noble mixing-bowl of Eros and through the god had been initiated into the secrets which might not be revealed. When, therefore, the conspirators failed and were put to death, she was questioned and commanded to reveal those who still escaped detection; but she would not do so and continued steadfast, proving that those men had experienced a passion not unworthy of themselves in loving a woman like her. And the Athenians caused a bronze lioness without a tongue to be made and set up at the Propylaea in the Acropolis of Athens, representing by the spirited courage of the animal Leaena's invincible character, and by its tonguelessness her power of silence in keeping a holy secret." The statue was not made by Calamis but by the Athenian sculptor Amphicrates, according to Pliny. It is possible that Leaena's story, replacing the account of Harmodius and Aristogeiton as a couple, was invented to explain the existence of the lioness statue with the missing tongue, or perhaps to accommodate the homophobia of writers from late antiquity. See also Courtesan Notes References Primary sources Pliny the Elder, Natural History VII.23.87, XXXIV.19.72 Eusebius, Chronicon 106.1-7 Plutarch, Moralia On Talkativeness 505E Polyaenus, Stratagems 8.45 Secondary sources Plutarch, The Morals, volume 4, trans. William W. Goodwin w/ Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1878) The Online Library of Liberty The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens By Eva C. Keuls, p. 194, University of California Press (1993), Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Volume I, Book II, Chapter III, Section III, by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Project Guttenberg Eusebius, Chronicon, ed R. Helm (Leipzig, Germany 1913), 106.1-7 External links Hetairai 6th-century BC Athenians 6th-century BC Greek women Greek rebels Greek torture victims Ancient Athenian women Ancient rebels Greek female prostitutes