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indiscriminate executions of parties implicated in the mysterious
rites.[73]
Other evidences of the purity of Roman morals might be found, if
they were wanting, in the remarkable fidelity with which the Vestals
observed their oaths; in the tone of the speeches of the statesmen
of the time; in the high character sustained by such matrons as the
mother of the Gracchi; and, finally, in the legislation of Augustus,
which professed rather to affirm and improve the old laws than to
introduce new principles.
As we approach the Christian era the picture gradually darkens. Civil
wars are usually fatal to private virtue: it is not to be doubted that
the age of Sylla and Clodius was by no means a moral one. Sylla, the
dictator, openly led a life of scandalous debauchery; Clodius, the all-
powerful tribune, is accused by Cicero of having seduced his three
sisters.[74] Soldiers who had made a campaign in profligate Greece
or voluptuous Asia naturally brought home with them a taste for the
pleasures they had learned to enjoy abroad. Scipio’s baths were
dark: through narrow apertures just light enough was admitted to
spare the modesty of the bathers; but into the baths which were
erected in the later years of the Republic the light shone as into a
chamber.[75] Even Sylla, debauched as he was, did not think it safe
to abdicate power without legislative effort to purify the morals he
had so largely contributed to corrupt by his example.[76]
Of the Augustan age, and the two or three centuries which followed,
we are enabled to form a close and comprehensive idea. Our
information ceases to be meagre; on some points, indeed, it is only
too abundant.
The object of the Julian laws was to preserve the Roman blood from
corruption, and still farther to degrade prostitutes. These aims were
partially attained by prohibiting the intermarriage of citizens with the
relatives or descendants of prostitutes; by exposing adulterers to
severe penalties, and declaring the tolerant husband an accomplice;
by laying penalties on bachelors and married men without children;
by prohibiting the daughters of equestrians from becoming
prostitutes.[77] Tiberius, from his infamous retreat at Capreæ,
sanctioned a decree of the senate which enhanced the severity of
the laws against adultery. By this decree it was made a penal offense
for a matron of any class to play the harlot, and her lover, the owner
of the house where they met, and all persons who connived at the
adultery, were declared equally culpable. It seems to have been not
uncommon for certain married women to inscribe themselves on the
ædile’s list as prostitutes, and to occupy a room at the houses of ill
fame. This was pronounced a penal offense; and every
encouragement was held out, both to husbands and to common
informers, to prosecute.[78]
In other respects the republican legislation is believed to have been
unaltered by the emperors. The formality of inscription, its
accompanying infamy, the consequences of the act remained the
same. Prostitutes carried on their trade under the ædile’s eye. He
patrolled the streets, and entered the houses of ill fame at all hours
of the day and night. He saw that they were closed between
daybreak and three in the afternoon. In case of brawls, he arrested
and punished the disturbers of the peace. He punished by fine and
scourging the omission of a brothel-keeper to inscribe every female
in his house. He insisted on prostitutes wearing the garments
prescribed by law, and dyeing their hair blue or yellow. On the other
hand, he could not break into a house without being habited in the
insignia of his office, and being accompanied by his lictors. When the
ædile Hostilius attempted to break open the door of the prostitute
Mamilia, on his return from a gay dinner, the latter drove him off
with stones, and was sustained by the courts.[79] The ædile was
bound also, on complaint laid by a prostitute, to sentence any
customer of hers to pay the sum due to her according to law.[80]

CLASSES OF PROSTITUTES.
It was the duty of the ædile to arrest, punish, and drive out of the
city all loose prostitutes who were not inscribed on his book. This
regulation was practically a dead letter. At no time in the history of
the empire did there cease to be a large and well-known class of
prostitutes who were not recorded. They were distinguished from
the registered prostitutes (meretrices) by the name of prostibulæ.[81]
They paid no tax to the state, while their registered rivals
contributed largely to the municipal treasury; and, if they ran greater
risks, and incurred more nominal infamy than the latter, they more
frequently contrived to rise from their unhappy condition.
We have no means of judging of the number of prostitutes
exercising their calling at Rome, Capua, and the other Italian cities
during the first years of the Christian era. During Trajan’s reign the
police were enabled to count thirty-two thousand in Rome alone, but
this number obviously fell short of the truth. One is appalled at the
great variety of classes into which the prostibulæ, or unregistered
prostitutes were divided. Such were the Delicatæ, corresponding to
the kept-women, or French lorettes, whose charms enabled them to
exact large sums from their visitors;[82] the Famosæ, who belonged
to respectable families, and took to evil courses through lust or
avarice;[83] the Doris, who were remarkable for their beauty of form,
and disdained the use of clothing;[84] the Lupæ, or she-wolves, who
haunted the groves and commons, and were distinguished by a
particular cry in imitation of a wolf;[85] the Ælicariæ, or bakers’ girls,
who sold small cakes for sacrifice to Venus and Priapus, in the form
of the male and female organs of generation;[86] the Bustuariæ,
whose home was the burial-ground, and who occasionally officiated
as mourners at funerals;[87] the Copæ, servant-girls at inns and
taverns, who were invariably prostitutes;[88] the Noctiluæ, or night-
walkers; the Blitidæ, a very low class of women, who derived the
name from blitum, a cheap and unwholesome beverage drunk in the
lowest holes;[89] the Diobolares, wretched outcasts, whose price was
two oboli (say two cents);[90] the Forariæ, country girls who lurked
about country roads; the Gallinæ, who were thieves as well as
prostitutes; the Quadrantariæ, seemingly the lowest class of all,
whose fee was less than any copper coin now current.[91] In
contradistinction to these, the meretrices assumed an air of
respectability, and were often called bonæ meretrices.[92]
Another and a distinct class of prostitutes were the female dancers,
who were eagerly sought after, and more numerous than at Athens.
