Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in Ancient Rome

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

What did it look like inside a Roman brothel? Who was the sex worker involved in a murder plot to kill an Emperor? And why was the Pope getting sex workers to race chariots?!In this first episode of our brand new limited-series on sex work through history, Kate is joined by Professor Anise Strong, who takes us back to meet some of the amazing sex workers from Ancient Rome, including one who was involved in a murder plot to kill Emperor Commodus.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Bertwitster Sheeds. Hello, hello, and welcome back. But don't get too comfortable. I have to give you the fair do's warning.

And we call that because if you keep listening to this and you get upset, well, fair do's, we did tell you. Here it is. This is an adult podcast, welcome by adults, to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adults subjects and you should be an adult too. Does that feel safer? I feel safer.

on with the show. You are joining me live from the streets of ancient Rome where the annual festival of Floralia is in full swing. It's part religious festival for the end of winter, part balesque, and completely and entirely Roman, which means it's bonkers. What they're doing is they are celebrating a fertility goddess. Of course they are.

And how are they going to do this? Right, here we go. Sex workers are going to be paraded naked through the streets, whilst flowers are being thrown at them and wine is being drunk. So it's a little bit like the Met Gala, but with less clothes, more hookers and some goat sacrifices. But let us retire to a tavernor, open a bottle of wine and we can unpick the Roman relationship with sex work and meet some of the celebrity sex workers and the thousands and thousands of sex workers who've got nowhere near celebrity status.

are you ready for this one? Me too. Let's do it. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm fearful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society. With me, Kate Lister. Sex work has been a real.

around as long as we have had money to purchase sexual services with. But by the time we get to the Roman period, what was it like to sell sex in ancient Rome? What was it like inside a Roman brothel? What was it like to be a sexually enslaved Roman? And why did the Pope want them to race chariots for him? In this brand new mini-series, I'm going to be joined by some truly fantastic guests,

and we are going to explore the ways in which sex work exists. and how it has been treated throughout history. Today I am chatting to author, lecturer and expert in Roman sex work, Professor Anise Strong, who's going to take us back to ancient Rome and help us try and get to know and understand the people that were selling or were made to sell sex. Togas at the ready betwixters, let's do this. Hello and welcome to betwixtor sheets. It's only Professor Anise Strong.

How are you doing? Terrific, thank you. It's so nice to have you here. You are the author of Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman world. So you are an excellent person to talk to about sex work, sex for sale, the sex business in ancient Rome. But can I ask you, first of all, what brought you to write in that book? Honestly, it was in particular early on in graduate school. I happened on the story of this one woman named Vesci.

Vistilia, who lived right around 2,000 years ago. And Vistilia was a really wealthy woman, a senator's wife, and she was apparently notorious for having many lovers. I like her already. Yes. So she's as many lovers. Her husband is apparently fine with this. But the Emperor Tiberius is not fine with this, because it sort of goes against his idea of family values. So the husband was okay, but the emperor decides to get involved.

The emperor decides to get involved. And so the emperor orders her husband to divorce her on the grounds that she's an immoral woman. Okay. And the husband refuses. And the emperor says, well, she's an adulterist. And at that point, Vistilia does something that's really interesting, which is that she goes on down to the city hall of Rome, and she registers herself as a sex worker.

Oh, there's a move. Oh, yes. Okay. Because sex workers can't commit adultery because it's their job to sleep with people. Okay. And apparently we're still isn't alone in this. We're told that dozens of other women who wanted to live their sexual lives freely tried this dodge of going and registering themselves as public sex workers. Wow. Can we still do that? Is that an option? No. I think not so much. So the Emperor Tiberius is not thrilled by this dodge. And so he passes a whole new law that says that wives of seditors cannot be sex workers. Spoilspot.

Indeed. Right. Okay. And what happens to the stage? Does she end up on an island starving to death? She does end up on an island, unfortunately. He demands again then that her husband divorce her and her husband asks for three months, which is sort of interesting. He wants some time to consider his options, but ultimately he does, and she goes off to an island in exile and spends the rest of her life there as far as we know. What is it with Rome exiling women to islands? That's a running theme, I've noticed.

