Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit: The Sexual Economy of Female Prostitution in the Roman

Empire
Author(s): Rebecca Flemming
Source: The Journal of Roman Studies , 1999, Vol. 89 (1999), pp. 38-61
Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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 QUAE CORPORE QUAESTUM FACIT: THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF
FEMALE PROSTITUTION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE*

By REBECCA FLEMMING

I. INTRODUCTION

Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded

in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly
integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which
have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated,
such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and
pleasures, the acquisition and dissipation of wealth, and the organization of urban life,
can certainly be described as major preoccupations in present enquiries into the Roman
world; and a couple of monographs on the subject, or aspects of it, have recently
appeared.1 None the less, there is as yet no study that can really bear comparison with
any of the substantial historical works on prostitution in a range of other times and
places that have been published in the last two decades.2 In particular, there has not
been any serious effort to take the perspective of the prostitutes themselves into account,
which is one of the most emphatic developments in the new historiography of
prostitution emerging elsewhere.
This article, therefore, attempts to set out some ways in which this more recent
body of historical research into prostitution might be productively brought to bear on
the remains of Roman patterns of exchanging sex for money - remains already located
in broader fields of interpretation and investigation within Classical studies. It does not
seek to apply an established methodology for the study of past prostitutions, nor to
extend an established model of their historical formation to the ancient world, for no
such tools or templates exist; but more generally seeks to take advantage of prior
historical problematizations of the sale and purchase of sexual services, of the
possibilities already mapped out, the issues raised and connections made, for under-
standing prostitution in imperial Rome.
In these prior historical problematizations, prostitution is broadly construed as a
changeable compound of two essential elements. The first is sexual availability, allegedly
absolutely indiscriminate but actually wrongfully discriminating in a relative sense;
availability deemed quantitatively and qualitatively mistaken. The second is economic

* My thanks to Riet van Bremen, Di Paton, and the who includes prostitutes in the section on 'free love'
Editorial Committee of JRS for all their comments rather than 'less reputable women'. Both, however,
and suggestions. consider prostitutes who had liaisons with famous
I T. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law poets to be the most blessed of women and worry
in Ancient Rome (I998) is so recent it appeared after about the public health consequences of prostitution
this article was initially completed, and provides a in ways that never occurred to the Romans, but rather
much more systematic (though circumscribed) study reflect the concerns of nineteenth-century reformers
of the legal rules affecting Roman prostitution than such as A. J. B. Parent-Duchatelet, whose work De la
hitherto. B. Stumpp, Prostitution in der r6mischen prostitution dans la ville Paris consideree sous la rapport
Antike (I998) appeared a little earlier, but follows de l'hygiene publique, de la morale et de l'administration
H. Herter's articles, 'Dirne', in RLAC III (I957), (I836) provided a model for similar works produced
I I49-I2I3, and 'Die Soziologie der antiken Prostitu- elsewhere in Europe and America, and has exerted
tion im Lichte des heidnischen und christlichen considerable influence on historical studies of prosti-
Schrifttums', YbAC 3 (I960), 70-I I I, in providing a tution ever since.
useful collection of material organized in a set of 2 Among the more notable of these are: J. Walkow-
rather confused analytical categories; S. Leontsini, itz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class
Die Prostitution im friihen Byzanz (I989), is a more and the State (I980); L. White, The Comforts of Home:
coherent study but of a later period. A still earlier Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (I990); M. Wood Hill,
methodological tradition is represented by e.g. Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New York City,
J. Balsdon, Roman Women: Their History and Habits I830-I870 (I993); R. Mazo Karras, Common Women:
(I962), 224-9, following K. Schneider, 'Meretrix', in Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (i 996);
REXV. i (I93I), I0I8-27, and the rather more liberal and G. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution
0. Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (I 934), 5 5-63, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai ( 997).

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 39

gain, which is part of the adjudged error in discrimination, but not necessarily the major
part (and certainly not the whole). Prostitution is, therefore, at once a form of sexual
activity, a kind of sexual style or category, and a form of economic activity, a way of
making a living through the provision of certain services, by behaving in accordance
with, or falling into, such a category. Some recent works have stressed the former aspect.
Karras, for instance, argues that in medieval Europe, 'it was not the exchange of money,
not even multiple partners, but the public and indiscriminate availability of a woman's
body that was the defining feature of prostitution'; and her collaborative article with
Boyd takes this a step further, claiming that in the Middle Ages prostitution was a
'sexual orientation', that it 'involved being a certain type of person, rather than engaging
in sex for money', that is doing certain types of things, performing certain sexual acts.
White, on the other hand, defines the prostitution she examines in colonial Nairobi as a
type of reproductive labour, deriving from the economic needs and aspirations of the
women involved, and their families, and meeting various, more social, needs of a new
urban, male workforce.4
This divergent emphasis partly reflects the cultural specificity of past prostitu-
tions the fact that the wider set of circumstances and practices, norms and values,
pertaining to both sex and wealth, within which prostitutions form and function, were
not the same in medieval England and colonial Kenya - but it also reflects differences
of scholarly resources and perspective within that framework. White uses, 'the language
that comes from the work and experiences of prostitutes themselves', a language that
passes to her through interviews and other oral reports.5 Indeed, the general academic
adoption of that language lies at the heart of her bold attempt to re-orient the
historiography of prostitution more broadly, to transform a literature that 'speaks of
women's victimization' into one that speaks of 'women's actions' and earnings. Karras,
however, has no such access to the voices of women in the Middle Ages, and, though
sympathetic to these more empowering historical narratives, thinks they must be
tempered by the view from outside; the negative view of the work of the prostitute
which bears down, in varying ways and weights, on those who engage in it. She,
therefore, tries to 'steer between the danger of portraying prostitutes as victims by
concentrating too much on how others saw them and the danger of decontextualizing
them by concentrating too much on their agency'.6
These debates about how women's history is both made and written have a clear
resonance for enquiries in the Classical world, where the problems presented by the
surviving sources are even more acute. This study thus sets out to examine the specific
sexual economy of prostitution in the Roman Empire with these issues in mind. It seeks
to find ways of using the scarce and slippery evidential resources of a literature produced
by men of the imperial elite for their own particular purposes, and of material and
documentary remains that are neither profuse nor unambiguous, to establish an outline
of the imperial sex trade both as an institution, as a set of more or less clearly constituted
and conceived economic, social, and ideative relations, and as a lived experience, as a
field of intentional female activity. That is to explore, with this set of evidence, the
possibilities of writing a history of Roman prostitution which forms part of the history
of female labour, or of the history of sexuality, not to mention the more traditional
history of social policy and a whole host of other histories. This exploration occurs, of
course, within the broader historical frame of the Roman Empire itself. It is worth
remembering at the outset that, for instance, the institution of slavery - one of the
linchpins of empire - is a troubling one for labour history, and cuts across, though does
not remove, issues of agency; and that the ancient world had its own distinctive

I Karras, op. cit. (n. 2), io; R. M. Karras and D. L. also uses prostitutes' letters to help produce a study of
Boyd, 'Ut cum muliere: a male transvestite prostitute the sex-trade in mid-nineteenth-century New York in
in fourteenth-century London', in L. Fradenburg which prostitution also appears as a rational economic
and C. Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities (I996), choice for women, with its own 'positive appeal and
I04. rewards' (5).
4 White, op. cit. (n. 2), I 0-2 I. 6 Karras, op. cit. (n. 2), 9; see also the similar
5 White, op. cit. (n. 2), 6-io; Hill, op. cit. (n. 2), remarks of Hershatter, op. cit. (n. 2), 3-33.

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 40 REBECCA FLEMMING

configurations of self and sexual activity. The point is, however, to use all the available
resources to try and write a history of Roman prostitution that is not just a history of
men's sexual choices and their regulation of the sexual objects they construct, but also
of women's lives; that is, not a half, but a whole history.
This means not abandoning male-authored, male-centred texts, but recognizing
them as such, and as less interested in describing the phenomenon of prostitution itself
than in describing, in making and marshalling, its meanings for the literary elite. They
need rather to be made to work harder than ever, with closer attention being paid to
their formulations and framings and the way items in the archaeological and epigraphic
records relate to them. In particular, this literature should not be coddled with
assumptions about prostitutes and prostitution that can be traced back to the social
reformers of the nineteenth century, but challenged with questions posed by more
recent historical and sociological studies variously informed by feminism and the voices,
views, and values of the working women themselves. The aim is to understand the
partiality of the literary legacy, its incompleteness and imbalance, but as something
none the less integral to the phenomenon itself - to an assemblage of human activities
organized around an essential asymmetry, discrepantly, even conflictually, engaged in
and interpreted by the different parties involved, who, at the same time, cannot avoid
their mutual implication in the complex whole they enact. There are additional
problems, of course, as even these elite voices are somewhat disparate in their
distribution in time and space, and the material evidence is similarly scattered. So, while
an attempt is certainly made to pull all this into a certain shape, to bring a kind of order
to affairs, there is no effort to smooth out the differences of positioning and perspective,
of locality and chronology; these must remain, with all their ramifications.
The overall approach is thus broad and thematic, rather than in anyway exhaustive,
but there are also some specific boundaries necessary to make the project manageable.
This is a study of prostitution in the Roman Empire before that Empire became
Christianized; which is not to say that Christian evidence is ignored, but that it is used
for what it reveals about prevalent 'pagan' practices, about the traditional (but not
unchanging) attitudes and activities which Christian writers were working with and
reacting against in various ways. And it is a study of female prostitution only. Women
made up the vast majority, but not all, of imperial prostitutes, and this must be
recognized in dealing with either part of the population. Though this article has little to
say directly about male prostitution, it is hoped that it still provides the basis for its
future examination; that it offers an introduction to the central elements that will need
to be rearranged, reworked, and elaborated in many subsequent, more detailed,
investigations into the unwieldy entirety of the sex-trade in the Roman world.

II. LABOUR, LUST AND LUCRE

The process of becoming a prostitute in the Roman world, becoming a meretrix-

literally a woman who earns (from the Latin mereo) - a hetaira or a porne - a woman
who sells (from the Greek pernemi) - is not a matter in which contemporaries evince
much interest, in contrast to the concern that was eventually to develop in this area, with
its complex classification of paths into prostitution centred around narratives of woman's
'fall' in which her victimization is writ large. Only a handful of reasons for women's
prostitution are provided, more or less incidentally, by imperial writers; and though
they eschew the more baroque styles of making woman victim, they do not exactly offer
her much choice in the matter either. She might be prostituted, first and foremost as a
slave or, secondly, as a wife or daughter; otherwise she herself might be driven to sell her
body systematically by either her depraved lusts or indigence.
Dio Chrysostom assumes that the bodies set out as sexual wares in the cities of the
Empire have been captured or purchased for the purpose, an assumption also worked
with in the assorted stories that circulated in the imperial world of well-bred maidens

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 4I

captured by pirates or bandits and sold to brothel-keepers (lenones or pornoboskoi).7

Whether these statements about the slave supply are in fact accurate may be questioned,
but the basic premise that prostitutes broadly become such through enslavement (or, at
least, that the great majority of prostitutes are slaves) is certainly borne out in numerous
sources, many of which will be discussed in due course.8 Justin Martyr alleges not only
that almost all exposed children (not just the girls) were raised for prostitution,
presumably as slaves, but also that pagans commonly sold the sexual services of their
own offspring and wives.9 This latter accusation is supported, without the religious
qualification, by the legislation of early Christian emperors formalizing at least one
means of escape for daughters from 'lenones patres', that is, fathers who prostitute
them.10 The practice is unlikely to be a recent development, even if this extension of
jurisdiction into the family domain and the remedy offered - centred around appeal to
a bishop - are. Moreover, a similar scenario, in which the mother replaces the father as
prostitutor, is imagined both in a fourth-century A.D. papyrus which recounts an
Alexandrian court case in which some of the drama is provided by a mother claiming
compensation for the loss of her livelihood caused by the murder of the daughter whom
she had placed in the control of a pornoboskos so that neither of them might starve, and
in Lucian's dialogue between a mother and the daughter whom she has just made turn
her first trick so that they might exchange poverty for a life of luxury.1" As for h
prostituting their wives, Firmicus Maternus describes a natal celestial configuration
that means a husband or wife will, respectively, compel or suffer sexual availability for
profit; and in his Apology Apuleius accuses his arch enemy Herennius Rufinus of
turning his house into a brothel, with his wife as the main attraction, in order to make
ends meet after having dissipated a dubious inheritance.12 There is every reason to think
that Apuleius is, at the very least, exaggerating, but the basic plausibility of the situation
seems assured.
It is Firmicus too who expresses most explicitly the, more widely hinted at, notion
that a woman's licentiousness might dictate her livelihood to herself:

si vero mulier sic Venerem positam habuerit, <erit> impura libidinosa et ad omnium
exposita voluptatem et meretricis semper actibus implicata, quae propter necessitatem vitae
in meritorio se statuat vel lenoni locet.