They were Ionians, Lesbians, Syrians, Egyptians, Nubians
(negresses), Indians, but the most famous were Spaniards. Their
dances were of the same character as those of the Greek flute-
players; the erotic poets of Rome have not shrunk from celebrating
the astonishing depravity of their performances.[93]
Horace faintly deplored the progress which the Ionic dances—Ionice
motus—were making even among the Roman virgins.[94] These
prostitutes carried on their calling in defiance of law. If detected,
they were liable to be whipped and driven out of the city;[95] but as
their customers belonged to the wealthier classes, they rarely
suffered the penalty of their conduct.
Apart, again, from all these was the large class of persons who
traded in prostitutes. The proper name for these wretches was Leno
(bawd), which was of both sexes, though usually represented on the
stage as a beardless man with shaven head. Under this name quite a
number of varieties were included, such as the Lupanarii, or keepers
of regular houses of ill fame; the Adductores and Perductores,
pimps; Conciliatrices and Ancillulæ, women who negotiated immoral
transactions, and others. Then, as almost every baker, tavern-
keeper, bath-house-keeper, barber, and perfumer combined the
lenocinium, or trade in prostitutes, with his other calling, their
various names, tonsor, unguentarius, balnearius, &c., became
synonymous with leno. This miserable class was regarded with the
greatest loathing at Rome.[96]
This hasty classification of the Roman prostitutes would be
incomplete without some notice, however brief, of male prostitutes.
Fortunately, the progress of good morals has divested this repulsive
theme of its importance; the object of this work can be obtained
without entering into details on a branch of the subject which in this
country is not likely to require fresh legislative notice. But the reader
would form an imperfect idea of the state of morals at Rome were
he left in ignorance of the fact that the number of male prostitutes
was probably full as large as that of females; that, as in Greece, the
degrading phenomenon involved very little disgrace; that all the
Roman authors allude to it as a matter of course; that the leading
men of the empire were known to be addicted to such habits; that
the ædile abstained from interference, save where a Roman youth
suffered violence; and that, to judge from the language of the
writers of the first, second, and third centuries of the Christian era,
the Romans, like some Asiatic races, appeared to give the preference
to unnatural lusts.[97]

HOUSES OF PROSTITUTION.
Having examined the laws which governed prostitution at Rome, and
the classes into which prostitutes were divided, it is now requisite to
glance at the establishments in which prostitution was carried on.
M. Dufour and others have followed Publius Victor and Sextus Rufus
in supposing that during the Augustine age there were forty-six first-
class houses of ill fame at Rome, and a much larger number of
establishments where prostitution was carried on without the
supervision of the ædile. As it is now generally admitted that the
works bearing the name of Publius Victor and Sextus Rufus are
forgeries of comparatively recent date, the statement loses all claim
to credit, and we are left without statistical information as to the
number of houses of prostitution at Rome.[98]
Registered prostitutes were to be found in the establishments called
Lupanaria. These differed from the Greek Dicteria in being of various
classes, from the well-provided house of the Peace ward to the filthy
dens of the Esquiline and Suburran wards; and farther, in the wide
range of prices exacted by the keepers of the various houses. It is
inferred from the results of the excavations at Pompeii, and some
meagre hints thrown out by Latin authors, that the lupanaria at
Rome were small in size. The most prosperous were built like good
Roman houses, with a square court-yard, sometimes with a fountain
playing in the middle. Upon this yard opened the cells of the
prostitutes. In smaller establishments the cells opened upon a hall or
porch, which seemingly was used as a reception-room. The cells
were dark closets, illuminated at night by a small bronze lamp.
Sometimes they contained a bed, but as often a few cushions, or a
mere mat, with a dirty counterpane, constituted their whole
furniture. Over the door of each cell hung a tablet, with the name of
the prostitute who occupied it, and the price she set on her favors;
on the other side with the word occupata. When a prostitute
received a visitor in her cell, she turned the tablet round to warn
intruders that she was engaged.[99] Over the door of the house a
suggestive image was either painted, or represented in stone or
marble: one of these signs may be seen to this day in Pompeii.
Within, similar indecent sculptures abounded. Bronze ornaments of
this style hung round the necks of the courtesans; the lamps were in
the same shape, and so were a variety of other utensils. The walls
were covered with appropriate frescoes. In the best-ordered
establishments, it is understood that scenes from the mythology
were the usual subjects of these artistic decorations; but we have
evidence enough at Pompeii to show that gross indecency, not
poetical effect, was the main object sought by painters in these
works.
Regular houses of prostitution, lupanaria, were of two kinds:
establishments owned and managed by a bawd, who supplied the
cells with slaves or hired prostitutes, and establishments where the
bawd merely let his cells to prostitutes for a given sum. In the
former case the bawd was the principal, in the latter the women.
There is reason to suppose that the former were the more
respectable. Petronius alludes to a house where so much was paid
for the use of a cell, and the sum was an as, less than two cents.
[100] Messalina evidently betook herself to one of these
establishments, which, for clearness’ sake, we may call assignation
houses; and as it appears she was paid in copper (æra poposcit), it
is safe to infer that the house was of slender respectability.
The best houses were abundantly supplied with servants and
luxuries. A swarm of pimps and runners sought custom for them in
every part of the city. Women—ancillæ ornatrices—were in readiness
to repair with skill the ravages which amorous conflicts caused in the
toilets of the prostitutes. Boys—bacariones—attended at the door of
the cell with water for ablution. Servants, who bore the inconsistent
title of aquarii, were ready to supply wine and other refreshments to
customers. And not a few of the lupinaria kept a cashier, called
villicus, whose business it was to discuss bargains with visitors, and
to receive the money before turning the tablet.
