’ communication, but the best way to do it.

Early reports of the British prison inspectors display this organization of discussion. The British prison inspectors’ second and third reports (1837 and 1838) contain lengthy sections organized as arguments for the Separate System (the Pennsylvania System) compared to the Silent System (the Auburn System). The Third Report marshals the views of twenty-one authorities in favor of the Separate System, including authorities in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, and Poland.^

The first International Penitentiary Congress in 1846 provided a transnational forum for discussing prison reform. The Congress was held in Frankfort-am-Main, Germany. Edouard Ducpétiaux, director of prisons in Belgium, and Whitworth Russell, inspector-general of prisons in Britain, organized it. They described their motivation for organizing the Congress:

Why is the progress of prison reform so slow? Why such diversity of systems? Certainly, greater unity of views is desirable, and, if arrived at, might secure a better success. ^

This motivation indicates concern about putting knowledge into practice and perhaps also hints at some trans-Atlantic policy rivalry. Among the seventy-five delegates who attended International Penitentiary Congress, most were senior European officials and European scholars. Dr. Karl Joseph Anton Mittermaier, distinguished professor of law at the University of Heidelberg, was elected president of the Congress.^ The only representative from the U.S. was Rev. Louis Dwight, the secretary of the Boston Prison Discipline Society and a zealous exponent of the Auburn system.

Discussion at the International Penitentiary Congress of 1846 mainly concerned suppressing communication among prisoners. Seven out of the nineteen questions proposed for the Congress specifically referred to the Auburn system or the Pennsylvania system. Seventeen concerned some aspects or consequences of suppressing communication among prisoners.^ The Congress endorsed “separate confinement.” Separate confinement, as defined in the Congress’s resolutions, suppressed communication and association among prisoners but provided prisoners with labor, exercise, instruction, and visits from persons in various official positions. Delegates unanimously endorsed separate confinement for prisoners awaiting trail and for short-time imprisonment. Three-fourths of the delegates supported separate confinement for “longer terms.”^

By organizing deliberation around the respective merits of systems for suppressing prisoners’ communication, the international penal congresses probably help to create implicit consensus that suppressing prisoners’ communication was a worthy goal. About 1869, Scalia, an eminent Italian justice official, noted:

For the last fifty years, the efficiency of the different penitentiary systems has been carefully debated, but that question has not yet made much progress; and, at present, as was the case a long time ago, the champions of different schools are ranged in the field of abstractions, to go over the same arguments, and to allege, on both sides, the same facts and arguments.^

Scalia argued for ongoing, systematic, standardized fact collection and scientific analysis of consequences. What went on in international congresses, he argued, was a much different sort of discourse:

Generally speaking, the congresses were mere academies, where any one went with the stock of goods he wanted to dispose of, and left with the same convictions which he entertained before those conventions.^

Such deliberative exercises can have consequences. A likely consequence is strengthening the assumptions that organized the formal deliberation.

masked prisoners silently walking together — Prisoners wearing face-obscuring masks walk by holding a rope under the silent system in Pentonville Prison, London, in the mid-19th century.

Prison construction and administration around the world in the middle of the nineteenth century indicates widespread consensus that prisoners’ communication should be suppressed. In Warsaw, Poland, construction began on a prison with 380 separate cells about 1831 and was completed in 1835.^ In 1839, a prison in Mecklenburg, Germany, began confining prisoners in isolation for one-year terms. By 1869, the ordinary form of imprisonment in Germany was described as solitary confinement, limited by statute in 1871 to no more than three years.^ Systematic suppression of prisoners’ communication was introduced in the Belgian prison system in 1835. In subsequent years suppression of prisoners’ communication was extended to numerous prisons in Belgium. These prisons included separate exercise spaces for prisoners and the uses of masks and separate stalls in chapel services.^ A prison that strictly suppressed prisoners’ communication began operation in Pentonville, England, in 1842. Known as the Model Prison, it also attracted many important visitors and was highly influential world-wide.^ From 1835 to 1850, prisons in North and South America, Europe (including Russia), India, Egypt, Australia and New Zealand adopted new designs and new rules intended to suppress prisoners’ communication.