If a woman has Venus in this house, she will be full of vile lusts, accessible for the pleasure
of all, and always in thrall to the impulses of a meretrix; on account of the necessity of this
life she will set herself up in the business, or contract to a leno.13

Ulpian rejects poverty as an excuse for living a turpissima vita ('most sordid life') in his
definition of those women whose conduct places them on the wrong side of the Lex Julia
et Papia in respect to their marriageability, and Lactantius is only a little more
sympathetic to women whom necessity forces to profane their chastity.14 Both seem to

7Dio, Or. 7.I33, and see also Cod. 8.50.7. Stories the alarming prospect of committing, not only for-
of enslavement and prostitution feature in Sen., nication, but also incest, when visiting a brothel, and
Contr. I.2, the Hist. Apoll. Tyr. 33-7, Xen. Eph. so is definitely not to be practised by Christians.
5.5-9, and Apul., Met. 7.9-IO. Women's fierce resist- Lactantius (Inst. 6.20.22) repeats the accusation, but
ance to the logical consequence of such a fate - that with the qualification that exposed children end up
she should lose her virginity to the wrong man in the either in slavery or the brothel ('vel servitutem vel ad
wrong circumstances - is the centrepiece of such lupanar') though this opposition should probably not
stories, so there are some limits to her victimhood. be pushed too hard.
8 W. Scheidel, 'Quantifying the sources of slaves in 10 Cod. I.4.I2 and II.4I.6 (= CTh I5.8.2). The
the early Roman Empire', J7RS 87 (I997), I56-69, measure deals with masters as well as fathers.
argues that slave reproduction was actually the great- I IBGU IV I024.8-I8 and Luc., DMeretr. 6. On the
est source of supply. Whether any such reproduction more imaginative aspects of the Alexandrian court
would have occurred within the brothel itself is case, see J. G. Keenan, 'Roman criminal law in a
unclear, certainly the implication in most sources is Berlin papyrus codex (BGU IV I024-I027)', AP 35
that prostitutes successfully strove not to reproduce, (I989), I5-23.
which recent studies on the efficacy of ancient 12 Firm., Math. 6. I I.6; Apul., Apol. 75-6.
methods of contraception and abortion might help 13 Firm., Math. 3.6.22; see also e.g. 7.25.9.
explain, see esp. J. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion 14 Dig. 23.2.43.5; Lact., Inst. 5.8.7; see also the
from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (I992). judge's remarks at BGU IV I024.20-30.
9 Justin, Apol. I.27. Exposing children thus raises

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 42 REBECCA FLEMMING

be speaking, at least primarily, of situations in which these factors act directly on the
woman, who has made herself into a meretrix as a result.
So, becoming a meretrix is, as the word suggests, primarily understood as an
economic act, but one that belongs far less to the prostituted woman herself than to
those around her; to those who profit from her initial and recurrent sale. The modern
verdict that, 'Money is the reason for prostitution', may be borne out by the ancient
sources, but the money in question is presented not as an incentive for entering the
profession, as it is now, but for establishing others in it.15 The existence of the institution
of slavery, and the profits to be realized from its intersection with prostitution, clearly
play their part in establishing this pattern. Beyond that, it is also hardly surprising that
prostitution was less an individual undertaking than one which occurred within a more
complex, and frequently familial, economic network. Nor should the sources' respect
for hierarchies of power and agency within this collective context be taken as at all
peculiar. It might well seem that the costs and benefits are unequally distributed in a
family which, directly or indirectly, prostitutes its womenfolk, but the precise
combination of consent and coercion involved in such circumstances is not revealed.
Apuleius does have Rufinus' wife eventually resign in some disgust from her
position as family bread-winner but not wife, though this is essential to his plot in
various ways and no doubt primarily intended to reflect badly on her husband, and the
later imperial legislation also indicates that at least some daughters wanted, and tried, to
get out of parental prostitution. However, while Rufinus clearly had other economic
alternatives open to him, this is far less obvious for the mothers who sold their
daughters, though the financial expectations from such sales appear high. Moreover, a
comment by Sextus Empiricus that some Egyptian girls accumulate their dowry
through prostitution, though highly dubious in itself, at least raises the possibility that
prostitution could be undertaken short-term with a very specific goal in mind, and it
also serves to underline the point that in the Roman world in general a daughter's sexual
choices, her control over her body, were severely limited.16 Her sexuality was, in a real
sense, for her father and family to dispose of, either in marriage or otherwise.
The problematic nature of these few sources makes it impossible to push them very
far on any of these issues. Female bodies clearly counted amongst the economic
resources not only of slave-dealers and owners, but also of any family network, available
short- or long-term for the avoidance of penury and probably in some cases also for the
pursuance of more particular and ambitious economic strategies. How often they were
deployed, and how this worked out within the family, as a source of what must have
been obligation, support, and conflict, is unclear.17 Both these mechanisms of prostitu-
tion were, broadly speaking, deemed legitimate in the Roman world; they function
within two of its most basic power structures. Slaves and daughters in particular were
legally positioned so they could be prostituted, and though there were various
qualifications to this which will be discussed later, even the Christian legislation did not
alter the underlying situation. That they could be, does not of course mean that they
should be; the reporting is largely censorious; but attitudes amongst those lower down
the social order and thus most likely seriously to consider prostitution amongst their
restricted economic options, rather than attitudes of the elite towards them, are
unknown.
Firmicus' ascription of a sexual motive to those women celestially destined to
become meretrices stands out against this predominantly economic pattern, and it is also
noteworthy that it is at this point that the women themselves emerge most clearly as
individual actors. He does not, however, exactly figure prostitution as a sexual
orientation or identity as distinct from a set of sexual activities. Nor does he quite

16 Sext. Emp., P 3.20oI.

15 C. H0igArd and L. Finstad, Backstreets: Prostitu-
tion, Money and Love, trans. K. Hansen, N. Sipe and 17 Hershatter, op. cit. (n. 2), I8I-209, discusses
B. Wilson (I992), 40; and see also e.g. N. McKeganey circumstances and contexts for the selling or pawning
and M. Barnard, Sex Work on the Streets: Prostitutes of daughters into prostitution in early twentieth-
and their Clients (I996), 26. These are, of course, century China, which may give some clues in this
sociological studies of prostitution itself rather than respect.
of popular views of it and its causes.

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 43

suggest, as was to become a nineteenth-century conviction, that some women are born
prostitutes.18 What some women are born with are certain lusts, with the 'impulses of a
prostitute', which she can, or must, then make into her trade, her career. Firmicus thus
constitutes the meretrix as a woman who realizes the professional potential of her innate
desires, whose identity is bound up with the performance of certain acts of a financial as
well as sexual character, the making of this condition into a way of life.
These different ways of entering prostitution are connected with the different forms
the institution took. The prostitution of slaves was paradigmatically based in brothels-
lupanaria and fornices, porneia and ergasteria - but also in a range of other establish-
ments, such as inns, taverns, and bath-houses. These places were managed by lenones,
pornoboskoi or, less frequently, lenae, who were in the business of making their denizens
sexually available; the verb describing this causative activity being 'prostituere', literally
'to place before', 'to set out' (of wares).19 The organization of life in a lupanar is
described, at least in outline, in the Elder Seneca's Controversia on the issue of whether
a virgin kidnapped by pirates and sold to a leno who established her in a brothel, but
who none the less managed to preserve her virginity with entreaties and a sword, is
permitted to hold a priesthood once she had returned to her family.20 Many of these
same features also occur elsewhere in the ancient literature. The slave lupanar appears
as an enclosed world, with the women confined to the premises, their basic needs
provided for by the leno who rules his domain in a cruel and coercive manner, driven by
greed and depravity.21 He sets the prices, displayed along with the woman's name on
the tituli set over the entrances to the small cellae in which they worked, and he takes the
money.22 None the less, the women themselves form some kind of community, as they
share meals and intimacies, welcoming new arrivals with kisses and training them in the
tricks of the trade.
These literary brothels are located in a range of times and places, from the
contemporary Rome and Puteoli of satire, to the vaguely historical Tarentum and
Mytilene of the novels. Whether the Roman model of their organization should in fact
be applied outside Italy, where it has some archaeological support, at any time is
however unclear. Certainly Xenophon of Ephesus, writing in Greek, presents a slightly
different picture of brothel arrangements than the Latin texts, but other Greek works
have little to offer on the matter. Pornoboskoi and slaves appear in relation to city
brothels (koineia poleos) in a fragmentary Arsinoite papyrus dating from A.D. 265, but
without any indication of internal organization beyond that, and, in interpreting dreams
involving prostitutes in brothels, for instance, Artemidorus specifies neither the status
of the women nor the regime under which they live.23
The elaborate details of Roman brothel life find their way into Seneca's Controversia
because they serve a clear rhetorical purpose. They substantiate the claim made by
several of the speakers that, regardless of the circumstances and her actual virginity,
once a woman enters a lupanar, temples are closed to her. Once she has been set up by a
leno as sexually accessible to the general populace - the titulus being the potent marker
of this availability - and has lived as a meretrix among meretrices, then, even if no man
actually gains access to her, even if she has not in fact worked as a meretrix, her chastity
is forfeit. These speakers also effectively expose the acute asymmetry that characterizes
Roman prostitution, for no such penalties were incurred by a man who entered a brothel

18 Kiefer, op. cit. (n. I), 59, quotes, for example, a Xenophon of Ephesus' Tarentine pornoboskos, on the
comment by a contemporary German sexologist that, other hand, shows some redeeming qualities at 5.7-8.
'One is born a wife just as one is born a prostitute; and The slave collar of a meretrix from Bulla Regia in
no woman who is meant for free-love becomes a wife Africa (ILS 9455) also emphasizes the coercive ele-
by being married'. ment of prostitution.
19 With one partial exception, slaves fill all literary 22 The tituli and cellae are the most regular feature
brothels where the status of their denizens is clear; the of Latin literary lupanara, see eg. Petr., Sat. 7-8,
sort of exception is provided by the empress Messalina Juv. 6.I i6-32, and Mart. I I.45. Cellae are also found
at Juv. 6.i I6-32, though the status of the other, more in the famous Pompeian lupanare at VI.I2.i8-20.
regular, women in the brothel is not clear, and there 23 PSI IX IO55a and Artemidorus I.78, cf. 4.9. For
are also several ambiguous cases. Greek brothels of an earlier age see J. Davidson,
20 Sen., Contr. I.2. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of
21 The nastiest, most avaricious, literary leno is Classical A thens (I 997), esp. 83-9 I .
undoubtedly that in the Hist. Apoll. Tyr. 33-7;

