Authors: Robert C. Knapp
Of course, Mary is released from her life of sin, but her experience gives us the best picture we have of the tavern as a venue for sex.
Public baths were also a favorite haunt of whores, as this remark by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus makes clear:
If they [the bathers] suddenly learn that a previously unknown prostitute has appeared, or some whore of the common herd, or an old harlot whose body is up for cheap, they rush forward jostling, pawing the newcomer, and praising her with outrageously exaggerated flattery like Egyptians laid on their Cleopatra … (
History
28.4.9)
The nudity – and all the more if men and women bathed together, as could occur – provided, like drink in a tavern, a stimulant propelling clients toward willing sexual partners; food and various other services were also available, such as massages. Just as a masseuse could easily move on to provide sexual services, bath staff easily could and did combine routine tasks, such as watching over customers’ clothing while they bathed, with access to sex should a customer desire it. Indeed
at the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, the most fully excavated example, there are explicit paintings illustrating progressively more audacious (or humorous) sexual participants and positions located above the shelf where clothes were deposited preparatory to bathing. There were also rooms for prostitutes above the bath, and even a separate entrance from the street in case customers just wanted sex, without bothering about the bath. A graffito on the wall outside states:
Whoever sits here, read this above all: if you want to fuck, look for Attis – you can have her for a denarius. (
CIL
4.1751)
All of these places – brothels, dwellings, taverns, baths – catered to ordinary people, along with the occasional elite who was slumming. Often a lit lamp in a niche signaled prostitution within, although lamps adorned other business facades as well. Such establishments were scattered throughout the city, as was housing and population in general, and in addition prostitutes could go out to serve at dinner parties or local festivals.
Besides work in specific places, whores also worked the streets. The emperor Domitian proclaimed prostitutes could not use litters; one might guess that this was to prevent mobile servicing of clients as much as to deny a mark of the elite to whores and the protection of enclosed curtains against the lewd remarks of fellow citizens. But even without enclosed litters, there were plenty of opportunities. T. Quinctilius Atta, a Roman author of the first century bc from whom we have only a single literary fragment, described audacious prostitutes in his
Aquae Calidae:
‘they whored through the streets like wolves looking for their prey.’ They could hang out in any quarter, but their choice of station was related to the traffic that could be expected, and sometimes produced a nickname for whores. Festus 7L states:
Alicaria
is a word for prostitutes in Campania because they were accustomed to make their money hanging around the mills grinding grain (
alica),
just as those who took up position in front of stables were called ‘fore-stablers’ (
prostibula).
They might work public areas that had more or less hidden spaces for
discreet sex. Markets and areas with public buildings had lots of potential customers; in a pinch, tombs outside the city could be and were used for business. The arches (
fornices)
of large public buildings such as theaters and amphitheaters – arches that give the word ‘fornication’ – were popular spots. As at the baths, the arousing activity of the places – in the case of the theater, often salacious performances; in the case of the arena, the excitement and blood lust of gladiatorial contests – provoked sexual arousal that local prostitutes could take advantage of. Somewhat more private than the local archway but very much in its spirit was the one-room cubby opening onto the street with a masonry bed either used by a whore on duty there, or rented cheaply to bring a client to.
The theater was related to prostitution both directly and indirectly. The area around a theater teemed with people before and after a performance; this provided opportunities for prostitutes. But more than that, some productions in the theater were as provocative as any wall paintings in a brothel. These were the mimes, a favorite with the people. They were performed by actors assumed to be of low character and, unlike in other theatrical art forms, women were allowed. Even if those actors themselves were not immediately involved in prostitution, their characters’ actions encouraged sexual fantasies. While a performance of a Greek tragedy or a Roman historical drama would not incite such, this more popular form of stage production did. Mime performers used a combination of gestures and acrobatics – rather like risqué ballet – as well as some singing and verbal play to tell rude stories of everyday life or mythology. At the Tavern on the Street of Mercury in Pompeii a series of highly erotic scenes from mimicry were painted on the wall – clearly these appealed to the imbibers’ enchantment with these theatrical displays. It is not surprising that these mimers not only stimulated demand for prostitutes, but multitasked in that profession as well.