Under many public and some of the best private houses at Rome
were arches, the tops of which were only a few feet above the level
of the street. These arches, dark and deserted, became a refuge for
prostitutes. Their name, fornices, at last became synonymous with
lupanar, and we have borrowed from it our generic word fornication.
[101] There is reason to believe that there were several score of
arches of this character, and used for this purpose, under the great
circus and other theatres at Rome,[102] besides those under
dwelling-houses and stores. The want of fresh air was severely felt
in these vile abodes. Frequent allusions to the stench exhaled from
the mouth of a fornix are made in the Roman authors.[103]
Establishments of a lower character still were the pergulæ, in which
the girls occupied a balcony above the street; the stabula, where no
cells were used, and promiscuous intercourse took place openly;[104]
the turturilla, or pigeon-houses;[105] the casauria, or suburb houses
of the very lowest stamp.
The clearest picture of a Roman house of ill fame is that given in the
famous passage of Juvenal, which may be allowed to remain in the
original. The female, it need hardly be added, was Messalina:
 “Dormire virum quum senserat uxor,
Ausa Palatino tegetem præferre cubili,
Sumere nocturnas meretrix Augusta cucullos,
Linquebat comite ancilla non amplius una,
Sed nigrum flavo crinem abscondente galero,
Intravit calidum veteri centone lupanar,
Et cellam vacuam atque suam. Tune nuda capillis
Constitit auratis, titulum mentita Lyciscæ,
Ostendit que tuum, generose Britannice, ventrem.
Excepit blanda intrantes, atque æra poposcit,
Et resupina jacens multorum absorbuit ictus.
Mox lenone suas jam dimittente puellas,
Tristris abit, et quod potuit, tamen ultima cellam
Clausit, adhuc ardens rigidæ tentigine vulvæ,
Et lassata viris necdum satiata recessit;
Obscurrisque genis turpis fumoque lucernæ
Fœda lupanaris tulit ad pulvinar adorem.”[106]
The passages in italics contain useful information; we shall allude to
some of them hereafter. Meanwhile, it is evident from the line mox
lenone, etc., that, at a certain hour of the night, the keepers of
houses of ill fame were in the habit of closing their establishments
and sending their girls home. The law required them to close at
daybreak, but probably a much earlier hour may have suited their
interest.
Allusion has already been made to the fornices under the circus. It is
well understood that prostitutes were great frequenters of the
spectacles, and that in the arched fornices underneath the seats and
the stage they were always ready to satisfy the passions which the
comedies and pantomimes only too frequently aroused.[107] This was
one formidable rival to the regular lupinaria.
The baths were another. In the early Roman baths, darkness, or, at
best, a faint twilight reigned; and, besides, not only were the sexes
separated, but old and young men were not allowed to bathe
together.[108] But after Sylla’s wars, though there were separate
sudaria and tepidaria for the sexes, they could meet freely in the
corridors and chambers, and any immorality short of actual
prostitution could take place.[109] Men and women, girls and boys,
mixed together in a state of perfect nudity, and in such close
proximity that contact could hardly be avoided. Such an assemblage
would obviously be a place of resort for dealers in prostitutes in
search of merchandise. At a later period, cells were attached to the
bath-houses, and young men and women kept on the premises,
partly as bath attendants and partly as prostitutes. After the bath,
the bathers, male and female, were rubbed down, kneaded, and
anointed by these attendants. It would appear that women
submitted to have this indecent service performed for them by men,
and that health was not always the object sought, even by the
Roman matrons.[110] Several emperors endeavored to remedy these
frightful immoralities. Hadrian forbade the intermixture of men and
women in the public baths.[111] Similar enactments were made by
Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus; but Heliogabalus is said to
have delighted in uniting the sexes, even in the wash-room. As early
as the Augustan era, however, the baths were regarded as little
better than houses of prostitution under a respectable name.[112]
Taverns or houses of entertainment were also in some measure
brothels. The law regarded all servants waiting upon travelers at inns
or taverns as prostitutes.[113] It would appear, also, that butchers’,
bakers’, and barbers’ shops were open to a suspicion of being used
for purposes of prostitution. The plebeian ædiles constantly made it
their business to visit these in search of unregistered prostitutes,
though, as might be expected from the number of delinquents and
the very incomplete municipal police system of Rome, with very little
success. The bakers’ establishments, which generally included a
flour-mill, were haunted by a low class of prostitutes to whom
allusion has already been made. In the cellar where the mill stood
cells were often constructed, and the ædiles knew well that all who
entered there did not go to buy bread.[114]
Finally, prostitution to a very large extent was carried on in the open
air. The shades of certain statues and temples, such as those of
Marsyas, Pan, Priapus, Venus, etc., were common resorts for
prostitutes. It is said that Julia, the daughter of the Emperor
Augustus, prostituted herself under the shade of a statue of
Marsyas. Similar haunts of abandoned women were the arches of
aqueducts, the porticoes of temples, the cavities in walls, etc. Even
the streets in the poorer wards of the city appear to have been
infested by the very lowest class of prostitutes, whose natural favors
had long ceased to be merchantable.[115] It must be borne in mind
that the streets of Rome were not lighted, and that profound
darkness reigned when the moon was clouded over.

HABITS AND MANNERS OF PROSTITUTES.