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 44 REBECCA FLEMMING

as a customer. Indeed, the Elder Cato is famously reported to have greeted a well-
known gentleman leaving a fornix with the congratulatory phrase, 'macte virtute esto'
('Well done!'), praising his decision to assuage his lust with prostitutes rather than other
men's wives; though he later added, after meeting the same man in the same situation a
number of times, that his approbation extended only to the occasional visit to the
brothel, not to making it home.24 Despite, indeed because of, her degradation and
dishonour, the meretrix was a perfectly proper sexual object for the Roman man, but
one to be enjoyed, like everything else, in moderation; the sexual services she provided
were socially useful, though not without qualification.
These twin themes are explored most fully in imperial Latin literature in the pair
of major declamations ascribed to Quintilian which argue both sides of the case of a poor
man who accuses a meretrix whom he loved of poisoning him with a hate potion.25 The
pauper first claims credit for the propriety of his conduct, for pursuing permissible
passions, not destroying anyone's marriage; he attacks the prostitute for her profession
in general, and her particular use of it to ruin him, as she insinuated herself into his
affections, took all his money, and then rejected him as insufficiently lucrative. The
woman's advocate also claims that she has behaved admirably (as far as her circum-
stances allow), causing no matrimonial discord, no paternal complaint, no impoverish-
ment, and seeking only to curb the increasing immoderation of her suitor. A single
declamation of Libanius opposing the return of the legendary hetaira Lais to Corinth,
though it initially seems to present a rather more austere argument than pseudo-
Quintilian, actually runs along much the same lines, just set in a somewhat mythical
Greek past.26 The motivation for her recall is that adultery has increased since her exile
resulting in a high death-toll among young men caught, and thus lawfully killed, in the
act. Libanius counters that Lais is the cause of the problem and cannot resolve, only
worsen it. For she not only acted as a drain on the community's economic resources, as
families' wealth ineluctably found its way into her coffers, but also on its moral
resources, as she took men away from their wives who then sought to emulate the
woman who was so successful where they had failed, and whose depravity has now
become habitual. Self-control (sophrosune), honour, and piety all demand, therefore,
that Lais should remain as far away from Corinth as possible. This is not, however, an
argument for the removal of all prostitutes from the city, but applies to Lais alone.
Indeed, if the allegations made by Libanius' putative opponent that the original motion
of exile was instigated by the more lowly (adoxoi) local hetairai and their pornoboskoi in
order to protect their trade are true, then they should be thanked for it. The implicit
point is that these prostitutes do, in their humble and rather unsavoury way, provide a
useful service, while Lais takes matters far beyond that into areas of flagrant excess and
dissipation. Similar distinctions, similarly drawn in the territory of the Greek past, can
be found in Athenaeus, particularly when Cynunculus warns his fellow-diners against
involvement with fabled ladies such as Lais, while recommending the use of the hetairai
of the brothels and booths (oike'mata), whose function is plain and who are, therefore,
easily available to all at low cost.27
There were those who took a different line. Libanius' arguments are a weaker
version of those used by Dio Chrysostom as he demands the business of the pornoboskoi
be completely banned from city life. That is he directs his energy precisely against what
others deemed the acceptable face of prostitution, a prostitution of the present rather
than a romantic, if dangerous, past.28 For Dio, not only does the open availability of
some women undermine rather than protect the non-availability of others, as prostitu-
tion is the start of a slippery slope into, rather than a buttress against, deeper depravity
and licence, but it also, given that this availability is something forced upon slaves,
transgresses against the basic honour in which all humanity is held by god. Proper
sexual activity, Dio implies, occurs within a proper and productive relationship between

24 The initial praise is quoted by Hor., Sat. 26 Lib., Decl. 25; the general theme seems to be a
I.2.3 I-2; the sequel is provided by a scholion in the standard one, see Rhet. Gr. 8.409 (Walz).
pseudo-Acronic collection. 27 Ath. I3.566e-7Ia.
25 [Quint.], Maj. Decl. I4-I5. 28 Dio, Or. 7. I 3 3-52.

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 45

man and woman, and Musonius Rufus, the Stoic philosopher who probably influenced
Dio, states this explicitly.29 He counts sex with prostitutes, like any other extra-marital
intercourse not intended for the procreation of children, as demonstrating a reprehens-
ible lack of self-control. The tone of Musonius' diatribe, however, makes it clear that he
realizes himself to be advocating a minority view within society; and the surviving
sources certainly bear this out.
The more general construction of the lupanar or fornix as a place where
contemptible female behaviour and creditable, though not unproblematic, male
behaviour, meet, with the acceptance of the latter dependent on the unacceptability of
the former, is also apparent in the more moralistic descriptions of the establishments
themselves. On the one hand, these are sordid places, smelly and sooty, degraded and
unsavoury - places of vice and venality, of soft pleasures and hard deceit.30 On the
other hand, the brothel maintains a certain propriety as a locus of prostitution, a certain
status as a structured, even controlled, site of sexual availability; what goes on here is
properly concealed behind closed doors, and there is a straightforward simplicity about
what is on offer, an honesty to the pretence.31 Similarly, as Wallace-Hadrill has argued,
the urban location of commercial and service activities, especially those trading on
various kinds of bodily satisfaction, at a respectful distance from the active centres of
public life, of law, politics, and religion, should not be seen as inhibitive, but rather the
reverse, as creating the appropriate context in which the less virtuous, but none the less
integral, aspects of city life could flourish.32
These descriptions, and the wider discourse on prostitution, also make it clear that
these lupanaria cater primarily for the poorer, rougher, end of Roman society; and the
names appearing in the graffiti most securely attached to the selling of sex in Pompeii
tend to confirm this, suggesting also that male slaves made up a significant proportion of
the clientele.33 But it is these same locales, not any special, more refined, establishments,
that also count the upper classes among their customers. It is his social equals and
betters that- Horace berates, whether they prefer their women in the full dress of the
matron, or 'olenti in fornice stantem' ('displayed in a stinking brothel'), and the poor
victim of the hate potion, convinced as he is that prostitutes were invented so that there
should be something 'quod liceret amare pauperis' ('that a poor man is allowed to make
love to'), has to compete with the wealthy for the attentions of his beloved meretrix.34
Indeed this is the point. The service provided by brothels is a service to all men and the
low standards necessary to maintain that availability to the poor acted as a restraint
against the potential excesses of the rich in this respect also; it made their place in the
sexual life of the elite plain. The vulgarity of these locations, both in the sense of their
wide catchment and their tawdriness, was proper to them, both defining and fitting,
indicative of and conducive to their rightful use. That fornices were generally filled with
slaves also forms part of their baseness, and its propriety. This status guaranteed that
there was no other man but the leno who had any claim on the woman, indeed guaranteed
that she had no claim on herself; it was a position wholly in accord with the operational
terms of the lupanar.
All this, however, leaves the women themselves sunk in sordidness, fully bound by
the necessary, and necessarily degrading, conditions for their social utility; able to gain
meagre moral credit for conforming particularly closely to the terms on which that
utility was constituted but still kept within the overall framework of censure and
contempt. This is, of course, the view from the outside, or rather, a view from a very
particular external vantage point. This is the lupanar as it is located in the sexual and
ethical world of the authorial elite; not as it was located in the world of most of its

29 Muson., Fr. i2 (Lutz) and see e.g. C. P. Jones, shame: the urban texture of Pompeii', in T. J. Cornell
The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom (1978), I2-I8 and K. Lomas (eds), Urban Society in Roman Italy
for his relations with Dio. ( I995), 39-62.
30 See e.g. Juv. 6.I2I-32 and III.72-3; Hor., Sat. 33 CIL IV.2I73-296 and CIL IV.3929-43; see on
I.2.30; Sen., Vit. Beat. 4.7. the identification of brothels etc. in Pompeii, Wallace-
31 See e.g. Mart. I.34.5-6 and 2.53.7; Hor., Sat. Hadrill, op. cit. (n. 32), 53 with notes.
i.2.83-5 and IOI-5; and Ath. I3.56ga-f. 34 Hor., Sat. I.2.30; [Quint.], Decl. Maj. I4.8, and
32 A. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Public honour and private see also I5.7 and 9-I0.

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 46 REBECCA FLEMMING

clientele, and still less as it was occupied, experienced, by women who, despite their
enslavement, surely had their own aims and values. Indeed, these must inevitably have
been at odds with those of their richest and most articulate customers. For it was
precisely those features of the brothel that made it a valuable institution - its enclosure
and control of a suitable group of women's sexual availability to the populace - that
bore down most heavily on its inhabitants, that acted most restrictively on any kind of
female self-determination, reducing any room for manoeuvre, and which must have
meant that their main objective, beyond simple survival, was escape.
Both the reach of the leno and the implication of slavery in Roman prostitution
extended beyond the confines of the lupanar, but precisely how far and in what direction
is hard to discern. The pornoboskoi of Dio Chrysostom have, as their name suggests,
flocks of slave prostitutes in their charge, stationed in oikemata all over the cities in
which they make their obscene profits or driven from festival to festival in search of rich
takings.35 And though lenones do not feature directly in transactions with meretrices who
solicit in front of individual cellae in Rome, their presence behind the scenes is not hard
to envisage; while Juvenal speaks of girls 'ad circum iussas prostare' ('ordered to display
themselves in the circus'), suggesting that at least some of the women who sold their
bodies in public places might be at the bidding of, if not owned by, a leno.36 It is possible,
however, likely even in the larger cities where control over the sex trade and its workers
would be harder to exercise, that some of these outdoor meretrices - those who solicited
in the open and serviced their customers where they could, who operated without
recourse even to an oikema or cella - worked independently, or at least within an
economic network from which the figure of the leno was excluded.37 Several Egyptian
ostraka also show the authorities dealing directly with prostitutes themselves, not
intermediaries, including permissions to trade sexually in their cities on certain days,
indicating that some peripatetic prostitutes might at least be free, if not more broadly
autonomous. 38
This kind of autonomy creates the possibility of exercising (within certain limits)
some degree of control over services offered and to whom, a control notably lacking
from most of the literature. The only clear case of a meretrix who was able to refuse a
paying customer is Republican in origin, though recorded by Aulus Gellius.39 This is
the story of the drunken aedile - Hostilius Mancinus - forcibly prevented from
visiting the meretrix Manilia, whom he then tried to prosecute for injuries sustained as
he was repelled from her door, a prosecution disallowed by the tribunes who upheld
Manilia's decision not to admit such a reveller. Nothing so explicit emerges from the
imperial period itself, though such independent establishments are sometimes hinted
at. Indeed, it is perhaps this kind of situation that Firmicus counterposed to contracting
to a leno for those celestially destined for a career as a prostitute. In general, however,
the meretrix is marked, even defined, by her absolute availability. It is the ease of access
to, the simplicity and clarity of transactions with, professionals, that poets praise in
contrast to the difficulties, the convolutions, and uncertainties of involvement with
amorous amateurs. The same openness is viciously attacked by the prosecuting pauper
in the Quintilianic case of the hate-potion. He demands of his opponent:

35 Dio, Or. 7.I33 and 77-78.4. There is no hint of that open directly onto the street - have been found
anything other than an economic motive being in Pompeii, see Wallace-Hadrill, op. cit. (n. 32), 53
involved in prostitutes' presence at these festivals, as with notes, and their operation seems to be referred to
also for their presence around temples. Prostitutes did in Ov., Am. 3.I4.9-I0, Mart. I.34.5, and Juv.
also participate in the religious life of the community 3. I 34-6. The prostitutes at the circus are at Juv. 3.65.
like any other group but none of this bears any 37 See e.g. Prop. 2.23.I3-I6; Juv. 6.0I6; and Mart.
resemblance to notions of 'sacred' or 'temple' prosti- 3.93. I 5 for references to these outdoor operations.
tution that have come to form such a potent part of 38 All are from Elephantine: O.Wilck. 83 and II57
the historical imagination (on which see generally are both dated to A.D. I I I; and SB VI 9545 n. 33 and
M. Beard and J. Henderson, 'With this body I thee IV 7399 to A.D. I42 and I44 respectively. Any
worship: sacred prostitution in antiquity', Gender and travelling worker in Egypt needed local leave to
History 9 (I997), 480-503). pursue their trade in this way.
36 Such cellae - single rooms with masonry beds 39 Gell. 4.1I4.

