We use cookies to offer you a better experience, personalize content, tailor advertising, provide social media features, and better understand the use of our services. Do you want to read the rest of this article?
We use cookies to make interactions with our website easy and meaningful, to better understand the use of our services, and to tailor advertising. For further information, including about cookie settings, please read our Cookie Policy. By continuing to use this site, you consent to the use of cookies. We value your privacy. Modern scholarship on the location of sex work in the Roman city has focused almost exclusively on an attempt to label and count brothels, largely within the small city of Pompeii.
This is a search concerned, naturally, with definitions and vocabulary: This hunt for brothels also seeks to locate and segregate Roman prostitutes themselves: While meretrices certainly did not share the same social status or respect as married women, they formed a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape.
This article will examine both literary and archaeological evidence in order to determine in what sort of cultural context urban Roman prostitutes of the first several centuries CE might have worked. Through a set of case studies of possible brothel sites in Pompeii, Ephesus, Ostia, Dougga, and Scythopolis, as well as a review of the surviving literary descriptions, we can further illuminate Roman attitudes towards prostitutes and how they functioned in Roman society.
Since brothels are the best archaeological evidence of sex work in areas where graffiti have not survived, this article will primarily concentrate on using brothels as a means of establishing the prominence of prostitutes in the urban environment.