A grand distinction between Roman and Greek prostitution lies in the
manner in which commerce with prostitutes was viewed in the two
communities. At Athens there was nothing disgraceful in frequenting
the dicterion or keeping an hetaira. At Rome, on the contrary, a
married man who visited a house of ill fame was an adulter, and
liable to the penalties of adultery. An habitual frequenter of such
places was a mœchus or scortator, both of which were terms of
scathing reproach. When Cicero wishes to overwhelm Catiline, he
says his followers are scortatores.[116] Until the lowest age of Roman
degradation, moreover, no man of any character entered a house of
ill fame without hiding his face with the skirt of his dress. Even
Caligula and Heliogabalus concealed their faces when they visited
the women of the town.[117]
The law prescribed with care the dress of Roman prostitutes, on the
principle that they were to be distinguished in all things from honest
women. Thus they were not allowed to wear the chaste stola which
concealed the form, or the vitta or fillet with which Roman ladies
bound their hair, or to wear shoes (soccus), or jewels, or purple
robes. These were the insignia of virtue. Prostitutes wore the toga
like men; their hair, dyed yellow or red, or filled with golden
spangles, was dressed in some Asiatic fashion. They wore sandals
with gilt thongs tying over the instep, and their dress was directed to
be of flowered material. In practice, however, these rules were not
strictly observed. Courtesans wore jewels and purple robes,[118] and
not a few boldly concealed their profligacy under the stola. Others,
seeking rather to avoid than to court misapprehension as to their
calling, wore the green toga proudly, and over it the sort of jacket
called amiculum, which, like the white sheet of baronial times, was
the badge of adultery. Others, again, preferred the silk and gauze
dresses of the East (sericæ vestes), which, according to the
expression of a classical writer, “seemed invented to exhibit more
conspicuously what they were intended to hide.”[119] Robes of Tyre
were likewise in use, whose texture may be inferred from the name
of “textile vapor” (ventus textilis) which they received.
The law strictly prohibited the use of vehicles of any kind to
courtesans. This also was frequently infringed. Under several
emperors prostitutes were seen in open litters in the most public
parts of Rome, and others in litters which closed with curtains, and
served the purpose of a bed-chamber.[120] A law of Domitian
imposed heavy penalties on a courtesan who was seen in a litter.
In the lupanar, of course, rules regarding costume were unheeded.
Prostitutes retained their hair black, but as to the rest of their person
they were governed by their own taste. Nudity appears to have been
quite common, if not the rule. Petronius describes his hero walking
in the street, and seeing from thence naked prostitutes at the doors
of the lupanaria.[121] Some covered their busts with golden stuffs,
others veiled their faces.
It has already been mentioned that the rate of remuneration exacted
by the prostitutes was fixed by themselves, though apparently
announced to the ædile. It is impossible to form any idea of the
average amount of this charge. The lowest classes, as has been
mentioned, sold their miserable favors for about two tenths of a
cent; another large class were satisfied with two cents. The only
direct light that is thrown on this branch of the subject flows from an
obscure passage in the strange romance entitled “Apollonius of
Tyre,” which is supposed to have been written by a Christian named
Symposius. In that work the capture of a virgin named Tarsia by a
bawd is described. The bawd orders a sign or advertisement to be
hung out, inscribed, “He who deflours Tarsia shall pay half a pound,
afterward she shall be at the public service for a gold piece.” The
half pound has been assumed by commentators to mean half a
Roman pound of silver, and to have been worth $30; the gold piece,
according to the best computation, was about equivalent to $4. But
whether these figures can be regarded as an average admits of
doubt, even supposing our estimate of the value of the sums
mentioned in the ancient work to be accurate.
The allusion to Tarsia suggests some notice of the practice of the
Roman bawds when they had secured a virgin. It will be found
faithfully described in that old English play, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,”
which is sometimes bound up with Shakspeare’s works. When a
bawd had purchased a virgin as a slave, or when, as sometimes
happened under the later emperors, a virgin was handed to him to
be prostituted as a punishment for crime, the door of his house was
adorned with twigs of laurel; a lamp of unusual size was hung out at
night, and a tablet exhibited somewhat similar to the one quoted
above, stating that a virgin had been received, and enumerating her
charms with cruel grossness.[122] When a purchaser had been found
and a bargain struck, the unfortunate girl, often a mere child, was
surrendered to his brutality, and the wretch issued from the cell
afterward, to be himself crowned with laurel by the slaves of the
establishment.
Thus far of common prostitutes. Though the Romans had no loose
women who could compare in point of standing, influence, or
intellect with the Greek hetairæ, their highest class of prostitutes,
the famosæ or delicatæ, were very far above the unfortunate
creatures just described. They were not inscribed in the ædile’s rolls;
they haunted no lupanar, or tavern, or baker’s stall; they were not
seen lurking about shady spots at night; they wore no distinguishing
costume. It was in broad daylight, at the theatre, in the streets, in
the Via Sacra, which was the favorite resort of fashionable Rome,
that they were to be found, and there they were only to be
distinguished from virtuous matrons by the superior elegance of
their dress, and the swarm of admirers by whom they were
surrounded. Indeed, under the later emperors, the distinction,
outward or inward, between these prostitutes and the Roman
matrons appears to have been very slight indeed.[123] They were
surrounded or followed by slaves of either sex, a favorite waiting-
maid being the most usual attendant.[124] Their meaning glances are
frequently the subject of caustic allusions in the Roman poets.[125]
Many of them were foreigners, and expressed themselves by signs
from ignorance of the Latin tongue.
These women were usually the mistresses of rich men, though not
necessarily faithful to their lovers. We possess no such biographies
of them as we have of the Greek hetairæ, nor is there any reason to
suppose that their lives ever formed the theme of serious works,
though the Roman erotic library was rich. What little we know of
them we glean mostly from the verses of Horace, Tibullus, Ovid,
Propertius, Catullus, Martial, and from such works as the Satyricon
of Petronius, and the novel of Apuleius, and that little is hardly worth
the knowing.
