What pose did the famous Venus di Milo statue feature when it still retained the female figure’s arms and hands? If a latest research thesis is accepted, then one of the world’s more emblematic statues may depict the goddess Aphrodite (Venus in Latin) as an “hetaira”, classical antiquity’s celebrated courtesans.

The interesting idea emerged via a recent article by Virginia Postrel in the slate.com website. She quotes an expert on ancient weaving and textile manufacturing who believes the Olympian goddess was … spinning thread!
The expert in question is Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who 1994 book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years expands on that thesis.

Venus de Milo Spinning Thread
by CosmoWenman
on Sketchfab

Barber, who is listed as a professor emeritus at the Occidental College “suggests that the statue held a distaff of fluffy fibers in her upraised left arm, while with her right she guided the thread toward a weighted drop spindle hanging in front of her.”

She was quoted in the “Slate” as saying that “this was a pose painfully familiar to women in ancient Greek society … Something new is coming into being where before there was at most an amorphous mass … Women create thread; they somehow pull it out of nowhere, just as they produce babies out of nowhere,” the academic wrote.

As numerous ancient vases will attest to, women depicted as spinning thread were oftentimes identified as courtesans — higher class escorts of the era.