The Floralia in Rome was a lewd festival of spring; named for a whore of yore, it could hardly have been otherwise. A parade of prostitutes and performance of mimes were central to the celebration. Tertullian describes it with disgust:
The very prostitutes, sacrifices on the altar of public lust, are brought out on stage, quite unhappy in the presence of other women – the only people in the community from whom they keep out of sight; they are paraded before the faces of every rank and age; their abode is proclaimed, their price, their specialties, even before those who do not need to be told; and yet more is shouted out, what ought to lie hid in the shadows and in their dark caves – but I’ll keep silent about that. Let the senate blush, let everyone be ashamed! These women themselves, assassins of their very own decency, blush this once a year, fearful of having their deeds brought to the light before all the people. (
On Spectacles
17.3–4)
On stage, mimic adventures acted by whores were set to the lives of ordinary people – tailors, fishermen, weavers – in compromising situations, as adultery was a favorite theme. These theatrical displays, as was normal with mimes, featured the usual obscene dialogue, singing, dancing, gestures, and suggestive movements of bawdy comedy. The final act often featured complete nudity on stage as the actors complied with the audience shouting ‘Take it all off.’ A Christian author, aghast, describes the goings-on:
Those games are celebrated with all moral restraint thrown to the winds, as is suitable to the memory of a whore. For besides the out-of-control, filthy language and the outpouring of every kind of obscenity, harlots are even stripped of their garments at the rhythmic demand of the people, and then they play the part of mimes, and are kept on stage before the appreciative audience until even shameless eyes are sated with their shameful gestures. (Lactantius,
Divine Institutes
1.20.10)
The appearance of both mimes and whores at the Floralia emphasizes their popularity among ordinary people as well as their similarity as part of the sex industry: mimes, like prostitutes, performed on street corners, in performance-specific spaces, like brothels, and for private parties. Their openly raunchy moves and sex-soaked themes must have approximated strip shows in many instances. And like strip shows, the segue to prostitution was a brief one.
Temples as well as theaters were popular hangouts for prostitutes. In Plautus’
Curculio
the whorehouse visited is next to the Temple of Aesculapius; in front of the house is an altar to Venus. And in Plautus
there is a description of the prostitutes congregating at the Temple of Venus:
The altar area is mobbed right now. Surely you don’t want to hang around there among those whores on display, playthings of millers, and the rest of the harlots – miserable, dirt-smeared, filthy little slavelings, stinking of the whorehouse and their profession, of the chair and bare bench they sit on to solicit, creatures no free man ever touched, not to mention married, five-dollar sluts of the vilest little slaves. (
Little Carthaginian
265–70)
There is a tantalizing detail of this activity from real life. South of Rome at the eightieth milestone along the Via Latina, at an ancient sanctuary of Venus, four women set up a cookshop:
Flacceia Lais, freedwoman of Aulus; Orbia Lais, freedwoman of Orbia; Cominia Philocaris, freedwoman of Marcus; and Venturia Thais, freedwoman of Quintus, built a kitchen at the shrine of Venus in a leased space. (
AE
1980.2016)
Now these women, all freed slaves, have names that are typical of prostitutes. Thais and Lais are both names of famous high-class Greek prostitutes; they would be grand names for Roman harlots. Indeed, it was common for a whore to take an appropriate name. A good example is a prostitute who became a Christian saint of the fifth century ad:
My father and mother gave me the name Pelagia at birth but the citizens of Antioch call me Margarita (‘Pearl’) because of the abundance of pearls they’ve given me as my sins’ reward. (Jacobus,
Vita
7)
Thus when Pelagia became a whore she took the name Margarita (‘Pearl’). Furthermore, the association of prostitutes and taverns/cook-shops combined with the use of temple locations as spots for solicitation makes it almost irresistible to speculate that this roadside restaurant next to a temple of Venus also served sex. However these four women came to be freed – perhaps through saving their money and purchasing freedom – they had enough capital to set out on their own.