It is a running theme. So there is not really a death penalty for Roman citizens in most cases. And so I think exiling to an island is the easiest way to sort of get them out of the picture, more or less. Wow. Wow. On what quality island depended on your crimes and who you were, I think. So that story just really got me interested because it made me think that what I'd sort of been told previously was that we had this giant distinction between good women and bad women and wealthy, rich women and poor, impoverished, mostly enslaved sex workers. But here was this wealthy, powerful woman who chose to be a sex worker. legally. And that seemed to be like it messed up the whole story about this sort of narrow division here. And so that's what started the book. I suppose this history as well, you must have

a lot of popular mythology to contend with. Because if there's one group of people that we like to think of as debauched perverts, it's the Romans. They have that reputation. We project a lot onto them. Is that difficult as a historian of ancient Rome to kind of pick through that? Very much so. And also because it's not just that that's a modern view, although it very much is. That's something

that I'm writing about in my current book. But it's also an ancient view. It shows up in the ancient Roman comedies and it shows up a lot in the early Christian literature. One of the favorite things that the early Christian writers do to condemn Rome is to talk about

how in particular it's not just that there are sex workers doing to bouch things, but that there are powerful and influential sex workers and that they have too much. That's where we draw the line. That's where we draw the line. It's one thing if they're on the streets or in the brothels and just pleasuring men for money,

but when they're using that power to gain wealth or influence or independence, that's when they become threatening. Wow. So the thing that it's very easy to miss about, Roman history as well. Is it a lot longer than you think it is? The period that you're looking at, is it hundreds of years or thousands of years? So I wound up mostly focusing on sort of big hundreds, on basically 200 BCE to about 200 CE because I had to cut things off a little bit. But even then I cheat a little bit. I end with the Ebris Theodora in Constantinople, who was certainly a sex-adjacent

worker and that she got her start as sort of an exotic dancer for the chariot racing team. So we're looking at hundreds of years of history and things can change so much in just a few years, weeks even. What was the state of the legal framework around the sale of sex in ancient Rome? Was there laws around this or was it just you carry on and do whatever you fancy? So mostly there are laws, the sort of parallel to the law that senators, wives can't be prostitutes is a law saying that prostitutes can't marry senators, that people who are sex workers can't then marry up and escape that. There's an attempt to sort of say that sex workers permanently have a bad reputation,

essentially. But it's perfectly legal. They get taxed pretty heavily, in fact. And that suggests that it's pretty profitable as an occupation. and interestingly they have some protections under law as well, which was something I hadn't really expected before I started writing the book. What kind of protections? These aren't consistent, but there's a case of a woman named Manilia

who's sex worker, sort of early Roman Republic, and she's finished working for the night. She's gone to sleep. And one of her clients, who's a wealthy, rich boy, comes throwing stones at her window at night to try and wake her up to get her to come down or let him come up and have sex. And she yells at him that, you know, no, she's done. And he keeps throwing stones. And so she opens her window and she throws a stone back at him and she hits him. And he then brings her up on charges of assault. How dare she? Not impressed with that one. What did the Romans make of

that? So the fascinating thing is the Romans find for her. It's brought to a public trial. And it's considered that she had the right to both self-defense and to refuse a client. Oh, they did something nice. Oh, I'm so pleased. I know. It's not. I don't hear that very often when we're talking about the Romans. It's normally someone's been executed. They've sacrificed something. It's all awful. I wasn't expecting you to say that at all. I wasn't expecting to find that. But no, they do say, they say, hey, she has a right to refuse clients. And that's huge. I'm sure you know from this series as well as others.

Sex workers having the right to refuse clients is not something we find as often as we'd like. Now, how often that worked in practice is a lot harder to say and so on. Was there a legal status that they occupied, the status of infam? What was that? So infamia is basically, you're still a citizen, but yeah, it's sort of, literally bad reputation and so forth, that you're not considered... That's a really weird legal status. Like, you've got the legal status of being a bit of a wronging. Yeah, a bit of a wronging.

And one of the main things is your testimony in court isn't considered reliable. The sort of the assumption is that you might lie or cheat. The other way in which that comes up that I find really interesting is there are laws against catcalling on a street. Is catcalling the right word for England? Yes, yeah, yeah. Cat calling the women or the women catcalling? Men catcalling women. But it's a law ingradation.