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 47

tu, cui non licet excludere debilitates, fastidire sordes, exposita ebrietatibus, addicta
petulantiae, [et] quaeque novissima vilitas est, noctibus populoque concessa, mores
iuventutis emendas?

You - who may not shut out cripples or disdain the dregs of society, who are accessible to
the drunk, sold to the wanton, and, which is the ultimate in cheapness, granted nightly to
the public - do you seek to correct the conduct of a young man?40

Rather than discussing, or ordering, different forms of prostitution according to

the amount of control they afford to the women involved, therefore, contemporaries
were more likely to assume, or assert, that the absence of autonomy was an integral part
of being a meretrix. She might resent it, as does the meretrix who curses the imperium of
her leno in one of Ovid's Amores, but it is still her most salient characteristic.41 While
this attitude is hardly surprising, the lack of Roman interest in distinctions of
prostitutional practice, or the constitution of a professional hierarchy generally, is more
striking in its contrast with the concerns of many more modern commentators. The
Latin language may be rich in words for 'prostitute', but, outside the plays of Plautus
and their lexicographical legacy, these different terms carry differentials of tone,
connotation and emphasis rather than of status, methods of soliciting, and service
provision.42 'Prostibulum' may once have designated a meretrix who made herself
available in front of a stabulum, for instance, but in the imperial era it is employed either
as just another derogatory term for a prostitute, or to denote a brothel. 3 The much
more commonly used noun 'scortum', which derives from the word for 'hide' or
'leather', differs from meretrix essentially in the pejorative force it applies to the same
persons or phenomena; and even lupa - literally a 'she-wolf' - simply takes this
condemnation a step further.44 Similarly, whatever their original difference, the Greek
words porne' and hetaira are used almost interchangeably under the Empire. Hierarchies
of the kind Davidson has recently tried to resurrect for Classical Athens, with its
'numerous gradations between the miserable life of the streets and the comfortable
existence of the most successful courtesans', are a thing of the past, however much that
past is treasured by authors such as Athenaeus.45 Figures such as Lais do not make it
beyond the Hellenistic period. Volumnia Cytheris, mainly associated with Anthony but
also with Gallus and Virgil, perhaps comes closest in Republican Rome but is apparently
a one-off; and the mistresses of poetry who bear a more recurrent resemblance to the
fabled courtesans of Greece are also made markedly different from them in other
respects.46 They are, for instance, significantly not named as meretrices, however their
situation has been subsequently interpreted; while neither Libanius nor Athenaeus, nor
any of his speakers or sources, has any hesitation in labelling Lais and her ilk, as well as
the denizens of the cheapest brothels, hetairai.47

40 [Quint.], Maj. Decl. I4.7. Isidore of Seville (Etym. IO.I63) refers to the rapacity
41 Ov., Am. I.IO.2I-4. of the she-wolf as she captures her unfortunate prey.
42 On the Latin vocabulary see J. N. Adams, 'Words 45 Davidson, op. cit. (n. 23), 77. See also Hershat-
for "prostitute" in Latin', RhM I26 (I983), 32I-58; ter's description of the professional hierarchy in
in which, partly through an emphasis on the Repub- imperial China, which raises the possibility that these
lican period, a somewhat different overall view of the hierarchies are always, to a degree, things of the past,
terminology is taken than that expressed here. that nostalgia is part of the 'shared imaginary' through
43 Tert., Apol. 6.3 and Amm. 28.4.9 both use which they are constituted (op. cit. (n. 2), 34-65).
prostibulum (or the feminine prostibula) to designate 46 For Cytheris see e.g. Cic., Phil. 2.58; Plut., Ant.
meretrices; the word is used for a brothel at Vulg. 9.4; and Serv., Comm. In Verg. Buc. IO. If Suetonius'
Ezech. I6:34 and Hist. Apoll. Tyr. 33 (earlier work, entitled by John Lydus in the only remaining
recension). reference to it Peri Epise1mon Pornon/On Illustrious
44 Paul the Deacon summarizes Festus: 'scorta Prostitutes (Mag. 3.64), had survived it might (or
appellantur meretrices, quia ut pelliculae subiguntur. might not, since what Lydus takes from it is entirely
omnia namque ex pellibus facta scortea appellantur' mythical) alter this picture.
('scorta are what meretrices are called, because they are 47 For discussion of the poetic evocations of these
worked like hides. For all things made from hides mistresses and their relationship to Roman social
are called scortea.') (443.6-7 Lindsay; the Festan text reality see, e.g. J. Griffin, 'Augustan poetry and the
at 442.I3-I7 is longer but badly fragmented). Later life of luxury', JRS 66 (1976), 87-I05; D. Kennedy,
writers offer two explanations for the figurative forma- The Arts of Love (I993), esp. 83-I03; and M. Wyke,
tion of lupa: the commentator Servius (In Virg. Aen. 'Mistress and metaphor in Augustan elegy', Helios
3.647) considers the connection between woman and i6,i (I989), 25-47.
beast to be a shared obscenity and odour, while

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 48 REBECCA FLEMMING

The term scortum, or more often its plural, is mainly used in a moralizing context,
to encapsulate concisely the disreputable aspects of the meretrix both as she exists in
herself and as she is associated with. It is for a scortum that 'honestum officium' ('proper
duties') are postponed on the road to ruin sketched out (for its avoidance) by Horace in
one of his exhortatory epistles to Lollius, for instance; and Seneca the Younger also
warns that life may be wasted 'in complexu scortorum aut vino' ('in the embrace of
whores or wine').48 Lupa is employed in more extreme cases, where the contempt is for
more than the woman's profession and its attendant dangers. The nasty foreign whores
that Juvenal takes such exception to, along with the men that fancy them, are lupae
barbarae; and when Martial wants to trump Ovid's unfavourable comparison of the
conduct of his flagrantly unfaithful mistress with that of a prostitute who modestly does
business behind closed doors, it is the behaviour of spurcae lupae ('filthy whores') who
none the less have the decency to use tombs as concealing shelter for their activities that
he evokes as worse than that of more discrete and domestic meretrices, but still not as
reprehensible as his Lesbia in actually wanting witnesses to her infidelities.49 Prostitu-
tion is, therefore, no undifferentiated phenomenon, but one understood to be engaged
in by those both buying and selling sex in manners more or less morally valued, more or
less socially sanctioned, and it is thus differentially deployed in a range of ethically
charged and culturally conformative discourses, in which both male and female conduct
comes under scrutiny and pressure. The behaviour least at issue here, however, is that
of the prostitute herself, and this is still a long way from the articulation of any kind of
proper professional hierarchy.
All this, of course, takes no account of the issue of price, or earnings, which, it
might be claimed, does provide an objective order of a kind; but here too things are
neither simple nor straightforward. There was a prostitutional price scale in operation
in the Roman Empire: inscriptions record a range between one and twenty-three asses,
with two asses as the clear mode, but give few indications about the range of women and
services to which they were attached.50 The second-century A.D. tax law of Palmyra,
which uniquely contains within it a ranking of prostitutes' prices, simply lists hetairai
who receive one denarius, eight, and six asses respectively without any further
definition.51 Literature shows a concern with transactions occurring both at the bottom
of this scale and off its other end entirely, but not with what happens in between, that is
with the overall cost structure, and certainly not with the livelihood of the women
involved.
The sex for one or two asses that appears, for instance, in a couple of Martial's
epigrams, does so as a measure of men's miserliness, or moderation, while the income of
a legionary tribune easily given by a rich man's slave to some Calvina or Catiena for his
occasional enjoyment of her body, in Juvenal's third satire, provides a shocking contrast
to the hesitation of an upright son of poor but free folk before he approaches some
openly soliciting scortum, a Chione, whose face takes his fancy.52 That the former is not
named as a meretrix in any way, that she is given - not necessarily paid - her
substantial reward while maintaining some control over what it is for, fits in, moreover,
with the general pattern of presentation of such ladies who do not inhabit the world of

48 Hor., Ep. I.I8.34-5; Sen., Brev. Vit. I6.4, the 51 CIS II iii.39I3 and see J. Matthews, 'The tax law
corrupting combination of scorta and vinum is stand- of Palmyra: evidence for economic history in a city of
ard, see also e.g. Livy 23.45.2 and Nep., Dion 4.4. the Roman East', JRS 74 (I984), I57-80 and further
49 Juv. 3.66; Ov., Am. 3.I4; Mart. I.34. The figure discussion below. It is worth mentioning that the
of the whore who services her customers in cemeter- earlier Palmyrene version of the law translated hetai-
ies, or stands naked in a stinking brothel, is also used rai as 'slave girls' (P I22) implying that prostitutes
as a most extremely unlikely guardian of basic stan- were slaves in Roman Palmyra.
dards of propriety, standards scandalously let slip by 52 Mart. 2.53 and I . I03; Juv. 3. I 32-6. The ludicrous
her social superiors, at Juv. 6.0 I 4-0 I 6 and I I . I 7 I -3. price put on Tharsia in the lupanar of the Hist. Apoll.
Apuleius also uses the shocking juxtaposition 'uxor Tyr. (33)- half a pound of gold initially, one aureus/
lupa' to describe the wife of Rufinus at Apol. 75. I00 HS thereafter - surely simply befits her status as
50 The evidence is collected by Stumpp, op. cit. a beautiful princess, rather than anything else. As
(n. I), 2I6- I 7 and T. McGinn, Prostitution and R. yulio-
Duncan-Jones says about the novel in general:
Claudian Legislation: The Formation of Social Policy 'Figures that have dramatic meaning but no external
in Early Imperial Rome (unpub. PhD diss., University significance predominate among the prices' (The Eco-
of Michigan, I986), 22-3. nomy of the Roman Empire (2nd edn, i982), 252).

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 49

fixed fees but of looser and larger exchanges of gifts and services, of relationships formed
on terms quite distinct from those on which prostitutes do business, and often take
literary form, as here, in contradistinction, if not counterposition, to meretrices
themselves.53 This contrast, in Juvenal, is to illustrate the gross inequities in the
distribution of rewards and respect in corrupt, contemporary Rome; the wrong man
gets the wrong girl, just as he gets the wrong preferments, legal judgements, and so on.
But in Ovid, for instance, it serves to police the behaviour of these more refined ladies,
to make sure they do not pass over into prostitution, a particularly sordid prostitution
since their degradation would then be self-wrought, not forced by another, and in
Libanius and Athenaeus it is a not unrelated distinction that is used to police the
behaviour of men.54 In all this, therefore, there is less of a hierarchy of women's prices
than one of men's conduct, in particular their sexual purchasing power. Those at the top
are able to operate in both the realms of the meretrix and the mistress, their dual position
further enabling them to use the figure of the meretrix to keep their mistresses in line,
but also bringing additional responsibilities about how they exercise their choices.
Within the ranks of the meretrices themselves, within the realm of fixed fees
represented by the epigraphic evidence, there is still, moreover, a crucial distinction
between price and income. Even if the common inference that outdoor meretrices
occupied the lower rungs of the price scale while a meretrix such as Manilia commanded
the higher prices, with the ladies of the lupanaria somewhere in between is correct (and
comparative material certainly suggests something of the kind), similar differentials of
income do not necessarily follow. For the fee for a single encounter is inversely
proportional to the frequency of such encounters, and modern studies indicate that the
higher earnings belong not to the more expensive call-girl but to the cheaper street-
walker, with low outlays and high productivity.55 High productivity may have its
downside, but so, at least according to the hookers of present-day Oslo, do high prices:
'The more customers pay, the more of yourself you sell', they say.56 There is also the
question of the time-scale involved and the economic objectives pursued. Street-walking
may be better adapted to a strategy requiring rapid financial accumulation over a short
period of time, and in which migrancy is implicated; whereas the more settled, service
oriented, operations of women who wait inside their rooms for men to come to them,
lead to a more long-term, gradual acquisition of wealth in circumstances in which the
earner is more integrated into the local community.57 This is, of course, to pass over the
position of those based in brothels, and, in general, the high prevalence of slavery, and
the role of the lenones, complicates the relationship between price and income still
further. A few women may have acquired enough money to purchase their freedom, but
generally there is no way of knowing what proportion (if any) of the money she brought
into a lupanar - or elsewhere - she actually received.58
The men of the Roman elite may have made, at least on a certain level, a
straightforward equation between price and value, but this equation is not equally valid
for the women themselves. Here a number of other considerations are relevant in
relating fees to earnings and to broader economic aims. Much remains speculative, but
it can certainly be argued that though the lupae of the streets and cemeteries presumably
ruled themselves out of the running for the highest rewards a meretrix might receive,
rewards entirely in the gift of some rich man, they might, when neither enslaved nor
ruled by a leno, earn through their own labour a more than living wage.59 McGinn