The first five poets mentioned—Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid,
and Tibullus—devoted no small portion of their time and talent to
the celebration of their mistresses. But beyond their names, Lydia,
Chloe, Lalage, Lesbia, Cynthia, Delia, Neæra, Corinna, &c., we are
taught nothing about them but what might have been taken for
granted, that they were occasionally beautiful, lascivious,
extravagant, often faithless and heartless. From passages in Ovid,
and also in one or two of the others, it may be inferred that it was
not uncommon for these great prostitutes to have a nominal
husband, who undertook the duty of negotiating their immoral
bargains (leno maritus).
The only really useful information we derive from these erotic
effusions relates to the poets themselves. All the five we have
mentioned moved in the best society at Rome. Some of them, like
Horace, saw their fame culminate during their lifetime; others filled
important stations under government. Ovid was intimate with the
Emperor Augustus, and his exile is supposed to have been caused by
some improper discoveries he made with regard to the emperor’s
relations with his daughter. Yet it is quite evident that all these
persons habitually lived with prostitutes, felt no shame on that
account, and recorded unblushingly the charms and exploits of their
mistresses in verses intended to be read indiscriminately by the
Roman youths.
Between Ovid and Martial the distance is immense. Half a century
divided them in point of time; whole ages in tone. During the
Augustan era, the language of poets, though much freer than would
be tolerated to-day, was not invariably coarse. No gross expressions
are used by the poets of that day in addressing their mistresses, and
even common prostitutes are addressed with epithets which a
modern lover might apply to his betrothed. But Martial knows no
decency. It may safely be said that his epigrams ought never again
to be translated into a modern tongue. Expressions designating the
most loathsome depravities, and which, happily, have no equivalent,
and need none, in our language, abound in his pages. Pictures of
the most revolting pruriency succeed each other rapidly. In a word,
such language is used and such scenes depicted as would involve
the expulsion of their utterer from any house of ill fame in modern
times. Yet Martial enjoyed high favor under government. He was
enabled to procure the naturalization of many of his Spanish friends.
He possessed a country and a town house, both probably gifts from
the emperor. His works, even in his lifetime, were carefully sought
after, not only in Rome, but in Gaul, Spain, and the other provinces.
Upon the character and life of courtesans in his day he throws but
little light. The women whose hideous depravity he celebrates must
have been well known at Rome; their names must have been
familiar to the ears of Roman society. But this feature of Roman
civilization, the notoriety of prostitutes and of their vile arts, properly
belongs to another division of the subject.

ROMAN SOCIETY.
It was often said by the ancients that the more prostitutes there
were, the safer would be virtuous women. “Well done,” said the
moralist to a youth entering a house of ill fame; “so shalt thou spare
matrons and maidens.” As this idea rests upon a slender substratum
of plausibility, it may be as well to expose its fallacy, which can be
done very completely by a glance at Roman society under the
emperors.
Even allowing for poetical exaggeration, it may safely be said that
there is no modern society, perhaps there has never existed any
since the fall of Rome, to which Juvenal’s famous satire on women
can be applied.[126] Independently of the unnatural lusts which were
so unblushingly avowed, the picture drawn by the Roman surpasses
modern credibility. That it was faithful to nature and fact, there is,
unhappily, too much reason to believe. The causes must be sought
in various directions.
Two marked distinctions between modern and ancient society may at
once be noticed. In no modern civilized society is it allowable to
present immodest images to the eye, or to utter immodest words in
the ear of females or youth. At Rome the contrary was the rule. The
walls of respectable houses were covered with paintings, of which
one hardly dares in our times to mention the subjects. Lascivious
frescoes and lewd sculptures, such as would be seized in any
modern country by the police, filled the halls of the most virtuous
Roman citizens and nobles.[127] Ingenuity had been taxed to the
utmost to reproduce certain indecent objects under new forms.[128]
Nor was common indecency adequate to supply the depraved taste
of the Romans. Such groups as satyrs and nymphs, Leda and the
swan, Pasiphæ and the bull, satyrs and she-goats, were abundant.
Some of them have been found, and exhibit a wonderful artistic skill.
All of these were daily exposed to the eyes of children and young
girls, who, as Propertius says, were not allowed to remain novices in
any infamy.
Again, though a Horace would use polite expressions in addressing
Tyndaris or Lalage, the Latin tongue was much freer than any
modern one. There is not a Latin author of the best age in whose
writings the coarsest words can not be found. The comedies were
frightfully obscene, both in ideas and expressions. A youth or a
maiden could not begin to acquire instruction without meeting words
of the grossest meaning. The convenient adage, Charta non
erubescit, was invented to hide the pruriency of authors, and one of
the worst puts in the wretched plea that, “though his page is lewd,
his life is pure.” It is quite certain that, whatever might have been
the effect on the poet, his readers could not but be demoralized by
the lewdness of his verses.
Add to these causes of immorality the baths, and a fair case in
support of Juvenal will be already made out. A young Roman girl,
with warm southern blood in her veins, who could gaze on the
unveiled pictures of the loves of Venus, read the shameful epigrams
of Martial, or the burning love-songs of Catullus, go to the baths and
see the nudity of scores of men and women, be touched herself by a
hundred lewd hands, as well as those of the bathers who rubbed her
dry and kneaded her limbs—a young girl who could withstand such
experiences and remain virtuous would need, indeed, to be a miracle
of principle and strength of mind.
