How to Find a Brothel in Pompeii

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Pompeii’s material remains, frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, offer an unparalleled look at what a first-century A.D. Roman city was like. We are all familiar with Pompeii’s lavish villas and colorful wall paintings—some of which, wrote a bashful Mark Twain, “no pen could have the hardihood to describe.” But it wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that scholars began to pay serious attention to some important evidence of everyday life in Pompeii—evidence suggesting how these ancient Italians actually lived.

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The evidence in question concerns prostitution.

Pompeii provides the most extensive archaeological evidence that we are ever likely to have for the sale of sex in Roman times. Yet no overall count of the number of brothels that existed in the ancient city was made until 1994. In two separate studies published that year, classicists Ray Laurence and Antonio Varone added up the number of buildings previously identified as brothels, and came up with a total of 35 (or more). Many scholars, including Laurence himself, believe nevertheless that a city of Pompeii’s size—with an estimated population of only around 10,000—simply could not have supported so many houses of prostitution.

Then, in 1995, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, now the director of the British School in Rome, concluded that only one brothel could be identified with certainty at Pompeii (though he also accepted nine single-room venues, or cellae meretriciae, that were probably used for the selling of sex). Three archaeological criteria, he argued, identify a brothel: erotic art, erotic graffiti and raised masonry platforms that functioned as beds. The only structure in Pompeii that strictly satisfies these criteria is a popular tourist attraction often called the Lupanar (Brothel).¹

Indeed, the so-called Lupanar is the most certain example of an ancient brothel—not only in Pompeii but in the entire Roman world. The dingy, two-story building stands at the triangular intersection of two streets 021and is relatively small, with five cramped rooms on each floor. A separate staircase leads to the second floor, which is fronted by a balcony. On the ground floor, a corridor connects the five small rooms, and each room has a masonry bed. The upper part of the corridor wall is decorated with a series of erotic paintings, most of which are still in fairly good condition. In one scene, the god Priapus is shown with two enormous penises, while in others, men and women are depicted in a variety of sexual positions, including three versions of a rear-entry pose. One painting shows a man about to penetrate a tall and elegant woman; he parts her legs while avoiding her gaze, suggesting shyness, detachment or even concentration. Yet another shows a man and woman relaxing in bed, gazing at an erotic painting. These are the very paintings that gave pause to Mark Twain’s pen.

In addition to the paintings, the Lupanar has more than 120 graffiti scratched on its walls, many of which contain the names of both prostitutes and clients. Some of the graffiti indicate the kinds of sexual acts the prostitutes could perform, with occasional references to the price (“Harpocras had a good fuck here with Drauca for a denarius”; “Fortunata gives head”).

The second floor of the Lupanar is similar to the first floor, except that there are no paintings, graffiti or masonry beds. This floor, that is, satisfies none of the criteria put forward by Wallace-Hadrill to identify a brothel. Should we then conclude that the first floor was a brothel but that the second floor had some other purpose? Not at all. According to Roman law, both floors had to be owned by the same person, and most scholars assume that the entire house served as a brothel. This discrepancy simply suggests how hard it is to determine what actually took place in ancient structures—and it is a warning not to accept the Wallace-Hadrill criteria as anything but a heuristic hypothesis.

The Lupanar was almost certainly built to be a brothel, making it something of a rarity in the ancient (and modern) world: a purpose-built brothel. Brothels are usually converted inns, hotels, motels or tenements. When the conversion is made, very few changes are made to the building. Brothels are difficult to identify because they tend to blend imperceptibly into the lower-class housing of a city.

And there are other obstacles to identifying brothels, in Pompeii and elsewhere. The fact that a building has a series of small rooms doesn’t mean it’s a brothel; any number of lower-class lodgings might have been designed in this way. Nor are erotic graffiti and art necessarily evidence of on-site prostitution. Graffiti might represent insults, and nothing more. Private homes contained erotic sculpture, as well 022as erotic lamps, drinking cups and mirrors—all of which were very much in vogue in the first century A.D. The walls of some houses were even adorned with erotic paintings; perhaps their owners were trying to capture the lurid aesthetic of the brothel, creating a kind of private sex club.