53 This is the kind of distinction Davidson builds J9 Juvenal (IO.236-9) lambasts a man who left all his
his hierarchy on, op. cit. (n. 23), I09-36. money to a whore who had been displayed for many
54 Ov., Am. i.io. years within the walls of a fornix, but the extremities
55 See e.g. H0igard and Finstad, op. cit. (n. I5), of the case suggest that even more modest versions
I30-I, and also the remarks of White, op. cit. (n. 2), would have been rare, though the general risk of
I 2- I 5. Of course, street-walkers may decide to pursue fortunes being lost in brothels is reflected in the
their career in a more relaxed fashion. various stories about the over-involvement of young
56 H0igard and Finstad, op. cit. (n. I5), I29. men with meretrices which usually turn on their
57 White, op. cit. (n. 2), I3-I6 and I03-25. disinheritance, e.g. Quint., Inst. 7.4.2o and I I. I.82-3,
58 Priap. 40 presents itself as a poem from the and Calp. Flacc. 30.
prostitute Telethusa marking the purchase of her
freedom, but this is the only hint at such a practice.

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 50 REBECCA FLEMMING

estimates earnings of about ten sesterces a day for meretrices operating on the attested
price scale, which is about twice the estimates for the daily wage of a male labourer, and
there are various other indications that prostitutes might become wealthy, most
strikingly Cato's story, as retold by Macrobius, that Larentia, 'meretricio quaestu
locupletatem' ('rich from her earnings as a meretrix'), left large amounts of land to the
Roman people on her death.60
It has to be said, however, that the people making the most money from prostitution
were not the women themselves, or their families. Greed characterizes the leno or
pornoboskos, not the prostitute; nor, to the same extent, her more familiar prostitutors.
By and large prostitution forms part of the slave economy, so though the labour is hers
the profits are not. And it is male rather than female lusts that are central; male rather
than female conduct that is of most concern in the writings that touch on prostitution.
The servile character of most Roman prostitution, its place in the wider pattern of the
exploitation of unfree labour by the slave-owning classes, their exploitation of the
constitution of the male sexual subject, and the ways women can be made to work at
being the ultimate sexual object, becomes clearer in examining the intersection of the
law and prostitution.

III. LEGAL RECOGNITION AND REGULATION

Roman prostitutes and their purveyors were recognized groups of persons within
the workings of the legal system; indeed they were subject to considerable regulation. It
was, however, their general place within society, their powers of personal action as its
members, that were regulated as much as, if not more than, their particular profession;
and this regulation was rather more incidental than systematic. The meretrix herself
rarely appears in legal writings, but is usually designated by some version of the phrase,
'quae corpore quaestum facit' ('she who makes a living by her body'), and such a woman
was, together with those who made a living by the bodies of others, penalized by a set of
legal disabilities that were justified, more or less consistently, with reference to that
most flexible of Roman legal concepts - infamia.61 They were persons of such ill-repu
that their rights as citizens were restricted, diminished, in various ways. However, since
women lacked many of these rights, as women, anyway, the specific penalties connected
with infamia had more bearing on the leno than either the lena or meretrix; what they did
not have could not then be removed from them. This is made most explicit in relation to
the provisions of the Praetor's Edict as it regulated litigancy, circumscribing the legal
agency of various groups of people, as well as setting out the ways in which that agency
might be exercised. Women can act only on behalf of themselves, while those who have
incurred infamia can act also on behalf of a small number of specified others.62 Thus the
Edict's list of infames is exclusively male, including he 'qui lenocinium fecerit' ('who
engages in lenocinium'), the identifying activity of the leno, but not she 'quae corpore
quaestum fecerit', for instance, as also those husbands and patresfamilias who commit
various marital improprieties, but not wives.63
Even acting on his own account, however, it would have been a brave leno who
ventured into a court, as several surviving declamations indicate. Orators slide easily
from impugning the moral character of the leno, to impugning his juridical capacity.
'Tu te iure audes defendere' ('Do you dare defend yourself in law?') demands an
unnamed speaker recorded by Calpurnius Flaccus as prosecuting a leno who had thus

60 McGinn, op. cit. (n. 50), 24; Macr., Sat. I.Io.I6; and C. Edwards, 'Unspeakable professions: public
this is, of course, not the only story told about performance and prostitution in ancient Rome', in
Larentia and her lands, but that it could be told is J. Hallett and M. Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities
significant none the less. (I997), 66-95.
61 On infamia see generally the remarks of B. Levick, 62 Dig. 3-I-I-5 - women; 3.I.I.8 - infames, the
'The senatus consultum from Larinum', JRS 73 others (mostly family members) on behalf of which
(I983), IO9; and see also, on the particular issues they can act are specified at 3. I . I . I I .
discussed here, McGinn, op. cit. (n. I), 26-69, 63 Dig. 3.2.I.
J. Gardner, Being a Roman Citizen (I 993), II 0-54,

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 5I

presumed.64 For, he asserts, 'nihil ei licet in quem nihil non licet' ('nothing is lawful for
him against whom nothing is unlawful'). Similarly, the one point at which the limitations
on a prostitute's court appearances exceeded those of other women - her exclusion, on
account of the disgraceful notoriety of her way of life, from giving evidence in any case
brought under the Lex Julia de vi - must be regarded as actually doing little work.65
The claim that the very 'condicio personae' ('condition of the character') of a meretrix
robs her of all fides - credibility or honesty - made by the pauper in the case of the
hate-potion, represents a very obvious line of attack for anyone faced with the testimony
of a prostitute on any matter.66
In all these declamations, except the last, the prostitutes are specified as slaves
mancipia and ancillae - controlled, if not owned, by a leno; and it is this feature of his
profession that is also most prominent in the definition of 'qui lenocinium fecerit'
provided by Ulpian in his work On the Edict.67 He specifies the group of persons thus
classified by the law as follows:

lenocinium facit qui quaestuaria mancipia habuerit: sed et qui in liberis hunc quaestum
exercet, in eadem causa est. sive autem principaliter hoc negotium gerat sive alterius
negotiationis accessione utatur (ut puta si caupo fuit vel stabularius et mancipia talia habuit
ministrantia et occassione ministerii quaestum facientia: sive balneator fuerit, velut in
quibusdam provinciis fit, in balineis ad custodienda vestimenta conducta habens mancipia
hoc genus observantia in officina), lenocinii poena tenebitur. Pomponius et eum, qui in
servitute peculiaria mancipia prostituta habuit, notari post libertatem ait.

He engages in lenocinium who has slaves for hire, though he who conducts this business with
free persons is in the same situation. He is liable to punishment for lenocinium whether this
is his principal occupation, or whether he carries on another trade (as, for instance, if he is
an inn- or tavern-keeper and has slaves of this kind serving and taking the opportunity to ply
their trade, or he is a bath-keeper having, as happens in certain provinces, slaves hired to
look after clothing in the baths who are attentive in this way in their workplace). And
Pomponius says that he who, while in servitude, had prostituted slaves in his peculium,
remains infamous after emancipation.68

The leno is, therefore, primarily a manager of slaves prostituted in taverns, inns, and
bath-houses, as well as brothels. He may also himself be a slave, and there are a number
of other indications that, even if not, he should still often be seen as a middle-man,
running a business in which the major investment comes from, and main profits accrue
to, people rather better placed in Roman society than himself.69
A similarly full definition of the meretrix and lena is also offered by Ulpian, but in
relation to the Lex Julia et Papia, not the Praetor's Edict; that is, in relation to an
enactment regulating the relationship between marriage, reproduction, and inheritance,
rather than regulating the instrumental relationship between persons and the law. In
the case of the Augustan legislation, moreover, the actual wording of the statute that
Ulpian is clarifying is unfortunately lost, or displaced. However, it is clear that it was
contrary to this law for freeborn men to marry infamous women, including prostitutes
specified by some version of the phrase 'quae palam corpore quaestum facit' - lenae,
and those manumitted by a leno or lena, among others.70 Ulpian explains:

64 Calp. Flacc. 5; the same controversia is referred to include Calp. Flacc. 37; [Quint.], Decl. Min. 356, and,
at Sen., Contr. IO.I.I3-I5, where a selection of of course, Sen., Contr. I .2.
sententiae abusing the leno is preserved, and, more 68 Dig. 3.2.4.2-3.
briefly, at Rhetores Latini Minores 83.i. For similar 69 Dig. 5.3.27. I, for instance, ensures that rents from
attacks on the ethical and legal persona of the leno, see brothels can be claimed as part of an inheritance, for
also [Quint.], Min. Decl. 385, where a leno is such establishments are run on the properties of many
attempting to bring an action damnum iniuria datum honesti viri; and see also CIL III.I3750 which is also
against a man who administered a love-potion to one discussed below.
of his slave meretrices. 70 For discussion of this provision, and the problems
65 Dig. 22-5.3-5. that surround it, see e.g. McGinn, op. cit. (n. i),
66 [Quint.], Decl. Maj. I 4.5. 70-I04, S. Treggiari, Roman Marriage (I99I), 62-3,
67 Other declamations featuring prostituted slaves and Gardner, op. cit. (n. 6i), I23-6.

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 52 REBECCA FLEMMING

palam quaestum facere dicemus non tantum eam, quae in lupanario se prostituit, verum
etiam si qua (ut adsolet) in taberna cauponia vel qua alia pudori suo non parcit. palam autem
sic accepimus passim, hoc est sine dilectu: non si qua adulteris vel stupratoribus se
committit, sed quae vicem prostitutae sustinet. item quod cum uno et altero pecunia accepta
commiscuit, non videtur palam corpore quaestum facere. Octavenus tamen rectissime ait
etiam eam, quae sine quaestu palam se prostituerit, debuisse his connumerari ... lenas
autem eas dicimus, quae mulieres quaestuarias prostituunt. lenam accipiemus et eam, quae
alterius nomine hoc vitae genus exercet. si qua cauponam exercens in ea corpora quaestuaria
habeat (ut multae adsolent sub praetextu instrumenti cauponii prostitutas mulieres habere),
dicendum hanc quoque lenae appellatione contineri.