But even then religion and law remained to assail her. She could not
walk through the streets of Rome without seeing temples raised to
the honor of Venus, that Venus who was the mother of Rome, as the
patroness of illicit pleasures. In every field and in many a square,
statues of Priapus, whose enormous indecency was his chief
characteristic, presented themselves to view, often surrounded by
pious matrons in quest of favor from the god. Once a year, at the
Lupercalia, she saw young men running naked through the streets,
armed with thongs with which they struck every woman they saw;
and she noticed that matrons courted this flagellation as a means of
becoming prolific. What she may have known of the Dionysia or
Saturnalia, the wild games in honor of Bacchus, and of those other
dissolute festivals known as the eves of Venus, which were kept in
April, it is not easy to say, but there is no reason to believe that
these lewd scenes were intended only for the vicious, or that they
were kept a secret.
When her marriage approached the remains of her modesty were
effectually destroyed. Before marriage she was led to the statue of
Mutinus, a nude sitting figure, and made to sit on his knee,[129] ut
ejus pudicitiam prius deus delibasse videtur. This usage was so
deeply rooted among the Romans that, when Augustus destroyed
the temple of Mutinus in the Velian ward in consequence of the
immoralities to which it gave rise, a dozen others soon rose to take
its place. On the marriage night, statuettes of the deities Subiqus
and Prema hung over the nuptial bed—ut subacta a sponso viro non
se commoveat quum premitur;[130] and in the morning the jealous
husband exacted, by measuring the neck of his bride, proof to his
superstitious mind that she had yielded him her virginity.[131]
In the older age of the republic it was not considered decent for
women to recline on couches at table as men did. This, however
soon became quite common. Men and women lay together on the
same couch so close that hardly room for eating was left. And this
was the custom not only with women of loose morals, but with the
most respectable matrons. At the feast of Trimalchio, which is the
best recital of a Roman dinner we have, the wife of the host and the
wife of Habinus both appeared before the guests. Habinus amused
them by seizing his host’s wife by the feet and throwing her forward
so that her dress flew up and exposed her knees, and Trimalchio
himself did not blush to show his preference for a giton in the
presence of the company, and to throw a cup at his wife’s head
when her jealousy led her to remonstrate.[132] The voyage of the
hero of the Satyricon furnishes other pictures of the intensely
depraved feeling which pervaded Roman society. The author does
not seem to admit the possibility of virtue’s existence; all his men
and women are equally vicious and shameless. The open spectacle
of the most hideous debauchery only provokes a laugh. If a man
declines to accede to the propositions which the women are the first
to make, it must be because he is a disciple of the aversa Venus,
and whole cities are depicted as joining in the hue and cry after the
lost frater of a noted debauchee.
The commessationes, which Cicero enumerates among the
symptoms of corruption in his time, had become of universal usage.
It was for them that the cooks of Rome exhausted their art in
devising the dishes which have puzzled modern gastronomists; for
them that the rare old wines of Italy were stowed away in cellars;
for them that Egyptian and Ionian dancing-girls stripped themselves,
or donned the nebula linea.[133] No English words can picture the
monstrosities which are calmly narrated in the pages of Petronius
and Martial. Well might Juvenal cry, “Vice has culminated.”[134]
It is perhaps difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise,
considering the examples set by the emperors. It requires no small
research to discover a single character in the long list that was not
stained by the grossest habits. Julius Cæsar, “the bald adulterer,”
was commonly said to be “husband of all men’s wives.”[135]
Augustus, whose youth had been so dissolute as to suggest a most
contemptuous epigram, employed men in his old age to procure
matrons and maidens, whom these purveyors of imperial lust
examined as though they had been horses at a public sale.[136] The
amours of Tiberius in his retreat at Capreæ can not be described. It
will suffice to say there was no invention of infamy which he did not
patronise; that no young person of any charms was safe from his
lust. More than one senator felt that safety required he should
remove his handsome wife or pretty daughter from Rome, for
Tiberius was ever ready to avenge obstacles with death. The sad
fate of the beautiful Mallonia, who stabbed herself during a lawsuit
which the emperor had instituted against her because she refused to
comply with his beastly demands, gives a picture of the age.[137]
Caligula, who made some changes in the tax levied on prostitutes,
and established a brothel in the palace, commenced life by
debauching his sisters, and ended it by giving grand dinners, during
which he would remove from the room any lady he pleased, and,
after spending a few minutes with her in private, return and give an
account of the interview for the amusement of the company.[138]
Messalina so far eclipsed Claudius in depravity that the “profuse
debauches” of the former appear, by contrast, almost moderate and
virtuous.[139]
Nero surpassed his predecessors in cynic recklessness. He was an
habitual frequenter of houses of prostitution. He dined in public at
the great circus among a crowd of prostitutes. He founded, on the
shore of the Gulf of Naples, houses of prostitution, and filled them
with females, whose dissolute habits were their recommendation to
his notice. The brief sketch of his journeys given by Tacitus, and the
allusions to his minister of pleasures, Tigellinus, leave no room for
doubting that he was a monster of depravity.[140]
Passing over a coarse Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a
mean Vespasian, and a dissolute Titus, Domitian revived the age of
Nero. He seduced his brother’s daughter, and carried her away from
her husband, bathed habitually in company with a band of
prostitutes, and set an example of hideous vice while enacting
severe laws against debauchery. After another interval, Commodus
converted the palace into a house of prostitution. He kept in his pay
three hundred girls of great beauty, and as many youths, and
revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he could no longer
share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he assumed the
dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with the
spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus,
whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpassed
even the most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his
pride to have been able to teach even the most expert courtesans of
Rome something more than they knew; his pleasure to wallow
among them naked, and to pull down into the sink of bestiality in
which he lived the first officers of the empire.
When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no
need of inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A
censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial—and he
was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the
stern historian—would only laugh, and copy the model before him. It
may safely be asserted that there does not exist in any modern
language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly depraved a
state of morals as Martial’s epigram on his wife.