Through the beginning of the twentieth century, International Penitentiary Congresses continued to endorse suppressing prisoners’ communication. This consensus endured in conjunction with the formalities of empiricism:

The International Prison Congress of 1900 discussed the results of the experiments, especially in Belgium, and reached the conclusion that the method {separate system} must be regarded with favor; that it has met the expectations of the promoters in diminishing or checking recidivism and general criminality, and that even when prolonged during ten years and more of confinement, there are no more unfavorable effects upon physical and mental health than occur under other methods, provided that those already seriously defective are removed.^

Estimating treatment effects is quite difficult, even for the separate system’s suppression of prisoners’ communication. Growth in prison populations, fiscal constraints, administrative practicality, and increased sensitivity to human rights almost surely were more important to undermining the international consensus on suppressing prisoners’ communication than was empirical evaluation of its effects on prisoners.

Penal Dimension of U.S. Communications Leadership

U.S. policy leadership in the world-wide suppressing of prisoners’ communication reflected more vigorous democratic deliberation and greater political concern about communication in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world in the early nineteenth century. Crime and punishment always have been political issues capable of garnering widespread attention. The circumstances leading up to the American Revolution produced in the U.S. a vigorous, independent, commercially driven press and persons accustomed to rough competition for popular attention and influence. The new U.S. national government encouraged open, antagonistic discussion of government policy (free speech) and of God’s will (religious freedom). It invested heavily in a geographically comprehensive national postal system, and provided favorable rates and regulations for disseminating newspapers. This democratic culture gave popular communications greater importance in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^ Not surprisingly, vigorous U.S. competition in discussing penal policy centered on prisoners’ communication.

prisoner in communication-suppressing suit — Prisoner in communication-suppressing suit in Eastern State Penitentiary (U.S.) in mid-1800s. The suit was for movement of prisoners within the penitentiary. The suits originally had no eye holes. The purpose was to deprive the prisoner of any sense of the world outside of his cell.

If one understands the U.S. Constitution and U.S. political culture to endorse government open to participation “by all the citizens, without exception,” U.S. policy leadership in suppressing prisoners’ communication might seem surprising. But influential texts, established investments in interpreting them, and class interests produced, as if by an invisible tongue, a nearly unified public voice among persons with unquestionable respect for the U.S. constitution and deep appreciation for U.S. political values. That voice urged suppressing prisoners’ communication. That voice did not distinguish between communication among prisoners and communication between prisoners and their family and friends. That grotesque result indicates that free communication can produce profoundly unjust results.

Monastic Precedent for Communicative Suppression

Systemically suppressing prisoners’ communication was not a U.S. policy innovation. At least by the twelfth century, punishment of monks sometimes took an extreme form called vade in pace (“go in peace”). This meant life imprisonment in harsh isolation, such as “a subterranean cave in the form of a grave.” In the fourteenth century, the king of France, horrified by such punishment, ordered:

priors and superiors to visit {imprisoned monks} twice a month and to give, in addition, their permission to two monks of their choice to visit them twice a month; that is, he ordered that they be visited at least once a week…. holding with reason that it was inhuman and barbarian to deprive poor wretches, overwhelmed by sorrow and pain, of all consolation.^

This description of the king’s order focuses on the frequency of visits. The indicated visitors, “two monks of their choice,” seems to refer to persons that priors and superiors designate. Monks built their communities upon expansive appreciation for brotherhood and sought to follow Abraham in knowing God intimately as a friend. Nonetheless, monastic concern for communication with imprisoned monks remained within the bounds of persons having an authorized relationship to the prisoner.