We would say that a woman openly makes a living [by her body] not only where she makes
herself available in a brothel, but also if (as is customary) she squanders her chastity in
taverns, inns, and other places. Thus we understand 'openly' as indiscriminately - that is
without selection - not a woman who commits adultery or fornication, but one who
maintains herself in the manner of a prostitute. Likewise, because she has intercourse with
one or two, having taken money, it is not understood that she has openly made a living by
her body. Also Octavenus says, most correctly, that even a woman who makes herself openly
available, without making a living, ought to be counted in this category.... We call these
women lenae who set out women for hire. We also understand as a lena she who leads this
kind of life under another name. If a woman running an inn has slaves for hire in it (as many
are accustomed to have prostituted women, on the pretext that they are servants of the inn),
this must also be said to put her in the category of the lena.71

For Ulpian, then, a prostitute is a woman who makes her absolute availability into a way
of life; not one whose sexual activity is, however wrong, essentially selective, nor one
who only occasionally turns tricks. This way of life need not even be remunerative. It
was juristically possible to separate the quaestum out from the vicis prostitutae without
destroying it, though there cannot have been much call to do so among the non-slave
women this law affects. The juristic definition of this way of life was still pretty
stringent, however, though it clearly was a sexual position - one of complete
openness - that was thus being lived, and the sexuality and the living impinge more
closely on each other, are closer correlates, than in the case of other women. This
stringency was also not just a legalistic phenomenon. Others too drew a sharp line
between the professionally promiscuous, those who lived by their accessibility, and
those women whose promiscuity was shaped by other considerations, who had not
surrendered control over access to their bodies, even if they exercised that control
woefully badly. Quintilian, for instance, considers the notorious Clodia to have been an
impudica, an unchaste and immoral woman, but not a meretrix; though he acknowledges
Cicero's application of the latter term to her during his defence of Caelius to have been
an effective case of rhetorical exaggeration.2 And the Younger Seneca describes the
transformation of Augustus' daughter Julia 'ex adultera in quaestuariam' ('from
adulterer into mercenary'), from a woman who took scores of lovers to a woman who
took money from men she did not even know.73 Economics and remuneration are thus
back in the picture.
Ulpian's lenae might be in charge of these women (and apparently only women)
who make a living by their bodies in a range of locations, indeed there is a persistent
concern to cover all forms of prostitution and its organization in these juristic
formulations. And a closer relationship between lena and meretrix than between leno and
his goods emerges in poetry, though here the lena is more of a procurer of individual
women than a manager of any kind of institution; while a remarkable third-century A.D.

71 Dig. 23.2.43.pr-3 and 7-9; cf. 23.2.4l.pr, where agrees with Ulpian that it is accessibility, not pub-
Marcellus implicitly interprets the legislative 'palam' licity, that is at issue in incurring infamia and the
rather differently, as signifying an openness of pub- penalties of the Julian law. These points are also
licity, rather than of accessibility, as for Ulpian; other discussed at McGinn, op. cit. (n. I), 123-39.
juristic usage also tends to favour Marcellus in this 72 Quint., Inst. 8.4.2; cf. Cic., Cael. I6.38.
respect. However, since what Marcellus is arguing is 73 Sen., Ben. 6.32.1.
that the 'palam' is an unnecessary qualification, he

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 53

inscription from Beneventum even commemorates Vibia Calybeni, a liberta lena.74 For
neither the lena, nor the meretrix, however, can the provisions of the Lex Julia et
Papia - the point of departure for Ulpian's definition - have been of much importance.
This is not to say that matters of inheritance, particularly for their children, were
irrelevant to these women, and their partners, in forming any union, but that a number
of factors - the inability of slaves to marry, for instance, as well as the range of
alternative relationships available, the compromised status of 'turpes personae' ('dis-
graced persons'), such as women who make a living by their bodies, as heirs, and the
doubt surrounding the application of the Augustan legislation to the poorer sections of
society all conspire to reduce its significance in this respect.75 However, this law, and
others, did play a part in regulating the place of the prostitute, and those who controlled
her, in society more generally; it did act to formalize their denigration. This regulation
restricted their rights, their powers of action, diminished their standing and agency, as
punishment for their way of life. It should be stressed that it is the failure of individuals
to conduct themselves in accordance with social norms and values that is being
penalized, not its results. No verdict is being passed on the institution of prostitution
itself, on its desirability or otherwise, just on its personnel as women and men living in
the Roman state.
There were aspects of the institution that Romans did find problematic. Indeed
there were even problems involved in the slave base of prostitution. A considerable
amount of imperial legislation and juristic writing is dedicated to the restrictive covenant
'ne prostituatur' which could be attached to the sale of slaves and so forbid the purchaser
to prostitute the slave.76 The Scriptores Historiae Augustae further report that Hadrian
prohibited the sale of slaves to lenones (or lanistae) without cause, and Septimius Severus
certainly gave the Urban Praetor the obligation to protect slaves from being prosti-
tuted.77 It was a rescript of the same emperor that laid down that a woman's servile
quaestus did not affect her standing after emancipation and, in a similar vein, a
freedwoman could not be required to perform services for her patron that harmed her
reputation.78 None of these measures amount to anything like a serious attempt to
prevent, or even curb, slave prostitution; but they do mark various points of difficulty
and contradiction within the Roman legal system and the principles and values it
enacted. That women should be so specifically forced to surrender their key asset -
their chastity - and so clearly condemned not to fulfill their proper role in society -
the procreation of legitimate children - was recognizably wrong, a contravention of
basic social norms. But it occurred within structures of power - the family and
slavery -just as basic to Roman society, to which certain other benefits also accrued
from its occurrence. There was nothing to be done on the fundamental level, but that
some patresfamilias might seek to prevent members of their household, for whom they
had a certain responsibility and whose conduct also reflected back on them, from
meeting this fate even after they had passed out of their direct control, and that the state
might also try to intervene around the edges, makes sense too, as do the limited legal
mechanisms adopted.
The other legal restriction on becoming a meretrix, that is the Tiberian senatuscon-
sultum prohibiting women of equestrian (and presumably also senatorial) rank from
making a living by their bodies, arises from a rather different set of circumstances and

74 On the poetic figure of the lena see K. Sara Myers, 76 See W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery
'The poet and the procuress: the lena in Latin love (I908), 70-I and 603-4 and T. McGinn, 'Ne serva
elegy', YRS 86 (i996), I-2I; and see CIL IX.2029 for prostituatur: restrictive covenants in the sale of
Vibia. slaves', ZRG I07 (I990), 3I5-53 and now also
75 Dig. 37. I2.3.pr covers the removal of turpes per- McGinn, op. cit. (n. I), 288-3 I 9.
sonae as heirs; and the Gnomon of the Idiologos 77 SHA, Hadr. i 8.8; Dig. I -I 2. I. i 8. The phrasing
actually sets a minimum inheritance below which the of the Severan instruction suggests that the Praetor's
Lex Julia does not apply, which may reflect practice duties were connected with the enforcement of 'ne
elsewhere even if not the letter of the law, see prostituatur' covenants.
Treggiari, op. cit. (n. 70), 78-9. There are sufficient 78 Dig. 3.2.24 and 38. I .38pr.
legal (and other) references, however, to indicate that 79 McGinn, op. cit. (n. 76), offers a similar explana-
meretrices did marry, or form other kinds of legally tion, but one which focuses more on the preservation
recognized unions, see e.g. Dig. 23.2.24 and 47; of the household's honour in all this.
25.7.3pr and 48.5.I4.2.

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 54 REBECCA FLEMMING

contradictions. This, as Tacitus tells it, was a rapid response to the efforts of one Vistilia,
the scion of a praetorian family, to avoid the heavy penalties of the Julian law on adultery
by advertising her 'licentiam stupri' ('sexual licence') with the aediles, and thus clearly
removing herself from the ranks of the matresfamilias with whom adultery was
committed.80 A further senatusconsultum closed off engagement in lenocinium (and
acting) as a possible escape route for women in similar straits, but explicitly so, rather
than by banning anyone from taking it up at all.81 The implication, it should be stressed,
is that Vistilia is the first and last aristocrat to respond to the clear incentives of the
Augustan legislation in this way; moreover, the real issue here is adultery not
prostitution.
The role of the aediles in relation to prostitution, however, raises the issue of a more
systematic kind of regulation of the profession and its organization at Rome. Unfortu-
nately, the evidence on the subject is extremely slight. Tacitus' account of Vistilia's
recourse to it is the only surviving mention of some kind of aedilician register of
prostitutes at Rome; a register which he claims has an essentially penal purpose, though
one better befitting an earlier, more innocent, age, when publicity in itself was
considered punishment enough for the unchaste. To this can be added a passing
reference by Seneca the Younger to places, connected with prostitution, that 'aedilem
metuentia' ('fear the aedile'); though what exactly they fear from him is unclear.82
Whatever aedilician control of prostitution there was, however, must have been eclipsed
following the introduction by the emperor Gaius of a raft of new income-generating
measures including a tax on the earnings of meretrices, which, Suetonius states, was
initially collected by the publicani, but quickly handed over to the Praetorian Guard in
order to maximize revenues for the imperial treasury.83 As McGinn says in his extensive
study of the subject, this maximization was as much about the resources the military
brought to the enterprise as about the advantages of direct collection per se; the
Praetorians had the capability both to keep a careful track of all women making a living
by their bodies in the city, and to ensure regular payment.84 His suggestions about the
effect of this measure on the practice of prostitution itself are, however, rather less
convincing, as he sees this tax as basically and beneficially 'legitimizing' prostitution,
though also increasing the control exercised over those who paid it, a control he admits
might be problematic.85
For Caligula's tax crosses no lines of criminalization, contravenes no principles of
public policy; there is none of the normal, indeed necessary, context for this talk of
'legitimation'. Instead it acts in collusion with the other circumstances of Roman
prostitution, both legislative and otherwise. It effectively exploits the situation in which
prostitution is entirely licit, but its personnel are legally and socially compromised; not
disallowed but disadvantaged. This is revenue raised on the (substantial) earnings of
women and slaves, persons of ill-repute and restricted juridical agency, though not
illegality; persons who could not defend themselves from imperial depredations, and
who were unlikely to find any champions amongst the honourable and powerful, though
their profits might be affected. It is, therefore, a tax on vulnerability, on a lucrative
vulnerability, which was basically recognized for what it was by Suetonius, who has it
motivated entirely by greed, and by later Christian writers who put the failure of a
succession of Christian emperors to stop profiting from a trade to which they were now

80 Tac., Ann. 2.85. from Palmyra (CIS II.iii.3913), and an inscription

81 Suet., Tib. 35.2; Dig. 48.5.II.2; and see also from Chersonesus on the Black Sea (CIL III.I3750);
Levick, op. cit. (n. 6I). I. Portes. 67 also records a harbour passage tax for
82 Sen., Vit. Beat. 6.7.3; the case of the meretrix prostitutes at Coptos on the Red Sea, but the structure
Manilia and the aedile Hostilia has also been used as of the tariff is too poorly understood to make much of
evidence of this register, but is less clear in this respect it.
than is often suggested. 84 T. McGinn, 'The taxation of Roman prostitutes',
83 The introduction of the tax is described in Suet., Helios I6 (I989), 87; and see the further comments of
Calig. 4O and Dio ap. Xiph. 59.28.3; its collection in R. Bagnall, 'A trick a day keeps the tax man away?
the second century A.D. by both publicani and troops The prostitute tax in Egypt', BASP 28 (1991), 5-12
is witnessed by at least two receipts on ostraka from and now also McGinn, op. cit. (n. I), 248-87.
Egypt (O.Wilck. 83, O.Cair.GPW 6o, and see also 85 McGinn, op. cit. (n. 84), 8o-6 and 98-9.
O.Edfou I7I), the bilingual inscription of the tax law

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 55

at least notionally inimical down to the size of the revenues involved.86 And far from
ameliorating that vulnerability, both the economic pressure exerted by the tax itself and
the military means of its collection exacerbated it.
Only speculation is possible concerning the increase in productivity the tax would
presumably have forced, and the impact it might have had on the relative merits and
demerits of different forms of prostitution; but there is clear evidence that the collection
of the tax was accompanied by violence and corruption.87 A late second-century A.D.
inscription from the Black Sea town of Chersonesus preserves, in fragmentary form, a
decree from the provincial governor, and various imperial instructions, issued in
response to local complaints about the extortion practised by the garrison charged with
gathering revenue from prostitution; complaints and instructions which also refer to
similar problems, and their resolution, in the past.88 The grievances set out and
responded to seem to centre around threats offered to, and excess monies taken from,
those whom the soldiers considered to be in charge of the trade, and the most rewarding
objects of their attentions: that is various leading citizens of the town. It is they who
have protested, and been answered in the form of orders to the army to behave itself
properly in general, and to restrict its activities to actual places of prostitution, rather
than calling at the homes of the wealthy in particular. Extortion must have been even
more endemic lower down the social order, and most vulnerable to violence and
intimidation would have been the independent operative, the meretrix who acted entirely
on her own behalf. The leno or lena could provide protection from the most arbitrary
abuses, especially if they were both well-organized and well-connected, making working
for them more attractive, despite the sacrifice in self-determination entailed, for those
who had any choice in the matter. Comparative material provides good parallels for the
way this kind of official intervention serves to bolster the position of, and increase the
exploitative possibilities for, those who could stand between the authorities and their
victims.89
Indeed the Chersonesus inscription refers to the tax at issue as being levied on
lenocinium and it is lenones that are the focus of the emperor Theodosius' first faltering
move away from the Christian state's participation in the profits of prostitution.90 This
is, in many ways, a tax on prostitution rather than prostitutes, and it reveals and
reinforces the position of the main beneficiaries of the business, the lenones and, behind
them, the elite. Against this, however, must be placed the fact that the two most
straightforward Egyptian receipts for the payment of the prostitute tax - the telos
hetairikon - are issued to women, presumably the hetairai themselves.91 But it was not
the military who collected the tax in Egypt, so perhaps this evidence should be placed
beside, rather than against, that from elsewhere, and alongside a summary account of
farmed taxes levied on a market held in Oxyrhynchus in A.D. I55/6 in which koineia