And it says that it's wrong in any case to sexually harass a woman verbally on the street. But you get a worse fine if the woman is dressed respectively. If the woman is dressed like a matron. That's the Romans I know and love. There they are. Okay. And you cat call you get a worse fine. Whereas if the woman is dressed like a sex worker, even if she's,

isn't a sex worker. That's where the sort of bad reputation, then you still shouldn't harass her. Like, they still have that bit of protection. You still get a fine for it, but it's a lower fine for that. And if she's dressed like an enslaved woman, again, you still shouldn't harass her. It's still a fine, but it's a lower amount of money that you have to pay in return for it. Is there anything in that law that says how a sex worker might be dressed? Because I'm always fascinated about that. Like, was there a style? Was there a fashion? I know that sometimes you see on like Reddit forums

and sometimes I read it in popular history books that sex workers, by law, they have to have bleached blonde hair and red lips. And I'm never quite sure if that's right. Yeah. So we see that a couple of times reference to the law. They have to wear yellow and or they have to wear togas. And they're wearing togas is really weird and interesting because normally, you know, we think of togas as being what Romans wear.

But the toga was a really uncomfortable and sort of bulky garment, and the sense is that even elite Roman men only wear it in the same way that men wear formal business suits. You'd wear it to go to the Senate. But sex workers are supposed to wear togas. So my best explanation of that is that that's the garment you wear when you're saying you're acting in public. you're being the most public person. I see. Okay. Yes, I can see the joining the dots there. The men wear it when they're out in public.

And because you're a public woman, you have to dress like that too. Right. But that said, we see a couple of references to that in history's illegal texts. But there is not a single surviving visual representation of a woman that is definitely of a sex worker. God damn it. So close. So close. There's nothing that I can point to that can say this is actually what they looked like. There's a scholar who's an expert on this named Kelly Olson, who's terrific. And she thinks that I agree with her that there may be a big difference between the reality of what sex workers wear, which seems to be more or less whatever they like, although probably designed to attract attention for their jobs.

And this idea that they're all, you know, going around yet with the bleached blonde hair of the yellow togas. Who else would have been regarded as an infamia? Who else would have got that legal category? Actresses, absolutely, are one of the big categories there. And definitely some bleedover between actresses and sex workers, waitresses in taverns. Oh, wow. I did know that. Okay. And anyone who's working in a tavern. And one of the legal sources says, any woman who sells things in public. But again, maybe, but we have all these gravestones that are of people proudly proclaiming themselves as woman shopkeepers.

So I think, again, it's a spectrum rather than a binary, as with so many things. What sources do you use to try and get as close as you can to the real lived experience of people who have been selling sex in actual drugs? It's notoriously difficult to try and get to. So most of our sources are written by men, which is something we can't really get around, unfortunately. But I tried to combine sort of like the histories and the plays. The Roman comedies are a really big source there with the archaeological evidence, the artistic evidence,

or to some extent the sort of lack of artistic evidence and inscriptions, grave inscriptions, where we can find them. Let's talk about Pompeii. We've got to talk about Pompeii. And anyone who's been to Pompeii has been to, the brothel, it's their biggest attraction. But it's actually like the Holy Grail of sex work history is that building. Could you just tell us a little bit about why it's so significant?

Absolutely. Also, you had a great episode with Sarah Leffin Richardson, who's amazing. I had a couple months ago about it. The thing about that building is that it's the only one we've identified so far that seems to have been designed specifically for sex. work. The only one that we know about. So I think there are a bunch of other buildings that I think were used as brothels.