Mabillon’s Public Concern for Imprisoned Brother Denis

Jean Mabillon, a seventeenth-century European scholar and religious leader, poignantly failed to value ordinary communication with prisoners. Mabillon wrote a short essay criticizing the harsh regime of monastic prisons. Contrasting monastic prisons with lay prisons, he noted that prisoners in lay prisons usually had “the liberty to see each other at certain hours and even to receive visits from friends and other charitable persons.” Regarding errant monks deprived of such visits in monastic prisons, he declared, “May no one say that it is good for them to be left alone in order to get time to think about their conscience and seriously reflect upon the sad state into which they have precipitated themselves.” He argued that imprisoned monks should be visited at least once or twice a week, and that the visits “should last more than a moment; one should listen to them, hear their troubles and their complaints, revive them, console them, fortify them.”^

Mabillon himself engaged in friendly communication with an imprisoned monk, but he did not recognize publicly the value of this type of communication. In their monastery at Saint-Germain des Près in Paris, Brother Denis, a younger monk, became Mabillon’s companion and assistant. Brother Denis and Jean Mabillon apparently developed a close relationship.^ ^ Denis, however, engaged in “libertinage,” deserted his duties as a monk, threw off his habit, and roamed outside the monastery for months. He later reappeared deeply in debt. An effort to reform him ended with Brother Denis again abandoning his habit and running away from the monastery. Denis was subsequently apprehended and imprisoned. Mabillon described Denis as a “poor brother and friend.” When Denis was in prison, Mabillon wrote letters to him and at least sought to visit him. Mabillon communicated with Denis as a friend.

Mabillon did not publicly recognize his own practice of communicating with his imprisoned friend. In his written proposal for reform of monastic prisons, Mabillon wrote:

{Imprisoned monks} should be frequently exhorted and the superior or some one in his place should take care to visit them separately and console and fortify them from time to time. Laymen and outsiders should not be given entrance in this place, where a strict solitude should be maintained.^

Ordinary communication with family and friends, such as that of Mabillon with his imprisoned friend Brother Denis, is a typical means for consoling and fortifying. Mabillon ignored such communication in his written proposal for prison reform.

Mabillon expressed considerable concern for the reputation of monks among their peers. He noted:

it is an insupportable lack of charity, unfortunately too common, not to spare the reputation of a monk who has fallen into error, but to spread within an entire Order, or sometimes even outside, information about sins that were either hidden or known only to a few persons besides his judges.^

Showing similar concern, an early Pennsylvanian penal reformer described the consequences of public punishment as infamy and ignominy. These destroy “the sense of shame, which is one of the strongest out-posts of virtue” and have consequences that are “universally acknowledged to be worse punishment than death.”

Social elites tend to be more intensely concerned about reputation than are ordinary persons. Social reputation, however, isn’t central to ordinary understandings of friendship. Jean Mabillon was an elite, seventeenth-century religious leader. His social status may have prevented him from expressing publicly the value of his communicating with his imprisoned friend Brother Denis.

Monastic Precedent Not Central to Early 19th-Century Penal Policy

Monastic precedents did not drive the early nineteenth-century growth of communication-suppressing penitentiaries for lay prisoners. The modern scholarly literature occasionally cites monastic confinement and a seventeenth-century religious leader’s essay on reforming monastic prisons as inspirations for early nineteenth-century penal reformers. Penal reformers, however, seem not to have noticed this essay before a penal reformer published it in 1837. Deep anti-Catholicism in English and U.S. culture made monasteries, a predominately Catholic institution, an unlikely place for reformers to look for policy innovations. The Protestant Reformation popularized personal, inward-looking Christian spirituality, the aesthetics of black text on a white page, and finding “spiritual meaning in blank walls and silence.”^ Protestantism, however, generally valued little the monastic life. Instead, Protestantism directed Christians to a common vocation to contribute through their everyday work to building God’s kingdom on earth. Communication-suppressing penitentiaries grew not from Catholic institutional practices of devotion to God, but from enlightenment developments in medicine (knowledge of contagious diseases) and philosophy (utilitarianism and social welfare), and from new forms of social competition (philanthropy).

Social rationalization helps to explain undervaluing ordinary communication with prisoners. Unlike a monastic superior or other persons officially designated to visit prisoners, family and friends don’t hold institutional positions with explicitly constructed duties. One cannot plausibly propose to impose duties on persons acting as family and friends and ensure their accountability to those duties. Moreover, even within a community that extolled brotherhood and friendship, a monk might not in fact have persons regularly acting as family and friends to him. Administrative functionaries are simpler, more effective persons to use in discussing and implementing prison communication policies. Especially to institutional leaders, ordinary communication with family and friends is a less compelling idea for providing comfort and strength to prisoners than is authoritative communication authorized and represented to do just that.