86 This is expressed most clearly by Evagrius at HE pieces of evidence come from contexts where collec-
3.39 when he discusses the eventual abolition of the tion was by tax-farmers, not the military. McGinn
tax by Anastasius in A.D. .498. And it is within the also moves in a more flexible direction at op. cit.
context of a Christian Empire with a new public (n. I), 264-8 and 274-86.
policy towards prostitution that legitimation becomes 88 CIL IIII.3750 = B. Latyschev, Inscriptiones
an issue, as Evagrius points out. Antiquae Orae Septentrionalis Ponti Euxini Graecae et
87 Its economic effects will have depended, in part, Latinae 12 No. 404; and see discussion by McGinn,
on whether the amount of the tax - set at the amount op. cit. (n. 84), 88-go and op. cit. (n. I), 26I-4.
received for a single concubitus - accrued daily, as 89 On the legal repression that led to the develop-
McGinn argues (op. cit. (n. 84), go) or monthly, ment of a pimp system in late nineteenth-century
which is the more traditional view. The question is England, for instance, see Walkowitz, op. cit. (n. 2),
not really resolvable, but Bagnall (op. cit. (n. 84), 2Io-2 I.
9-I 2) opens the way to a possible reconciliation 90 CIL 111. I3750, 36 and NTh i 8.
between the evidence that suggests prostitutes were 91 See Bagnall, op. cit. (n. 84) for details. I would
taxed much more heavily than other earners - that is further suggest that O .Edfou I 7I, which not only
the shocked report of Suetonius, the survival of the contains a broken text, but is also made out to a known
tax for so long under the Christian emperors, and poll-tax payer from a well-attested Jewish family,
Evagrius' account of its eventual demise - and the could well be made out to a profiteer from prostitution
evidence of its collection in Egypt and Palmyra which of the kind met elsewhere, rather than an actual pimp
puts it more in line with normal, monthly, accruals. or simply the victim of a general apportionment of a
For, as he points out, there is no reason to assume shortfall in the telos hetairikon which are the two
uniformity in implementation across the Empire; possibilities discussed by Bagnall.
moreover, it seems to me suggestive that these latter

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 56 REBECCA FLEMMING

(thought to be municipal brothels) are taxed as units.92 All can be taken as a useful
reminder of the undoubted variation in prostitutional practice, its social position and
patterning, across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire.

IV. PATTERNS OF SLAVERY AND PROSTITUTION

The authorial elite of the Roman Empire thus viewed prostitution as an institution
through which, for basically economic reasons, women were made and marketed as
sexual objects of a certain, approved, type for the general populace. This was, then, a
sex industry, but one in which the women were considered (and, through slavery,
concretely constituted) more as products than producers, more as wares than workers;
they were approved only as sexual objects for men, not as themselves, as women, and
certainly not as sexual subjects. The general populace mainly meant the poor, including
slaves, but also the rich. For them the meretrix counted among a whole range of sexual
choices; but they could certainly also partake of the goods on offer to everyone, so long
as they conducted themselves properly towards them and their milieu. This indeed is a
central concern of the elite discourse on the subject; though whether it was a concern
shared in any way by the more humble and usual brothel clientele is unknown.
This was not just how the elite viewed the institution of prostitution, it was also
how the state, their state, shaped it. The law penalized the meretrix and the leno, or lena,
diminishing their standing in society, their ability to act as members of the imperial
community; but it protected, in various implicit and explicit ways, the customer and the
investor, the less direct profiteer from prostitution. It enabled women to be forcibly
prostituted, to have their bodies repeatedly sold under them - their owner being the
one who gained, as all monies legally accrued to him and from which he provided her
livelihood as he chose. The emperor also participated in, even deepened, this
exploitation, with his tax on prostitutes' earnings. The impact of this tax on the
historical record, however exaggerated in places, indicates the economic significance of
prostitution; and it may also stand as a symbol of the more generally integral position of
this institution in imperial society.93
In one sense, therefore, external factors bore down especially hard on the Roman
meretrix, leaving her little room for manoeuvre, little agency at all. However, for those
outside the framework of slavery itself, it is not clear that this was in fact the case.
Imperial Rome was a divided society to an extent almost unimaginable now in the
modern West - the pattern of formal penalties and rewards woven into its legal system,
both by broad concepts such as infamia and specific provisions such as those in the
Augustan marriage legislation, were really relevant only to a select few. It was important
that a wealthy man who owned or visited a brothel did not find his powers of litigation
and inheritance compromised thereby; but it mattered little to the women inside, they
had separate concerns and may not even have been aware of the legal repercussions of
their actions. It is not that the outside world was entirely irrelevant, but that it was the
views of the poor, amongst whom meretrices lived and worked, rather than the rich, who
wrote about them, that impinged on the consciousness and experience of these women.
It was within these communities that their own attitudes to a career in prostitution
would be formed, and within these economies that such a career was pursued; but so
little can be said about this part of the Roman world that the meretrix is left as an actor
without a stage.
The writings of the rich on the subject generally emphasize this distance between
the worlds inhabited by the author and the prostitute, even if the two types of persons

92 P.Lond. inv I562 verso, I9-20, published and was accustomed, the massive size of the global sex
discussed by J. Rea in ZPE 46 (i 982), I 9 I -209. industry today and the fact that UN reports in the
93 It is worth remembering, when reading Evagrius' I980s estimated that more money was being made in
account of arguments by those opposed to the aboli- the trafficking of women, mostly for prostitution, than
tion of this tax that it would leave the state unable to smuggling drugs or arms (see, e.g. S. Altink, Stolen
pay the army or serve God in the manner to which he Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery ( 995), 2).

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 57

occasionally met. Not only are meretrices clearly positioned, in a number of ways, right
at the other end of the social scale, perhaps even so far removed as to be not on the same
scale at all, but also women who are of the ruling classes are not meretrices, are rarely
even accused of being such. The woman against whom the figure of the meretrix is
marshalled is the mistress of elegy and epigram, not the matrona; and even here it is the
gap between mistress and meretrix that is exploited, not their elision, there is no
expansive dilution of the category of meretrix to include loose women more widely. The
behaviour of the matrona was of concern, and it was variously regulated, but the meretrix
was too far away from her to be of much assistance in this respect. The problem of her
sexual conduct, especially of her potential for adultery, was dealt with very much on its
own terms. Indeed adultery, a real (if much exaggerated) issue among the elite and an
activity they actually sought to prevent, was much more harshly punished by the law
than prostitution, an issue of the ordering of the rest of society in relation to the elite, an
activity not to be prevented but kept in its place; and adulterer also proved the stronger
term in speech, as moecha and adulter are derogatory synonyms for meretrix, not the
other way round. Vistilia recognized this as she moved herself from the harsh reality of
the threat of a prosecution for adultery into the gentler unreality of the aedile's list of
the sexually available.94
It is not that being an adulterer was deemed worse than being a prostitute, for it is
the utter depravity and degradation of prostitution - proper prostitution in which
money changes hands, not a more loosely constituted whoredom - that is the worst
Juvenal and Seneca can throw at Messalina and Julia, but that the two were, from the
perspective of the wealthy writer, two different kinds of women, separated by an
enormous social gulf if sexually more proximate. The image of the 'meretrix Augusta' is
an incredible one, in all senses of the word, and is both stronger and weaker for it.
Juvenal exploits its potency in his particular poetic programme, but more mundane
moralists generally respected the distance between the matrona and adulter dyad on the
one hand, and the meretrix on the other. Thus the meretrix herself is again excluded
from these elite literary conversations. Again it is a quite differently located (and now
lost) set of conversations in which all manner of claims and counter-claims may, or may
not, have been made by and about meretrices and their neighbours that is of real
relevance.
These points and patterns, however, fit neatly into neither the history of female
labour nor the history of female sexuality, though both work and sex are significant
parts of the story. Social policy, even if construed most broadly, takes up only some of
the slack, for it is policies towards things other than prostitution itself that are of most
importance. Moreover, it is unclear whether it would be possible, even if the evidence
from the ancient world was commensurate with that used by White or Karras, to write a
history of Roman prostitution that resembled either of theirs; a verdict which is certainly
not critical, since both predict it, more or less explicitly. Access to their kinds of
materials would undoubtedly make a difference, but a central problem, or pair of
problems, would remain. For, on the one hand, the professionalism of the meretrix, the
sense in which she definitely makes her livelihood with her body, is engaged in economic
activity, is unquestioned; she is not 'completely defined by her sexuality'. On the other
hand, her professionalism, in the sense that it implies a degree of ownership of, and
control over, that economic activity, the making of her livelihood, is challenged by the
involvement of slavery in prostitution, the way it constitutes the women as goods as
much as workers. Furthermore, slavery must have had an impact on the way meretrices

94 McGinn, op. cit. (n. I), I40-2I5, argues (inter to prostitute was achieved - the toga both were
alia) that the Augustan adultery law deploys the allegedly meant to wear - is problematic in many
categories of meretrix and leno against adulterous respects, and McGinn has to strengthen the slight
matronae and their complaisant husbands, both as contemporary evidence by recourse to later Christian
deterrent and punishment. The relevant legal notions writers who are, needless to say, participants in a
(especially that of lenocinium) were certainly part of rather different moral discourse. In a sense this just
the juridical matrix within which this legislation was goes to emphasize that, in contrast with what was to
formulated and elaborated, but McGinn's particular follow, remarkably few women of the pagan Roman
points are harder to make. For the main vehicle world were called 'whores', at least in polite society.
through which he claims the assimilation of adulterer