But often they are cases like their fancy villas that seem to have the real estate market took a downturn. They were repurposed as brothels or they were like the back ends of bathhouses. But the Pompei Lupinar seems to have been designed for that for the beginning. it's not with the concrete beds in it and so on. And so that combination of it's designed for it and it's not, it is the Holy Grail space, but it's a great counter to all the images we get from literature and modern media of the luxury idea of the brothel,

because it's not a luxurious space. It's frankly not a space that, you know, you'd want to stay in for very long. it's very very little privacy what there would have been would have been a curtain pulled across I guess it's not as small as I thought it would be but when you consider that there would be like several people shagging in here it is quite small yeah so real shagging maybe some people standing in blind like it's it's very much a get in get out and then of course the other great thing about it and this is something that Sarah talks a lot about is the graffiti collection in

side, which because it's Pompeii has been so much more well preserved than in most of the other brothel sites around the empire that I've looked at, which all have their own awesome things, but don't have that sort of record of at least some of the names of the people who actually worked there. I love the fact that the graffiti is some of the people that work there leaving notes for one another and it's like swapping almost jokes with each other. I don't think that exists anywhere else in the entire world. No. And I think there's a couple blocks away, there's a tavern, a tavern of Salvias, which has these famous sort of comic strip frescoes right outside it, which seem to suggest things you shouldn't do in the tavern. And the first of them is, it depicts a man and a woman kissing. And the sort of speech bubble says, I don't want to do it with Mertale. Mertale being a name.

Wow. The thing is, Mertale is one of the names that shows up most frequently in the brothel, a couple blocks over, in one of those front rooms, and one of the two nicest rooms. And the other one that shows up really often is the name Salvia. And this tavern belongs to a guy named Salvius. And so I think that maybe he's trying to promote either his own enslaved woman. who's a sex worker are possibly his own daughter, saying, you don't want to go with Bertale. Oh, there's the Romans that I know and love.

There they are. Yep. So that sense of competition, like, this is not a tavern for people who like this woman. This is... God, that's wild, isn't it? I'll be back with Anise after this short break. Sarah's arguments is that the brothel, it's not a rich establishment.

and that possibly it was used by enslaved people, and it certainly would have had enslaved people working there. That was something that kind of blew my mind, because I put into that point, I didn't even realize enslaved people could have money to go to a brothel. No, absolutely. I think when you start thinking about the clientele, which is a really, an interesting question.

So the thing is, you're an enslaved person in Pompeii, and it's the end of the week, and you've been given your tiny little stipend from the slave o'clock, or probably something like the equivalent of a dollar or maybe a pound a day. And you have a choice at that point. You could save it up and hope that in five, ten years you can use that money to go and buy your freedom. Or you could go get yourself, you know, a decent meal. Or you could go to the brothel and get some pleasure.

You could go, you know, the amphitheater for some gladiator games and bet and hope to, you know, win. and I think that for most people, even people not living in slavery, but most people in general, in the same way as today, that short-term pleasure is going to be a lot more tempting than the save it up and hope that, you know, in five years, you can use it to buy yourself out of slavery. Yes. Do you think there's more weight to the argument that the brothel in Pompeii

and perhaps others were used by, enslaved people, poorer people. Would it be true that rich and more wealthy people would have had sex with their slaves, with enslaved people? So here I think there's an important distinction that I've gotten from looking at literature. I think that the heads of the household are absolutely having sex primarily with their enslaved people because frankly they have easier access and to them it's free. I think that another major source of the clientele for brothels, though, are the young men of that household. Okay. The people who don't want to have sex with an enslaved person and then have to explain that to their dad and mom, basically.

Either because their dad is sleeping with the same person or because their mom might have ideas, that those are the people who have some extra money to spend and who are going outside of the household for their sexual needs. those enslaved people and then free working class men who aren't married or don't have enslaved people themselves. Were the people working in these brothels, would they all have been enslaved? And do we know anything about their experience? Not as much as we would like, which is always the case. In the brothels themselves, my guess is some combination of mostly enslaved and free. But there's a huge spectrum. There are people who are working

on the street. Literally our word fornicate comes from the idea of having sex under an arch, because you could mean your backup against it, to people working at a brothel who probably have slightly more comfort and protection, all the way up to

the wealthy freelance courtisans or escorts who I think were also significant figures within Roman society. And those would mostly, I suspect, not have been enslaved. Those would have been people who maybe had started out enslaved but had earned their freedom and were either operating completely independently or, you know, possibly together with a pimp or madam.