Jonas Hanway’s Rise to Philanthropic Prominence

Jonas Hanway’s life is the story of a highly successful public intellectual. Hanway was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1712 to a family that was not socially or economically prominent. He was apprenticed to a merchant. After traveling through Russia to Persia on behalf of British merchants, Hanway achieved notice among the English elite through publication in 1753 of his four-volume travelogue, An historical account of the British trade over the Caspian Sea: with a journal of travels from London through Russia into Persia. By challenging oppressive gender norms that restricted men’s use of umbrellas, Hanway garnered additional public attention. Hanway, however, achieved only modest success as a merchant.

Hanway moved into the field of charitable work in 1756. Hanway achieved great success in this field:

for thirty years thereafter there was scarcely a charitable cause in London in which he was not in some way associated. In addition to founding the Marine Society, the most important new charity of those years, and fathering the 1767 statute {which provided nursing for London’s abandoned infant poor}, he was the principal director of the Magdalen Hospital in its early years, and one of the most active governors of the Foundling Hospital during the experiment with open admissions. He founded Misericordia Hospital to treat veneral disease, and the Maritime School in Chelsea to educate boys for sea service. He was a founder of the Troop Society, which aided British soldiers in Germany and North America, and was an active steward of the Stepney Society, which helped poor boys pursue marine trades. He was the first Londoner to attempt to better the lot of chimney sweeps’ young apprentices, through both charity organization and legislation. ^

A late twentieth-century biographer described Hanway’s motivation as “Evangelical Utilitarianism.”^ He was eulogized as “one of the most distinguished Philanthropists of this or any other age or nation”; “eminently conspicuous, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe.”^ Hanway’s contributions to penal policy were well-known and widely admired in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A memorial to Hanway was placed in the north transept of Westminister Abbey, which became a location for commemorating Britain’s leading statespersons.^

Hanway’s Plan for Solitary Confinement

The most prominent early advocate of suppressing prisoners’ communication was the English philanthropist Jonas Hanway. Hanway noted, “Everyone has a plan, and a favorite system.”^ Hanway’s plan was to suppress prisoners’ communication through mass solitary confinement. To help promote this plan, in 1776 Hanway published a small book with a plain grey cover. This modest form allowed it to be marketed for just one shilling.^ Hanway actively promoted his publications and often had institutions with which he was philanthropically associated subsidize and distribute his work.^ Hanway thus vigorously competed in the marketplace of ideas about penal reform.

Hanway’s marketing sense is evident even from the title of his book. Its full title:

Solitude in Imprisonment, with proper profitable Labour and a spare Diet, the most humane and effectual means of bringing Malefactors To a right Sense of their Condition, And how to qualify Offenders and Criminals for Happiness in both Worlds, And preserve the People, in the Enjoyment of the genuine Fruits of Liberty, and Freedom from Violence

The combination of “profitable Labor and a spare diet” appealed to those concerned about public expense on prisoners and to those who believed prisoners should be made to suffer. At the same time, Hanway’s plan claimed to be a “humane and effectual means” for inducing understanding of the prevailing order. In addition, it asserted utilitarian merits that covered both happiness on earth and happiness in life after death. For those not imprisoned, Hanway’s plan promised to ensure that crime did not diminish their enjoyment of liberty and freedom

Hanway’s deliberative tactics were quite sophisticated. Responding to criticisms that his plans were wholly impractical, Hanway, like a shrewd scholar peddling abstract models, linked his work to emotive aspirations and ideals:

We are always to keep such a degree of perfection in government in view, as may stimulate the endeavors of individuals, to maintain the empire of reason, and give peace and justice their true and genuine luster.^

He quickly followed up this statement with an affective international comparison. Noting that a prison recently built at Trim, Ireland, apparently provided cellular confinement, Hanway suggested that the Irish were leading the English, while also calling to the English mind Irish malefactors in England:

Whether the Irish are more or less wise than we are in England, I do not presume to decide; but they seem to shew us an example. If this imprisonment, reputed to be in solitude admits of thieves associating in any manner or degree, it will not answer to the idea I form of absolute solitude. And if Irish malefactors in Ireland are as bad as English, or Irish malefactors in England, the Directors of the Trim Prison may prove short-sighted, though in much less degree than the Directors of our Newgate.^

Hanway also made effective use of upper-class anxieties. He warned that “ill-educated common people” were thronging in London and that “religion is at a low ebb.” He linked concern about bodily disease, and developing medical knowledge, to the political system and penal policy:

as sickness and eruptions in the natural body sometimes grow into chronical distempers, which, if not radically cured, accelerate death; the political system may suffer in the same manner.^

At the same time, the first figure of a criminal that Hanway used in an extended discussion of the need for penal reform was a figure well-known throughout human history, a person probably not particularly intriguing to common people, but an object of intense interest among upper-class social reformers. Hanway’s first figure of the criminal was, of course, a female prostitute.

Concern about Prisoners’ Evil Communication

Many eighteenth-century authors, artists, lawyers, philosophers, and reformers declared that communal life within prisons was morally corrupting. Jonas Hanway agreed:

What can be the consequence of associating prisoners, but reciprocal offices in a fraternity of thieves, teaching and learning all the mysteries of rapine and blood; and nourishing a dangerous enemy in our bosom?^

In a book published in 1775 on policing and other topics, Hanway expressed concern about prisoners’ “evil communication.”^ In Solitude in Imprisonment, published roughly a year later, Hanway insistently and forcefully focused on “evil communication” :

When {the heart} is corrupted by evil communication, is it reason, is it common-sense, to expect that corporal punishment alone will produce a reformation? …
In no case can evil communication or drunkenness produce any good. …
Evil communication under all circumstances must be productive of evil effects. …
We have, in practice, departed from the obvious principle that evil communication corrupts good manners.^

Within Hanway’s text, the plain meaning of “evil communication” is communication among prisoners. According to Hanway, communication among prisoners enabled “schools for villainy” that transformed minor offenders into skilled malefactors.^ Intense concern about “evil communication” became Jonas Hanway’s most influential contribution to penal policy.

The phrase “evil communication” has important advantages in the marketplace of ideas. Philosophers, moralists, parents, and others have long discussed the question “Can virtue be taught?” Such discussion typically encompasses a wide field of competing ideas about human nature, virtue, raising children, and educational programs. Hanway shifted focus to the question, “Can vice be taught?” and to generic behavior, “evil communication.” Moreover, he associated “evil communication” with all communication among a class of morally suspect persons not typically participating in deliberations about penal policy, i.e. prisoners. Hanway’s deliberative competitors were left with the inauspicious task of identifying and promoting some type of communication among prisoners that would not promote vice. Not surprisingly, Hanway’s idea dominated the marketplace of ideas.

Apart from his application of it, Hanway’s “obvious principle” does not have a plain meaning. Hanway stated that principle as “evil communication corrupts good manners.”^ Evil communication could mean speaking according to particular conventions considered to be bad (evil rhetorical manner) or it could mean associating with “bad company,” typically represented as persons who are poor, low-class, and foreign. “Good manners” might include appropriate patterns of address, observing conventions of social conversation, and other aspects of communication recognized to be good as a matter of upper-class social standards, such as those of English gentlemen of Hanway’s London society. As one scholar noted of the phrase, “it seems to me to have no edge to it.”^ One might easily empty it of meaning by taking it to mean nothing more than “evil corrupts good,” with evil and good accorded their dominant representations in prevailing public deliberation. Hanway’s well-known principle could thus easily conform to the dominant values of a particular time and place.

Bible quotation on the effect of evil communications: manuscript text of 1 Cor. 15:33 — φθείρουσιν ήθη χρήσθ’ όμιλίαι κακαί : Text 1 in the Codex Vaticanus, probably written in the first half of the fourth century G.C.

