Prostitution in the Roman World (Ancient Monographs Book 4)

Sex was for sale on every street corner of the Roman Empire. Behind the romantic ruins and marble statues stood a vast trade in paid sex, supplied largely by slaves and the very poor, tolerated and taxed by the State, and regarded by most Romans as an unremarkable part of everyday life.

Based on a widely praised public lecture, Prostitution in the Roman World introduces the commercial sex of the Empire from Augustus to Justinian. In clear, unsentimental prose, Sean Gabb brings together law codes, satirists, Church Fathers, graffiti, papyri and archaeology to show how the sex trade actually worked, and what it meant for those who bought and those who were bought.

Among the questions discussed are:

How did slavery shape the market in paid sex?

What legal status did prostitutes have, and what was infamia ?

How were women, men and children recruited into brothels?

What were Roman attitudes to all-male sex and male prostitution?

How young could a “willing” partner be in law and in practice?

What did a visit to a Pompeian brothel really look like?

What diseases followed in the wake of the trade?

How did Christian emperors and bishops respond to prostitution?

Along the way, the book ranges from graffiti in Pompeii to the great jurists of the Digest, from Petronius and Juvenal to Augustine, Justinian and Theodora. A final section considers how far Christianisation altered the legal and moral landscape, and how much remained unchanged beneath the new rhetoric.

This short volume is:

Richly illustrated in full colour with mosaics, frescoes, inscriptions, artefacts and manuscript images, printed on high-quality gloss paper.

Firmly grounded in primary sources , with a full bibliography of ancient and modern works for further reading.

Accessible to general readers with an interest in Rome, yet useful as a compact introduction for students of Classics, ancient history, gender and legal history.

The subject is often harrowing and sometimes disgusting; the treatment is scholarly, candid and occasionally darkly humorous. This is not a coffee-table book, but it may well be the ideal present for those hard-to-please friends and relatives who like their history vivid, unsanitised and firmly rooted in evidence.