The professional mistresses, they're always fascinating because, as you're saying, this all exists on a huge spectrum. And you'd be hard pushed to say that they were respected, but they certainly had a kind of celebrity or could achieve a certain kind of celebrity? No, absolutely. And could wind up, you know, being treated. We have a couple of the more famous ones getting referred to as second wives, as almost like wives and so on. They'd get invited to the best dinner parties. And, you know, Cicero at one point comes home and writes this sort of gossipy letter to his friend that's like, you'll never believe I went to dinner tonight.

and so-and-so's house and his mistress, you know, the cortisone, was right there dining with us. And he's clearly a little bit scandalized by it, but mostly in the, you know, oh my gosh, I can't wait to go home and tell my friend about this rather than I'm going to stalk out of the house because I can't believe I'm dining with a sex worker. Are there some notable names left to us that we know about these sort of celebrity courtisans from the Roman period? Yes, absolutely. Marcia is from the imperial period. She winds up as the principal mistress of the emperor Combinus, which is not bad at all. And Cominus is famous now because of the movie Gladiator. Yes, I was just about to say, wait a minute, wasn't that Wacking Phoenix and didn't he get killed by a gladiator? Yes, he did. But in the first draft of the script, Marcia was played an important role and then Ridley Scott wrote her out much to my... Is that true?

Yes, it is true. Right, I'm going to write in the letter after this. We're not, that's outrageous. Okay, so who was Marcia? So Marcia, so Marcia's a freedwoman and she seems to have been sort of a freedwoman in the imperial court. And one of the interesting things we know about her to begin with is that she's raised by a Christian eunuch.

So we don't know much about her family, but she has a foster dad. And she works her way up. First, she marries, you know, a politician in the court, and then she marries a sort of court Chamberlain. And at some point in there, she becomes Kauvinus's sort of principal mistress. And then she starts functioning as a sort of quasi-emprice in a lot of ways. And we're told that she has a huge amount of wealth and financial power. One of the most interesting things is that she intervenes to save a whole bunch of Christians who'd been condemned to die in the mines in Sicily.

And she personally rescues them one of the winds up becoming Pope, in fact. It's not clear, but it doesn't seem like she thought of herself as Christian. The Christian writers refer to her as God-loving, which is not true. We see elsewhere sort of interestingly. sympathetic, but maybe not Christian herself. We're told that commonists really like to have her dress up in gladiatorial costume as an Amazon and sort of cosplay as an Amazon gladiator, although it doesn't seem necessarily like she ever fought the arena directly.

She stops a couple of conspiracies against him, but then ultimately, one of her close friends happens to find a death list that commonus has written up with her name on it. Oh. Oh, it's time to get out of town. It's time to leave now. Except rather than getting out of town, what she does is she conspires with that friend or one or two others and they murder commonists. Oh, Marsha. Oh, no.

Yes. No Maximus involved, no gladiator involved. They just have his personal trainer strangle him in his bath. Did she get away with it? she gets away with it briefly. She gets away with it for about three months and then the sort of She's not sent to an island is she?

She's not sent to an island. The puppet guy they've put his up as sort of emperor lasts for about three months and then he gets overthrown by somebody else and the new person wants to seem like he's sort of defending the memory of commoners and so she gets executed.

Right. Oh, Marsha. Oh, that was all a bit dramatic and unnecessary. Why would come to want to kill her? So commonus seems to want to kill her because she's trying to persuade him. It happens right after a point where he's getting a little more unstable and is wanting to fight in the arena as a gladiator himself. Ah, enough said, right. Okay, he was losing it. Right. He's losing it. She's like, I don't think that's such a good idea. I think, you know, she should be focusing on, you know, the raining and and wow. He decides she's spoiling his fun.

Oh, dear, that would have been a much better gladiator, I have to say. I think so. I mean, I'm biased, obviously here, but... What about Theodora? We should talk about her, known as Theodora from the Boppel. Yes. Yes, so Theodora gets her start. And again, the chariot racing factions at this point in Constantinople are incredibly powerful and influential. And besides the actual chariot racing, they have clubs, basically. and big parties, and at the parties they have dancers. And she gets her start as the principal dancer for one of the chariot racing factions. Okay.

And that seems to have involved a fair amount of striptease. That kind of dancing. Gotcha. That kind of dancing, yes. Although, again, our sources here are biased. But very biased. But in any case, the nephew of the Emperor Justinian sees her doing these dances and falls in love with her.

