Sónnica, who was at that time called Myrrhina, wearied of the life of the _dicterion_. All the women there were slaves whom the Boeotian beat when they allowed a customer to leave discontented. It disgusted her to take the two oboli stipulated by the laws of Solon from those calloused hands which wounded as they caressed, and she was nauseated by the dirty, brutal people from all the countries in the world who came in search of pleasure, and went away surfeited, being immediately replaced by another and another, like an incessant surging of desires excited by the solitude of the sea, repeating similar caprices and identical demands.
One night she visited for the last time the temple of Venus Pandemos raised by Solon in the great square of the Piræus, and deposited an obolus as her final offering before the statues of Venus and her companion Peitho, the two divinities of the courtesans, before whom she went many times with her lemans of the moment, before giving herself up to them on the seashore or near the long wall constructed by Themistocles to unite the port with Athens. Then she fled toward the city, eager for liberty and joy, wishing to become one of those Athenian hetæræ whose luxury and beauty she had admired from afar.
She lived like the free, poor courtesans whom the Athenian youths called "she-wolves" on account of their howling. At first she spent whole days without eating, but she considered herself more happy than her former companions of the port of Phalerum, or in the district of Estiron, slaves of the masters of the _dicteria_. Her market now was the Cerameicus, a large district of Athens, along the wall between the gates of the Cerameicus and the Dipylon, in which were the garden of the Academy and the tombs of the illustrious citizens who had died for the Republic. By day the great _hetæræ_ went or sent their slaves to see if their names were written in charcoal on the wall of the Cerameicus. The Athenian who desired a courtesan would write her name, with the sum offered, and if this were to the liking of the hetæra she tarried near the inscription until the coming of the favored proponent. In broad daylight the great courtesans appeared there, almost nude, wearing purple sandals, wrapped in flowered mantles, wearing crowns of fresh roses on their hair, powdered with gold. The poets, the rhetoricians, the artists, the distinguished citizens strolled through the green groves of the Cerameicus or along the porticos adorned with statues, chatting with the courtesans, having to rack their brains to keep even with their repartee.