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 58 REBECCA FLEMMING

were understood as a sexual category as well as on their status as workers. It may, for
instance, have contributed both to their sexual objectification and the separation of
meretrices from, rather than conflation with, other women, indeed it probably helped
foster the divisions between rather than commonality among Roman women more
generally.
A full assessment and understanding of the impact of slavery on prostitution,
however, is complicated, if not impeded, on two scores. The first is that within modern
debates on the sex industry there are arguments that prostitutes cannot, by definition,
attain ownership of, or control over, their situation; that prostitution has an intrinsic
affinity with, an innate tendency towards, slavery. That is there are those who (somewhat
ironically given their rhetorical use of a more metaphorical notion of slavery) would
claim that the existence of juridical slavery, of large numbers of prostitutes who are
juridical slaves, makes little or no difference to the plight of the prostitute, or to the
wider evil prostitution participates in. There are two main ways in which such anti-
prostitution, 'abolitionist', arguments are advanced.95 The more traditional approach,
beginning with the late nineteenth-century campaigns against the 'White Slave Trade',
is to characterize prostitution as something innocent young girls are forced into, as the
domain of cruel and violent pimps and organized crime, to whom huge profits accrue
while the women themselves have to make do with more meagre takings. More recently,
however, the issues of coercion, of consent and control, have been discounted in favour
of seeing the problem as residing in the very nature of the transaction around which the
institution of prostitution is constructed; this is where prostitution is taken to resemble
slavery. For prostitution inherently compromises the personhood, the subject-status of
the prostitute while enhancing the manhood, the subject-status and power, of the
purchaser; it thus assimilates, in a gender specific way, the prostitute to the position of
the slave and the purchaser to that of the master.96 More precisely, however, prostitution
is to be classified as a form of sexual violence against women, which is a structural fact,
unaffected by its concrete circumstances or by the actual views of either party; and it is
to be opposed, abolished, on that basis. It is against these kind of assertions, and to
normalize the position of the prostitute in society more generally, that others,
importantly including much of the prostitutes' rights movement, define prostitution as
'sex work'; chosen on the same basis as other types of work, and experienced in ways
that depend on the conditions in which the work takes place rather than the terms on
which the sex takes place.97 They argue that what is being sold is not the self, or
degradation, or even the body, but the woman's time and labour; and even that making
men pay for this erotic service, its commodification, may actually be positively self-
determining for women and subversive of the dominant sexual order. They speak not of
the 'free-choice' to become a prostitute, for in the contemporary labour market free-
choice is a chimera, but say rather that many women have made a 'rational choice' in
this matter; and that efforts should be made to improve the conditions of the trade, to
increase women's autonomy and control and decrease third-party involvement, state
repression and social stigma, rather than forbidding them this option. These are then
reformers and transformers rather than abolitionists, those for whom prostitution may
become slavery, but is not necessarily so.
Historically speaking, the view that the organization of prostitution is automatically
coercive has little support. Recent studies in particular have put more emphasis on the
rationality of the choice to go into prostitution in contexts where women's economic
options are significantly circumscribed, and the ways women found of achieving their
objectives, of resisting degradation, in the profession. 'Choice' not compulsion was the
main mode of entry into prostitution in late nineteenth-century Britain and America,

95 For a recent discussion of these issues within the tion within slavery. Of course, it is not the prostitute-
abolitionist tradition see e.g. S. Jeffreys, The Idea of punter relationship that is the slave-master one in
Prostitution (I 997). actual slave prostitution.
96 This comparison is based on the definition of 97 For a recent discussion within this tradition see
slavery formulated by Orlando Patterson in his e.g. W. Chapkis, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing
Slavery and Social Death (I982), in particular his Erotic Labour (I 997).
highlighting of the dynamics of honour and degrada-

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 59

despite the claims about the magnitude and methods of the 'White Slave Trade'; and
those who campaign against the traffic in women today estimate that force and deception
are implicated in between ten and twenty per cent of recruitment into prostitution both
within South East Asia and of foreign women into the sexual marketplaces of Western
Europe.98 That is what might reasonably be taken as a rough reversal of the probable
proportions of slave and free prostitutes in the Roman world. Nor are prostitution and
pimping synonymous. The sex trade in colonial Nairobi White describes is free from
third-party involvement, male or female; and outside of slavery, and the existence of
formal ownership, it is state regulation and repression, especially the criminalization of
the prostitutes themselves, that establishes the conditions for, and encourages the
growth of, the systematic exploitation of prostitutes by the managers of clubs and
brothels, and pimps.99
On the issue of whether, even in the most favourable conditions, prostitution is
abusive, directly damaging to the prostituted women themselves and indirectly
detrimental to the position of women in society more widely, the historical view is, of
course, less clear. Either way, however, it does seem somewhat perverse to discount
issues of consent, coercion, and control completely; to create absolutes rather than a
complex continuum of abuse and empowerment, degradation and achievement. And,
on any such scale, slave prostitution is going to come at the very bottom. It is the site
where all the most harmful and oppressive conditions for the prostituted women, if not
wider society, converge and formally congeal. There are certainly free women who
approach, and have approached, this position. Those currently forcibly trafficked from
South East Asia for instance, who find themselves virtually imprisonned in brothels or
clubs in Amsterdam or Tokyo and saddled with an enormous debt notionally incurred
in their transport and settlement which must be paid off before they see any of their own
earnings. But however close these groups of women come in practice, there is still a
formal difference between them, of juridical status and the legality of their treatment,
and it is not an irrelevant consideration. 'Non-slaves always possess some claims and
powers themselves vis-a-vis their proprietor', as Orlando Patterson says, and it is true
however hard they may find it to pursue those claims or exercise those powers in the
circumstances; otherwise slavery vanishes as a distinct institution.100 Indeed, the overall
effect of the argument that prostitution inherently imitates slavery is to blur this
distinctiveness, to overlook the fact that the relationship between prostitutes and slaves
may actually be one of identity not resemblance.
Moreover, this article has tried to draw attention to ways in which prostitutes' legal
status made a difference in the Roman world itself, to the lives and livelihoods of the
women themselves. However, having insisted that juridical slavery does matter, the
second difficulty now comes into play; for it is at this point that the historical
comparisons are at their weakest. It is patterns of prostitution in societies without large
numbers of slaves that have been best studied; while the impact of patterns of servitude
on prostitution in slave societies has received little attention. Both slavery and
prostitution are expanding areas of recent historical scholarship, but separately not
together. Moreover, the most obvious place to look for comparisons - the American
South - turns out to be rather awkward in this respect, though illuminating in others.
For there slaves were not commercially prostituted on any substantial scale; demonstrat-
ing that the particularities of the Roman world are not reducible to the centrality of
slavery within it, to the simple existence of opportunity and motive for slave prostitution.

98 See e.g. Walkowitz, op. cit. (n. 2), I3-4I, and also offers a range of evidence to support her wider
Hill, op. cit. (n. 2), 63-I06, for the past and Chapkis, claim that, 'men and male control enter prostitution
op. cit. (n. 96), 47-8 for the present. only after the state does' (4). This claim ties in with
99 White, states categorically (op. cit. (n. 2), 6) that, the conclusions of other recent studies, but slavery
'There were no pimps in Nairobi or anywhere else in provides an exception.
Africa, outside of Johannesburg in the i89os'. She 100 Patterson, op. cit. (n. 96), 26.

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 6o REBECCA FLEMMING

In their controversial econometric survey of Southern slavery, Fogel and Engerman

offer two reasons for this absence.101 First, that there was no demand, on account of
white men's 'racist aversions' to sex with black women; second, that there was no
supply, on account of the greater profits to be made from female slave labour in the
fields than in brothels. As has often been pointed out, however, white men had no such
aversion to sex with black women outside the frame of commercial prostitution. Indeed
it has been suggested that it was instead the ease with which female slaves were sexually
exploited by white men who had control over them which acted to reduce the numbers
prostituted.102 Rome, however, contradicts this argument, or at least renders it
insufficient. Their own slaves certainly counted amongst the acceptable sexual objects
and options for elite men in the Roman Empire, indeed, the dissenting Musonius Rufus
implicitly locates them as the most socially acceptable, with prostitutes next, and other
unmarried and otherwise unattached women after that.103 But this also shows, as do
many more orthodox voices, that the two were not mutually exclusive, and there were
those who suggested that the reverse is true, that one form of licence inevitably leads to
another. Of course the clientele of Roman brothels was primarily poor, they did not
depend on aristocratic, slave-owning patronage for their success, and it may well be that
it is in this context that demand was lacking in America. That the lesser degree of
urbanization in the Southern States, the less developed and more controlled slave and
freed populations of what towns and cities there were, failed to produce a significant
sexual market, engendered a demand that could easily be met by the casually organized
prostitution mainly of poor whites.104 The relatively restricted role of prostitution, and
slave prostitution in particular, in the wider sexual economy of the American South thus
comes primarily from the economic rather than sexual side of the equation; from the
economic unattractiveness of prostitution as an investment for slave-owners, rather than
its sexual unattractiveness given the alternatives. The traditional aristocratic response
to any set of choices is, after all, to opt for both, or all, as the Romans amply demonstrate.
There are other differences between the American South and the Roman Empire
which have a bearing on the ways in which slavery and prostitution intersect in each
case. Each has its own slave-holding ideology and sexual order, entwined and enforced
in their own ways, and bound up in America with a specific racial order. Thus the legal
position of prostitution diverges between the two, as indeed does the notion of
prostitution itself, and the wider security and certainty of their respective slave systems.
In the Southern States, for instance, slave-owner investment of slaves in prostitution
would have been investment in a criminal as well as morally reprehensible business, and
it would have offered abolitionists, who already attacked slavery as synonymous with a
very loosely defined prostitution (since it made women sexually available), a gift.105 At
this point, therefore, prostitution was a more clearly and commonly identifiable evil
than slavery, which was to be tarred with its brush rather than vice versa. Whereas in

101 R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross: 207, and the Caribbean, see e.g. B. Higman, Slave
The Economics of American Negro Slavery (I 974), I 3 5. Populations of the British Caribbean, I807-I1834
They offer only one statistic about the absence of (I984), 23I-2 and H. Beckles, 'Black female slaves
slaves from prostitution - that in i86o only 4.3 per and white households in Barbados', in D. Gaspar and
cent of Nashville prostitutes were black (and none D. Hine (eds), More than Chattel: Black Women and
were slaves) while 20 per cent of the overall population Slavery in the Americas (1 996), I2I-2.
was black - but that Southern prostitutes were 105 The complaint of Mary Boykin Chesnut, the
overwhelmingly white, and even more overwhelm- abolitionist wife and daughter of major slave-owners,
ingly free is, however, not disputed. that, 'we live surrounded by prostitutes', is one of her
102 See e.g. V. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics key objections to slavery; that is the wrongs it perpet-
of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (I992), rates against white women married to men who make
79-80 and C. Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: full use of these black 'prostitutes' (C. Van Woodward
Woman's World in the Old South (i 982), 22I. (ed.), Mary Chesnut's Civil War (I98I), 29). Pro-
103 Muson., Fr. I 2 (Lutz). slavery ideologue William Harper, on the other hand,
104 I take support for this suggestion from the places, praised this state of affairs, claiming that the 'prostitu-
mostly busy ports, where prostitution, including of tion' of all slave women was a benefit both to the
some slaves, did take significant root in the Americas, women themselves and to the white men who were
see e.g. T. Lockley, 'Crossing the divide: interracial 'less depraved' by intercourse with them than they
sex in antebellum Savannah', Slavery and Abolition would be by intercourse with 'females of their own
i8 (I997), 159-73. This is also what seems to have caste' (D. G. Faust (ed.), The Ideology of Slavery:
happened to more slaves in Brazil, see e.g. M. Kar- Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South,
asch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, i8o8-i850 (I987), I830-I860 (I98I), I04-7).

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 THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF FEMALE PROSTITUTION 6i

the Roman world, prostitution was no less legal than slavery and only slightly less
unobjectionable. A few did object, but while Dio Chrysostom might attack the
pornoboskoi and their avarice and Musonius might criticize the lack of elite male
continence, neither raised a murmur against slavery itself, the institution which enabled
and encouraged these profits and profligacy.106

V. CONCLUSION

The complexity of the subject is thus underlined once again. The multiplicity of
factors involved in the formation and workings of past prostitutions is stressed. It is to
try and embrace (but certainly not exhaust) all these issues that this article addresses
itself to the broader construction of the 'sexual economy' of female prostitution in the
Roman Empire; and to the notion that this construct - the interplay of sex and money,
of labour and livelihood, in their wider surroundings - is both different from and
similar to those from other societies, slave or not. There is, it is suggested, a particular
Roman configuration of elements also to be found elsewhere, and understanding it as
such, within the context of other possibilities and perspectives is helpful. It is
particularly helpful in making some room for the women involved, for their aims and
actions, life and work; though it has not been possible to fill in that space with anything
much more tangible than suggestion and innuendo. These gaps, their openness rather
than their occlusion, are none the less crucial in the move towards the better
understanding of Roman prostitution as a phenomenon fully integrated into Roman
imperial society.

Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine/University College London

106 On the general security of Roman slavery

see P. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to
Augustine (I996).

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