This project aims to improve our understanding of the use of courtesans (high-class Greek sex workers) as a literary focus in the Second Sophistic (50-250 CE), a literary and cultural period characterized by reverence for the classical past, a commitment to Greek language, culture, and literature, and a reignited interest in rhetoric. This period has provided us with the most comprehensive accounts on courtesans more than half a millennium after their heyday: Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, Alciphron’s Letters of Courtesans, and Athenaeus’ book 13 in The Dinner Sophists. These works which make up the corpus of the project all testify to a rise in literary attention to courtesans that is not only unparalleled in the Greek literary tradition but also never systematically analyzed in modern scholarship. This project aims to fill this gap by exploring the literary (re)constructions of courtesans in these works within the context of the Second Sophistic and their relation to the Greek literary tradition. This is achieved through a close reading of the entirety of the three works. These close readings are guided by a rhetorical-narratological and intertextual analysis and interpreted within the theoretical framework of New Historicism. This project will thus contribute to both the research on the three works as well as to research on sex work in Antiquity and the Second Sophistic.