SECRET DISEASES AT ROME.

At what period, and where, venereal diseases first made their
appearance, is a matter of doubt. It was long the opinion of the
faculty that they were of modern origin, and that Europe had derived
them from America, where the sailors of Columbus had first
contracted them. This opinion does not appear to rest on any solid
basis, and is now generally rejected. The fact is, that the venereal
disease prevailed extensively in Europe in the fifteenth century; but
the presumption, from an imposing mass of circumstantial evidence,
is that it has afflicted humanity from the beginning of history.
Still, it is strange that Greek and Latin authors do not mention it.
There is a passage in Juvenal in which allusion is made to a
disgusting disease, which appears to bear resemblance to venereal
disease. Epigrams of Martial hint at something of the same kind.
Celsus describes several diseases of the generative organs, but none
of these authors ascribe the diseases they mention to venereal
intercourse.
Celsus prefaces what he says on the subject of this class of maladies
with an apology. Nothing but a sense of duty has led him to allude to
matters so delicate; but he feels that he ought not to allow his
country to lose the benefit of his experience, and he conceives it to
be “desirable to disseminate among the people some medical
principles with regard to a class of diseases which are never revealed
to any one.”
After this apology, he proceeds to speak of a disease which he calls
inflammatio colis, which seems to have borne a striking analogy to
the modern Phymosis. It has been supposed that the Elephantiasis,
which he describes at length, was also of a syphilitic character; and
the symptoms detailed by Aretous, who wrote in the latter half of
the first century, certainly remind the reader of secondary syphilis;
but the best opinion of to-day appears to be that the diseases are
distinct and unconnected.
Women afflicted with secret diseases were called aucunnuentæ,
which explains itself. They prayed to Juno Fluonia for relief, and used
the aster atticus by way of medicine. The Greek term for this herb
being Bonbornion, which the Romans converted into Bubonium, that
word came to be applied to the disease for which it was given,
whether in the case of females or males. Modern science has
obtained thence the term Bubo. The Romans said of a female who
communicated a disease to a man, Hæc te imbubinat.[141]
We find, moreover, in the later writers, allusions to the morbus
campanus, the clazomenæ, the rubigo, etc., which were all secret
diseases of a type, if not syphilitic, strongly resembling it. It must be
admitted, however, that no passage in the ancient writers directly
ascribes these diseases to commerce with prostitutes.
Roman doctors declined to treat secret diseases. They were called
by the generic term morbus indecens, and it was considered
unbecoming to confess to them or to treat them. Rich men owned a
slave doctor who was in the confidence of the family, and to whom
such delicate secrets would naturally be confided. But the mass of
the people were restrained by shame from communicating their
misfortunes; as was the case among the Jews, the unhappy patient
was driven to seclusion as the only remedy. However cruel and
senseless this practice may have been as regarded the sufferer, it
was of service to the people, as it prevented, in some degree, the
spread of contagion.
Up to the period of the civil wars, and perhaps as late as the
Christian era, the only physicians at Rome were drug-sellers,
enchanters, and midwives. The standing of the former may be
inferred from a passage in Horace, where he classes them with the
lowest outcasts of Roman society.[142] The enchanters (sagæ) made
philtres to produce or impede the sensual appetite. They were
execrated, and even so amorous a poet as Ovid felt bound to warn
young girls against the evil effects of the aphrodisiacs they
concocted.[143] Midwives also made philtres, and are often
confounded with the sagæ. The healing science of the three classes
must have been small.
About the reign of Augustus, Greek physicians began to settle at
Rome. They possessed much theory, and some practical experience,
as the Treatise of Celsus shows, and soon became an important
class in Roman society. It was not, however, till the reign of Nero,
that an office of public physician was created. Under that emperor, a
Greek named Andromachus was appointed archiater, or court
physician, and archiatii populares were soon afterward appointed for
the people. They were allowed to receive money from the rich, but
they were bound, in consideration of various privileges bestowed on
their office, to treat the poor gratuitously. They were stationed in
every city in the empire. Rome had fourteen, besides those attached
to the Vestals, the Gymnasia, and the court; other large cities had
ten, and so on, down to the small towns which had one or two.[144]
From the duties and privileges of the archiatii, it would appear they
were subject to the ædiles.
It may seem almost superfluous to add that no careful medical
reader of the history of Rome under the empire can doubt but the
archiatii filled no sinecure, and that a large proportion of the
diseases they treated were directly traceable to prostitution.
 CHAPTER V.
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA.
Christian Teachers preach Chastity.—
Horrible Punishment of Christian
Virgins.—Persecution of Women.—
Conversion of Prostitutes.—The
Gnostics.—The Ascetics.—
Conventual Life.—Opinion of the
Fathers on Prostitution.—Tax on
Prostitutes.—Punishment of
Prostitutes under the Greek
Emperors.
Perhaps the most marked originality of the Christian doctrine was
the stress it laid on chastity. It has been well remarked that even the
most austere of the pagan moralists recommended chastity on
economical grounds alone. The apostles exacted it as a moral and
religious duty. They preached against lewdness as fervently as
against heathenism. Not one of the epistles contained in the New
Testament but inveighs, in the strongest language, against the vices
classed under the generic head of luxury. Nor can it be doubted that,
under divine Providence, the obvious merit of this feature in the new
religion exercised a large influence in rallying the better class of
minds to its support.
From the first, the Christian communities made a just boast of the
purity of their morals. Their adversaries met them on this ground at
great disadvantage. It was notorious that the college of Vestals had
been sustained with great difficulty. Latterly, it had been found
necessary to supply vacancies with children, and even under these
circumstances, the number of Vestals buried alive bore but a very
small proportion to the number who had incurred this dread penalty.