Hanway’s “obvious principle” is based on a phrase whose meaning has changed significantly over its long, historic voyage of interpretation. Hanway’s reference is almost surely to a biblical verse from a Pauline letter: 1 Corinthians 15:33. The Codex Vaticanus provides the earliest still-existing physical inscription of this phrase . That textual artifact is about 1750 years old. The phrase, however, achieved public prominence much earlier. It occurred about 2300 years ago in the work of Menander, an ancient Greek comic playwright. Menander probably drew the text from an earlier work of Euripides, an ancient Greek tragedian.^ Whether one traces the source to comedy or tragedy, the phrase had much different meaning in Hanway’s Solitude in Imprisonment than it did in ancient Greece.

The Evil-Communication Phrase in Menander

The evil-communication phrase of 1 Corithinians 15:33 is attributed to Menander’s Thais in credible ancient sources. Its specific context in Menander has not survived. However, Menander’s relatively narrow concerns, stock characters, and formulaic plots provide considerable insight into the likely meaning of the evil-communication phrase. It most likely concerned a courtesan’s seduction of a young man and the effects of the young man’s passion for her on his behavior towards his stern father.

Menander’s plays are largely apolitical. Dating from 325 to 292 BCE, the plays focus on the family life of middle-class Athenians. They usually conclude with one or more marriages. Menander’s plays do not include a class of morally suspect characters who threaten to contaminate a family with communication from outside of it. None of his characters are extremely virtuous or wholly evil. Among Menander’s characters are flatterers, courtesans, and stern fathers. Flatterers, usually servants or slaves, typically verbally manipulate their masters in a way that demonstrates the true superiority of the servant or slave. Courtesans, unmarried women who exchange sex for gifts and control over men, typically had ongoing relationships with particular men.

In Menander’s Thais, the evil-communication phrase might best be translated into English as “seductive words corrupt customary family relationships.” Two surviving fragments from Menander’s Thais indicate the behavior and influence of the courtesan Thais:

Sing to me, goddess, sing of such a one as she: audacious, beautiful, and plausible withal; she does you wrongs; she locks her door; keeps asking you for gifts; she loveth none, but ever makes pretense. …
“Loose-bridled?” Pest! Methinks, though I have suffered this, that none the less I’d now be glad to have her.^

Menander typically uses descriptive names for characters such as Chrysis (“gold plate”) for a courtesan.^ Thais, which has no meaning other than as a personal name, was a courtesan who traveled with Alexander the Great to Persia. According to one historical source, Alexander burned the magnificent Persian city Persepolis at Thais’ urging. Menander probably chose the name Thais with an awareness of stories about her seductive power and her celebrity value. In Menander’s play, Thais could have been suggestively translated from Alexander’s court to middle-class family life in Athens.

Terence’s adaptations of Menander show a courtesan’s seductive power. Terence, an African writing in Latin in Rome about 160 BCE, based his play Eunuchus on Menander’s lost play Eunouchos. Eunuchus begins with text much like that of the above fragments from Menander’s Thias. Here also a young man agonizes over his love for a courtesan and her treatment of him:

So what am I to do? Should I not go, not even now, when she invites me of her own accord? Should I rather take myself in hand and refuse to endure the insults of courtesans? She shuts me out, she calls me back: shall I go?…
I’m fed up with her, but I’m on fire with love. I’m going to my ruin awake and aware, alive and with my eyes open. And I’ve no idea what to do.^

The courtesan is named Thais, and she is well-off enough to have her own house in the young man’s well-off Athenian neighborhood. When Thais subsequently meets the young man, named Phaedria, she tries to comfort him regarding her treatment of him:

Don’t torment yourself, I implore you, my darling, my Phaedria. Heaven knows I didn’t do it because I love or care for anyone more than you; but the situation was such, I had to do it.^

To explain why she has been having sex with a soldier rather than with Phaedria, Thais provides a complicated story about a slave girl living with her. Thais then asks Phaedria to give the soldier “first place with me for the next few days.” Phaedria sarcastically recapitulates her story about the slave girl and then provides his own interpretation of it:

“She was kidnapped from here as a small child; my mother brought her up as her own; she was called my sister; I want to get her away from him to restore her to her family.” The fact is, all these fine words in the end come down to this: I’m shut out, he’s let in. Why? Unless you love him more than me and you’re afraid now that this girl who has been brought here will snatch your splendid soldier from you.^