Just how difficult is it to determine whether a building was a venue for prostitution? Located not far from Pompeii’s boundaries, near the Porta Marina (the arched seaside entrance to the city), is the sprawling Terme Suburbane (Suburban Baths), one of the six bathing complexes at Pompeii known to have been open around the time of Vesuvius’s eruption. The structure, which sits on the side of an inclined road, has two floors. The bath complex took up the entire lower floor. Bathers came to immerse themselves in the hot, cold and warm waters of the baths, perhaps to receive a massage or exfoliation treatment (the removal of dead skin) and to go for a swim in a large heated pool.

A trip to the Terme Suburbane was, of course, invigorating and refreshing. But were other pleasures available there?

On a wall of the apodyterium (changing room), just above the place where wooden lockers were once set, is a series of erotic paintings. Discovered in 1986, these paintings appear above a row of boxes also painted on the wall, mimicking the wooden lockers that once existed there. A number was painted corresponding to each box.

In one painting, a tall woman sits astride a man, who rests on a bed upon his elbows (not to be confused with the painting shown on p. 20, which is in the Lupanar). In others, women perform or receive oral sex. There’s (possibly) a scene showing sex between females, as well as two group scenes, one involving two men and a woman, the other depicting two men and two women.

Literary and legal texts do attest to the 023sale of sex in baths. For example, writing in the early third century A.D., the jurist Ulpian observes that in some provinces the slaves who guarded the bathers’ clothing also acted as prostitutes.² That does not mean such activity took place in the Terme Suburbane; by Ulpian’s time, of course, Pompeii had long been buried under the ash of Vesuvius. And it seems unlikely (though not impossible) that sex took place in the apodyterium itself. The University of Texas scholar John R. Clarke has suggested that the erotic paintings of the Terme Suburbane may not have been meant to titillate, but rather to elicit laughter. Luciana Jacobelli, an expert in Pompeian art, proposes that the images, along with the numbered lockers painted on the wall, served as mnemonic devices, helping bathers recall where they had stored their clothing. The large multilevel parking garages of our own time accomplish much the same thing by distinguishing their levels by number as well as color. Of course, none of these explanations—sex, laughter, and memory—necessarily excludes the others. Different people may have reacted to the art in different ways. Still, if prostitutes worked at these baths, they probably didn’t do so in the apodyterium.

Only one certain example of an erotic graffito has been found at the baths, discovered on the upper level near the road—nowhere near the changing room. The graffito sets the cost for a prostitute’s services at 16 asses, a relatively high price in Pompeii, where the going rate for a prostitute was in most recorded cases two asses, the price of a loaf of bread. Nor have any masonry beds been located in the bath complex, though a small group of apartments was located on the upper level, accessible by a ramp leading from the apodyterium and also accessible directly from the street. Whether sex was sold at the Terme Suburbane is still uncertain, though it seems far from unlikely.

Similar difficulties arise in trying to determine with certainty if prostitutes worked in any Pompeian buildings other than the Lupanar. We must be content with degrees of certainty in approaching this problem. Of the 40 or so structures that have been identified as brothels, maybe about half were likely to be brothels, on the basis of the available evidence—masonry beds, erotic art, graffiti, or some combination thereof. So Pompeii perhaps had about 20 brothels, consisting, like the Lupanar, of one- or two-story buildings with a series of small rooms. Some of these brothels doubled as taverns, though 025the Lupanar did not.

Aside from brothels, there were the cellae meretriciae, one-room structures in which a single prostitute worked (or perhaps more than one in shifts). About a dozen of these have been identified in Pompeii.

If we assume that, on average, five prostitutes worked at each brothel, adding about a dozen more for the cellae, and if we further assume that the city did indeed have a population of 10,000, we can estimate that just over 100 prostitutes worked in Pompeii, a little more than one percent of the population.

So where were Pompeii’s brothels located, and who frequented them?