And at first, they live together simply her as his mistress. But then when he becomes emperor, he wants to make her his empress. And so he has to repeal that whole law from 600 years earlier that we talked about right at the beginning that says that sex workers can't marry senators, much less emperors. And so he does and they get married.

And then the thing that really interests me is that one of the first things that she does that they do as a couple is that they ban sex work in Constantinople. It's the first case that we know anywhere on the world, actually, of a law making

sex work illegal. And what Theodora does is they round up all the sex workers they can find, and for all of the women who have families that they can go back to, she gives them a new dress, and some money and sends them back to their families.

Cheers. And then for all the women who don't have families they can go back to, they build them a convent, the convent of repentance. And they make them all nuts. Okay. Do we have any information about how successful this particular project was? So our very hostile source claims that a lot of these ex-workers throw themselves off the walls of the convent.

which suggests unsuccessful. That didn't go too well then. It certainly seems to have been a short-term thing at best. It's an all unclear that past Theodore's raid at sex work, it continues to be officially illegal, but I don't think that sex work in fact completely stops at Constantinople from what we can tell. Another example, one of the things I did find my book

is that when you look at the real life examples of the historical sex workers, none of them seem to want that as a job for their own daughters, for instance, or for other people. And that, I think, tells us a lot that the people who do wind up in power and influence do not think this is a good career. It must have been so dangerous and so precarious and women have so few rights anyway. Yes. It must have been an extraordinarily volatile existence. And a short career as well, yeah.

And a short one. I mean, for the few that made it to be, well, I was going to say the few that made it to be the emperor's mistress, but even she met a sticky end, didn't she? I'll be back with Anise after this short break. By the time Theodora is ruling in Constantinople is the Empire Christian by this point. And what impact did the emergence of Christianity have on sex work in Rome, sex and gender in Rome? So it definitely seems to have made it much less. respectable. Again, until Theodore, it's still legal, but it becomes viewed as as less respectable. We have some evidence, for instance, there's this annual festival in Rome that goes on for centuries and

centuries called the Floralia, in which the sex workers, but also all of the actresses, perform nude, and then go on a giant parade through the streets. It's sort of early pride parade in some fashion. The Christians really, really hate that and try and ban it at various points, but when some of the early Christians try and ban it, they get vegetables thrown at them because the people really like seeing these new

plays. We want our nude actresses on display. That's what we want. Stop messing about with it. References to that. And then I think that's kind of fascinating is that these prostitute festivals and parades in fact keep happening well into the Renaissance because he have records of of something happening on basically

the exact same date in the calendar, same year all the way into the 1400s but they get turned from pride parades into walks of shame and now these sex workers are racing through the streets while

the crowds throw vegetables at them so... Oh that doesn't sound nearly as much fun. No. Where was that happening? That happens there's, I've counted about 14 different Italian and French cities where that happens regularly.

And my favorite example of that actually is that in the 1490s in Rome, they had had these races in Rome, but there it had been in some ways even worse because they had gotten to the point where they'd have things like three-legged races where they would tie together a

woman sex worker with a elderly Jewish man and have them race through the streets. There we go. There we go. The one nice thing that the Romans did and now look at what they're up to. Honestly, they're absolutely bonkers. But in the case, there starts to be criticism from elites and from the church. But the criticism is mostly about the fact that they're worried about the fact that the respectable women, the matrons, are watching these sex workers. Not about the fact that they thought it would be funny to tie a sex worker young woman to a a disabled Jewish person. That bit's fine.

No, that, that bit's fine. No, but you might give the wives ideas, you see. Honestly. And so, the Pope bans this. This is actually the Borgia popes. But then the solution they come up with is to solve this problem by moving, at least for several years, the sex worker races inside the papal apartments. I just, to have been a fly on the wall, at these meetings.

Who came up with that? You see, the problem is that the women might be corrupted. Oh yeah, of course, of course. Right, exactly, exactly. And so you move them to where only the priests who obviously can't possibly be corrupted by seeing. It's not funny, but it's just so ridiculous. So you've got a situation where they're now racing sex workers inside in the Vatican.