Phaedria then complains that he has brought the gifts that Thais requested – an Ethiopian slave girl and a eunuch, the latter a particularly exotic gift. Thais responds by proclaiming that she will acquiesce to Phaedria “rather than lose your friendship.” To this line, Phaedria responds:

“Rather than lose your friendship”? If only you spoke that sentence truthfully and from the bottom of your heart! If I believed you spoke it sincerely, I could endure anything.^

Thais easily convinces Phaedria of her sincerity. Phaedria then exits, declaring:

I’ve made up my mind: I must let Thais have her way.^

This comic scene contrasts a highly sophisticated rhetorician with an ingénue, a beautiful courtesan with a naive young man.

Thais’ power over Phaedria greatly affects Phaedria’s family. When informed that Phaedria has bought a eunuch for Thais, Phaedria’s father exclaims, “Bought one? God damn it! For how much?” Told that the cost was more than five times that of a skilled adult slave, Phaedria’s father responds, “I’m finished!”^ Phaedria’s gift of a eunuch to Thais allows Phaedria’s brother, disguised as that eunuch, to enter Thais’ household and rape her slave girl, with whom he had fallen in love. These developments exasperate Phaedria’s father: “It’s one thing after another. … Damnation! … Is there any other disgrace or damage that you’ve left unmentioned?”^ Family catastrophe is averted only when the slave girl is discovered to be a Roman citizen. Phaedria’s brother marries her. Thais moves to be under the care of Phaedria’s father. Phaedria’s brother explains:

Thais has entrusted herself to my father’s care and protection. She’s thrown in her lot with us. … There is nobody more worthy of love than your Thais, brother. She’s such a supporter of our whole family.^

One can almost hear the snickering of the Roman audience in that last line. There is one more twist. Agreeing that “Thais needs many gifts” and recognizing that the soldier is rich, generous, and otherwise a weak rival in love, Phaedria agrees to share Thais with him.^ The familial threat that Thais’ seductive power created is comically resolved in this happy scene of extended family.

Menander’s play Samia also includes a father’s response to a courtesan’s alleged seduction of his son. Concerning this son, whom he had adopted and raised, the father declares:

I know the young man through and through as one
Who’s always in the past been well-behaved,
As dutiful to me as he could be.^

The father overhears a conversation that he misinterprets to imply that his son had a child with the father’s courtesan, who lived with them. The father blames his courtesan for corrupting his son’s behavior:

…for she’s to blame
for what has happened; she got hold of him
When he’d been drinking, yes, that’s obvious,
And lost his self-control. Neat wine and youth
Result in many a foolish action, when
They have at hand to help them one who’s schemed
To bring him down. I simply cannot believe
That he, so well behaved and self-controlled
Towards all others, would treat me like this,
Not if he were ten times adopted, not
My natural son. No, it’s not his birth
I’m thinking of but his good character.^

Although the son did not father the courtesan’s supposed child, the son in fact had a child with the girl next door. That girl had come over with other women to celebrate a fertility festival. The fertility festival involved sowing seeds in pots, dancing, and carrying the pots up to the roof. The son explained:

The festival involved a lot of fun,
As I was there, I thought I’d stay and watch.
Their rowdiness made sleep impossible;
For they were carrying their gardens up
Onto the roof and dancing; scattered round,
They kept it up all night.

It doesn’t take much appreciation for normal male physiology to guess what happened next:

I hesitate
to say what followed; perhaps I am ashamed
When shame can do no good; but still, I am.
The girl got pregnant. When I tell you this,
I also tell you what went on before.
I did not then deny I was to blame.^

The son, confronted with unplanned parenthood, immediately promises to the girl’s mother that he will marry the girl. The plot balances the father’s response to his courtesan’s alleged scheming with the natural imperative of human sexuality.

Menander’s surviving plays, as well as Terence’s adaptations, provide key insight into the meaning of the evil-communication phrase in Menander’s Thais. Almost surely in Menander the evil-communication phrase concerned a highly cultured courtesan’s verbal and behavioral scheming and its disruption of family relations. Evil communication in Menander was not about communication with low-status, criminal persons.

Communicating with Prisoners

Public Interest Analysis