As they went about their business in these various places, prostitutes were supposedly compelled to wear ‘official garb’ – the toga. Or so scholars have deduced from remarks by elite authors Horace (
Satires
1.2.63, 82) and Sulpicia ([Tibullus]
Elegies
3.16.3–4), and from references better suited to a requirement, clearly quickly dropped, to have women convicted of adultery wear the toga. And while it is clear that prostitutes were not to wear the sartorial badge of respectable womanhood, the stola, it is just as clear from other references that their normal garb was hardly the toga. In fact, ancient sources in general do not describe a working whore dressed in this way – not Plautus, not Apuleius, not Petronius. And in addition, there is not a single illustration, erotic or otherwise, in sculpture, reliefs, wall painting, or graffiti that can be identified as a prostitute in a toga. It is hard to say if this supposed dress code was ever widely implemented, or whether it was mostly a confusion with the pallia, a cloak worn by women, including whores. Elaborated descriptions of prostitutes that do appear in literature are rather more the expected: women tarted up in fine, colorful, diaphanous clothing, wearing rouge and other makeup – or parading about in a brothel dressed either in skimpy clothing or none at all. The moral advice in a letter from Egypt is typical in that it urges a wife to be the opposite of a prostitute, shunning ‘garments woven with purple and gold threads,’ dressing modestly so as to ‘look shapely to her own husband, but not to her neighbor,’ and not using rouge and white lead as face makeup (Rowlandson, no. 260). In erotic paintings women are shown either as naked (sometimes with a breast band), or clothed (in various stages of dishabille) in normal female garb; unfortunately it is impossible to tell which might be lusty wives and concubines, and which out-and-out whores. But a painting from the Tavern of Salvius at Pompeii can reasonably be seen as showing a prostitute and her prospective client. Here the woman is dressed in a long gown of colorful orange-yellow material, with fancy slippers. She is kissing a man and he says, ‘I don’t want to [screw] with Myrtalis’; presumably the joke is that he rejects Myrtalis in favor of the lovely woman he is with presently. There is also a hint of the dress distinction here, since in the next frame of the painting a barmaid appears wearing the same long gown as the whore, but in plain white, and she has normal footwear. In short, prostitutes advertised their wares; selling sex meant selling something alluring. Their
clothing created that allurement – and Roman officials had little interest and no effect in dictating what they should wear, much less requiring that that be a toga.
One of the primary reasons to use a prostitute was that the sexual services offered were more exciting, adventurous, and varied than what was expected of a wife or even of a discreet lover. An example of this proficiency in described in Achilles Tatius’ novel,
Leucippe and Clitophon.
Clitophon, stating that his experience ‘has been restricted to commercial transactions with women of the street,’ graphically describes that experience:
When the sensations named for Aphrodite are mounting to their peak, a woman goes frantic with pleasure; she kisses with mouth wide open and thrashes about like a mad woman. Tongues all the while overlap and caress, their touch like passionate kisses within kisses … When a woman reaches the very goal of Aphrodite’s actions, she instinctively gasps with that burning delight, and her gasp rises quickly to the lips with the love breath, and there it meets a lost kiss … (
Leucippe and Clitophon
2.37/Winkler)
Along these lines, I can also point to the prospective contractor of the services of the courtesan in Plautus’
Comedy of Asses
(788): when the lamp is extinguished, she is, he insists, to be ‘lively.’
Erotic art from Pompeii offers graphic examples of what a prostitute had to offer. In particular, sex acts that were seen in the general culture as polluting were on display. Fellatio and cunnilingus – there are also decorated lamps combining the two into the ‘69’ position – both involved the mouth and were considered unclean and degrading in the extreme to judge by numerous insulting remarks abounding in elite literature and in graffiti. Another sex act displayed is intercourse from the rear-entry position. But exactly for the reason that these enticing acts were forbidden to ‘nice girls,’ they were probably available for sale to willing buyers. A word of caution is needed, however. Scenes in paintings and on lamps that depict ‘unnatural acts’ (as Artemidorus would put it), i.e. oral sex, are in fact rare. And many such erotic scenes may be intended at least as much to display the female body as to catalog possible sex acts with prostitutes.