Brilliant. Well, that's, that is one of the wildest things that I've heard. That is, that is just properly Monty Python stuff. It's absolutely. And, you know, I think this only lasts as far as I can tell for a couple of years and then they stopped those with a new post. It wasn't still being done in the 80s or something. No, it was.

No. We did not accuse it. We've spoken a lot about women selling sex, but obviously men were selling sex as well. Were there different rules for men selling sex? We know that there were some men, for example, possibly selling sex inside. The brothel in Pompeii is Adoras, I think, is a name scrawled on the walls. Yes. So there are definitely some men, almost certainly primarily for male clients, I think.

I think there's any chance, any chance at all that women would maybe go into the brothel. Because one of the pieces of graffiti translates to something like, Isidorus should be elected to a local official, he's the best cunt liquor. or something like that. And I alluded to that, is there any chance in the world that a woman client could probably not? What do you think? I think there's absolutely there's some chance.

And what I will say is we see on the walls of the gladiatorial barracks in Pompeii. There are a lot of favourable comments about the sexiness to the gladiators. And so... Gladiator groupies. I think it's much more likely that we have gladiator groupies and people who are quite possibly playing the gladiator.

for their sexual favors, then we have women going to the actual brothel. But I think the hire a gladiator for a private show is very likely happening and is suggested by some of our other sources there, I think. As far as we know, the majority of men-sand-sex would have been selling it to men. Yes.

And there we know there's one in Rome. We know there's a specific street in Rome where you went for male sex workers that was distinct from where you'd go to find female sex workers. So they had their own neighborhood, basically. And fascinatingly, it's the same street where the porn shops are or the porn stalls and so on. So you go to the same place if you want to buy scrolls with pornography or erotica on them and if you want to buy services of a male sex worker. Wow.

So is that sort of final question then? Because I'm always interested in this. When we get accounts of sex workers throughout history, what we tend to get is like this little flash of history, like a spotlight just shone on a moment of something. We so rarely find out what happens in the long run to these people. Have you ever found a case where it's like you've been able to track the lifespan? I mean, not somebody like Marcia that wound up being murdered,

but like, did you retire from this job? Did you, like, could you go on to something else afterwards? So there's one person who comes to mind. So I think the most likely sort of successful retirement is into being a madam yourself. We do see, there's a lot of fluidity. So I think there are, we do have a couple of examples of people who seem to go from being sex workers to say cooks or managers at a tavern to maybe back to sex workers or to wives. But there's this one tombstone, and it's the only one like it in the whole empire that I've been able to find, that's a family tombstone that's set up by a woman named Vibia, Vibia Crestes,

and she sets it up for herself and for her family, and also for Vibia Calibanus, whose same name, like probably belonged initially to the same slave owner, but doesn't seem to be related to her. and she describes her on the tombstone as a madam who earned her own money without cheating others. Oh, that's interesting. So that's the only person who lists themselves explicitly as a sex worker on their gravestone. And this seems to have been a family unit of some form. So what's the relationship between these two women,

between the woman who sets up the gravestone and for the madam. I really don't know. I kind of want to imagine them as a happy same-sex couple because... Wow, yes. The first Vibia who sets up the gravestone doesn't have a husband. She has a son, but she has no husband listed whatsoever. And so, in my mind, they, you know, they retire, they have a good life.

She makes money without defrauding people. And then they retire and eventually have this family gravestone for each other. I can't prove that. But let's hope. Anise, you have been absolutely fascinating. It's going to take me a while to move on from the image of priests, racing, sex workers in the Vatican. That's going to stay with me for a bit. But if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Absolutely. So the easiest place is my website at Western Michigan University. You can absolutely buy my book on prostitutes and matrons in the Roman world. I have a variety of articles. If you want to hear more about Marsha, that article is available freely online. And so you can learn all the juicy details about Marcia's life and why she gets ignored in the historical record. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. You've been Martha.

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Anise for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is, you get your podcasts. I know we ask you to do that every single time, but it actually really does help us. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello perhaps you wanted to know if these events

are still happening at the Vatican well you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com Coming up we've got an episode on The Truth Behind Jane Austen and the second instalment of this sex worker mini-series where we will be diving into the medieval world. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith.

The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixie. to the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.