Some scholars have argued that Pompeii’s brothels were clustered together on the city’s back streets, where no respectable woman or child could accidentally happen upon them. In other words, the Romans made a point of consigning brothels to the less prominent parts of town, thus dividing Pompeii into virtuous and seedy regions in a campaign of moral zoning. A literary cliché may lend support to this theory. Near the beginning of the Satyricon of Petronius, the hero Encolpius is taken to a brothel by an old woman of questionable morals. Encolpius may have been too naive to realize that he was being led to a brothel (see box), but few people reading the Satyricon in the first century A.D. would have failed to recognize Petronius’s cliché. Descriptions of “an out of the way place” located down “various pitch-dark turnings” would have immediately suggested to the reader a place of ill repute.

But to what extent did literature in this case match reality? Our Pompeian Lupanar lies on a twisty street set back from the main thoroughfares. Petronius almost seems to describe its setting. Still, this apparent confluence of archaeological and literary evidence is tenuous at best.

A passage from De Vita Beata (On the Good Life), written by the first-century A.D. Roman philosopher Seneca, distinguishes between the good and bad places in a Roman city. One finds virtue in a temple, in the forum, in the senate-house, in front of a city’s walls. Pleasure, however, skulks in the shadowy establishments of a city, in brothels, baths and saunas—places that would have been policed by public officials called aediles. But Seneca is probably not reporting on the geography of an actual Roman city, or even prescribing what the layout of a Roman city should be. He is making an ideal distinction between virtuous and immoral locales. Despite the stigma that Seneca attaches to baths, the Romans did not zone them for moral purposes. This literary evidence does not support the theory of Roman moral zoning.

The customers of Pompeii’s brothels were for the most part lower-class and poor—with slaves or ex-slaves among them. Members of the city’s elite could not have set foot in a brothel without risking opprobrium. Wealthy Pompeians owned slaves, some of whom were presumably exploited for sexual purposes.

But the brothels also attracted a fair number of visitors to the city, probably including large numbers of agricultural workers. (Pompeii was part of an extensive commercial network that stretched across the Mediterranean. So strong were these commercial ties that Pompeii, although located in a region fabled for its vineyards, imported wine from as far away as Crete.) Seventeen years before the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii, a devastating earthquake rocked the city and the surrounding region. A campaign of restoration and rebuilding was undertaken, and a mass of imported workers (mostly male) likely assisted in the work. These newcomers would have needed food, lodging and, one might argue, sex. So the demand for prostitutes may well have increased in the years following the 62 A.D. earthquake. 062So perhaps more brothels built as a result of this increased demand.

It might be tempting to use what archaeologists have found in Pompeii and compare it with evidence from other cities, to draw some general conclusions about prostitution throughout the Roman Empire. The problem is, no other city in the empire preserves anything like the amount and kind of evidence we see at Pompeii. Rome itself has three known establishments—located in or near the Forum Romanum and the Forum Boarium—that were perhaps (though not certainly) brothels. In Herculaneum (also buried by the eruption of Vesuvius) no brothels have been identified yet, though some evidence for prostitution has been found in the form of erotic graffiti. The port city of Ostia, with its extensive second-century A.D. remains, does not have a certain brothel or even many possible brothels. Roman Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey, is similarly disappointing. Some decades ago an inscription was found in the Scholasticia Baths that seems to mention a brothel, but no brothel has been identified in the vicinity.

The Lupanar, therefore, is a most unusual case, given how difficult it is to identify Roman brothels. With this structure in mind, along with the other 19 or so brothels in the city, we can say that Pompeii was no Sybaris on the Sarno River, but that sex was easily purchased there all the same.

Pompeii’s material remains, frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, offer an unparalleled look at what a first-century A.D. Roman city was like. We are all familiar with Pompeii’s lavish villas and colorful wall paintings—some of which, wrote a bashful Mark Twain, “no pen could have the hardihood to describe.” But it wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that scholars began to pay serious attention to some important evidence of everyday life in Pompeii—evidence suggesting how these ancient Italians actually lived. 020 The evidence in question concerns prostitution. Pompeii provides the most extensive archaeological […]