Nor could it be denied that the chastity of the Roman virgins was, at
best, but partial, the purest among them being accustomed to
unchaste language and unchaste sights. The Christian
congregations, on the contrary, contained numbers of virgins who
had devoted themselves to celibacy for the love of Christ. They were
modest in their dress, decorous in their manners, chaste in their
speech.[145] They refused to attend the theatres; lived frugally and
temperately; allowed no dancers at their banquets; used no
perfumes, and abstained generally from every practice which could
endanger their rigorous continence.[146] Marriage among the
Christians was a holy institution, whose sole end was the procreation
of children. It was not to be used, as was the case too often among
the heathen, as a cloak for immoralities. Christ, they said, permitted
marriage, but did not permit luxury.[147] The early fathers imposed
severe penitences on fornication, adultery, and other varieties of
sensuality.
Persecution aided the Church in the great work of purifying public
morals, by forcing it to keep in view the Christian distinction
between moral and physical guilt. At what time it became usual to
condemn Christian virgins to the brothel it is difficult to discover. The
practice may have arisen from the hideous custom which enjoined
the violation of Roman maidens before execution, if the existence of
such a custom can be assumed on the authority of so loose a
chronicler as Suetonius.[148] However this be, this horrible
refinement of brutality was in use in the time of Marcus Aurelius.[149]
Virgins were seized and required to sacrifice to idols. Refusing, they
were dragged, often naked, through the streets to a brothel, and
there abandoned to the lubricity of the populace. The piety of the
early Christians prompted the belief that on many conspicuous
occasions the Almighty had interfered to protect his chosen children
in this dire calamity.[150] St. Agnes, having refused to sacrifice to
Vesta, was said to have been stripped naked by the order of the
prefect; but, no sooner had her garments fallen, than her hair grew
miraculously, and enveloped her as in a shroud. Dragged to the
brothel, a wonderful light shone from her body, and the by-standers,
appalled at the sight, instead of offering her violence, fell at her
knees, till, at last, the prefect’s son, bolder and more reckless than
the others, advanced to consummate her sentence, and was struck
dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.[151] Theodora, a noble lady of
Alexandria, was equally undaunted and equally faithful to her creed.
The judge allowed her three days to deliberate, warning her of the
consequences of obstinacy. She was firm, and was led into a house
of prostitution. There, in the midst of debauched persons of both
sexes, she prayed to God for help, and the sight of the half-naked
virgin bent in fervent prayer struck awe into the minds of the people.
At last a soldier declared that he would fulfill the judgment. Thrust
into a cell with Theodora, he confessed that he was a Christian,
dressed her in his clothes, and enabled her to escape. He was seized
and executed; but the Christian virgin, refusing to purchase her
safety at such a price, gave herself up, and died with him.[152]
Similar stories are contained in several of the Christian fathers.[153]
There is, unhappily, no reason to doubt that in many instances the
brutal mandate of the pagan judges was rigorously executed, and
that the faith of many Christian virgins was assailed through the
channel of their virtue. This appears to have been frequently the
case during the persecution of Diocletian, when we hear of Christian
women being suspended naked by one foot, and tortured in other
savage and infernal ways. The practice led to the clear enunciation
of the important doctrine of moral chastity, already stated by Christ
himself in the Gospel. The Romans could not conceive a chaste soul
in a body that had endured pollution, and hence for Lucretia there
was no resource but the poniard. It was left for St. Augustin, St.
Jerome, and the other fathers, to assert boldly that the crime lay in
the intention and not in the act; that a chaste heart might inhabit a
body which brutal force had soiled; and that the Christian virgins
whom an infamous judge had sentenced to the brothel were none
the less acceptable servants of God.[154]
The only retaliation attempted by the early Christians was the
conversion of prostitutes. The works of the fathers contain many
narratives of remarkable conversions of this character, and a learned
Jesuit once compiled a voluminous work on the subject. The
Egyptian Mary was the type of the class. She confessed to Zosimus
that she had spent seventeen years in the practice of prostitution at
Alexandria. Her heart being opened, she took ship for Jerusalem,
paid her passage by exercising her calling on board, and expiated
her sins by a life of penitence in the woods of Judæa. She lived, the
legend said, forty-seven years in the woods, naked and alone,
without seeing a man. A chapel was built at Paris during the Middle
Ages in her honor. The painted windows, representing her in the
exercise of her calling on shipboard, were in existence at a very late
period.[155]
In revenge for the victories of the Christians, the pagans accused
them of committing the grossest immoralities. For many centuries
the early Christian congregations met under circumstances of great
difficulty, in secret hiding-places, in catacombs. Their religious rites
were performed mysteriously. Lights were often extinguished to foil
the object of spies and informers. These peculiarities served as the
pretext for many obvious calumnies. It was commonly believed,
even by men of the calibre of Tacitus, that the Christian rites bore
strong resemblances to those rites of Isis which, at an early period
of Roman history, had created such alarm and horror at Rome. Nor
were these calumnies confined to the heathen. In the third and
fourth centuries, when sectarian rivalries menaced the destruction of
the Church, similar accusations were freely bandied. That they were
wholly unfounded in every case seems difficult to believe, in the face
of the clear statements of such writers as Epiphanes. What the
precise doctrines of the various sects called Adamites, Cainites,
Nicolaites, and some subdivisions of Gnostics, may have been, it
were perhaps superfluous now to inquire; but it seems not
unreasonable to suppose that, in some instances, men of depraved
instincts may have availed themselves of the cloak of Christianity to
conceal the gratification of sensual habits; or, on the other hand,
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