The Ancients - Sex Work in Pompeii

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

This episode contains some strong language references to sexual content.Pompeii is shrouded in myths and legends about it's vibrant, after hours, night life. With theories of carved stone penis' pointing towards brothels, frescoes of graphic images, and bawdy graffiti immortalising individual's experiences - there's a lot to unpack when it comes to Sex in Pompeii. But what can we decipher from the archaeology about the lives of sex workers in Pompeii - and are their experiences universal, even today?In the third episode of our special series on Pompeii, we're delving into the Brothels of Pompeii with Sex Historian, and host of Betwixt the Sheets, Dr Kate Lister. Looking at the shared experiences between sex workers and gladiators, secret Museums filled with sordid artefacts, and the images that decorate Pompeii's Lupanar - what do we know about Sex in Pompeii? And if you follow the Penis' - where do they actually take you?The series was written and produced by Elena GuthrieThe Assistant Producer was Annie ColoeIt was edited and mixed by Aidan LonerganDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, we are continuing our special mini-series all about Pompeii. Today's episode is an interview with one of our sister history hit podcast hosts, the host of the Sex and Scandal podcast Betwixt the Sheets,

Dr Kate Lister, who also has recently been nominated at the British Podcast Awards for Rising Stars. A huge congrats to Kate. Kate graced us with her presence for this episode where she talks all things sex work in Pompeii. What is the archaeology? Whether it's frescoes or graffiti or a particular building itself, I'm thinking especially one building that is known as the Lupinar or the Wolf's Den. More on that that in the interview what has all of this archaeology revealed about sex work in ancient roman society and specifically in ancient pompeii well kate is here to talk all about it and i really do hope you enjoy naturally there are themes of a sexual nature in this episode so this podcast might not be for you. However, this might have piqued your interest even more,

and if so, listen on. So without further ado, here's Kate. Kate, my normal introduction, it was always great to have you on the Ancients podcast, but I feel you're already part of the podcast because you're part of History Hit, so all I'm just going to say is hello, and it is wonderful to see you today. Hello, I'm really pleased to be here on The Ancients. Yes, absolutely. You've skipped across to The Ancients from Betwixt the Sheets, your wonderful podcast. And we are now going to do a lovely crossover event, now talking all about sex work in Pompeii. Because, Kate, Pompeii, of all sites in the ancient world it's the pinnacle isn't it

especially with ancient Rome we've learned so much about so many different aspects of Roman life and this is true when it also comes to sex work true have you been to Pompeii you must have been to I have recently yeah have you it's freaky as fuck isn't it I think because like obviously you know what it is it's a preserved Roman town you know that but like when you're walking around the street like this is really eerie it's an actual town in like a lot of places it's literally like they've just put some stuff down and cleared off I found that was quite freaky like you could go into the old houses and see plates and things that I found that quite eerie it is very eerie isn't it because it's almost you know the skeletal remains of the houses that are still there from over almost 2 000 years ago and i think i hear this time and time

again by people who go there just the experience you're walking in the footsteps of roman everyday people going you know from the amphitheater to the forum and it's absolutely mad you know oh there would have been the fast food place there would have been the wine merchant or so on and so forth there are the baths there's the graffiti on the walls isn't it it's a unique experience to go to that side it is and even though i was prepared for it and i knew what it was it was still surreal and what made it even more kind of eerie was the fact of like this is literally a place that's been abandoned and you can see what people were just doing like a minute ago before this volcano exploded and i mean we've

learned so much from pompeii haven't we and they're still uncovering how much of it have they still got to uncover i think it's most of it there's so much excitement still there and there's always the thing with pompeii is that almost you can guarantee that every year there'll be an amazing new discovery announced because they are just always finding new stuff in these unexcavated quarters of pompeii like they know the city wall so they know the boundaries of the town as it were but there's still more places inside to excavate so it's very exciting in the future and i guess also in regards to sex work isn't it we know quite a lot already but there's still potentially more to learn too there's so and it can teach us loads about sex in general actually and it's one of

those places like where you kind of really get a feel for the fact of like wow the way these people viewed sex and we viewed sex is so different in so many ways that it's very difficult for us to try and get a grasp on what exactly was going on there for example all the penises everywhere just wall to wall cocks in pompeii they're on the floor they're on the walls they're in frescoes everywhere and we're still kind of like a little confused as to what on earth was going on here like if you and i walked out of our house now and there was penises painted everywhere like there is in pompeii you'd notice why someone drawn cocks everywhere so then we're kind of thinking well like what did they see when they saw this did they see them as what we would term pornographic did they arouse people or are they just good luck symbols and we just don't know and the other like

the erotic frescoes that we discover all the time in Pompeii when we say erotic they are people having sex on walls and they're not all confined to what we might call brothels some of them were in family homes in what would have been their front room and that's like kind of bonkers so what was happening that what you'd all just sit around at a family meal with grandma and grandpa and just two people going at it doggy style on the wall behind them so that was normal to them it is isn't it and i get on barbs as well in public barbs and changing rooms aren't there sometimes there's absolutely mad scenes i think are depicted on one of the barb walls it's really weird to see today so i'm looking forward to delving into this kate's just trying to figure out as you say what it all means i know there's

the common they see what do they see and you know the common myths that have been applied to so many of these things over the past couple of centuries i mean let's talk about the penises on the walls of pompeii that you do see on many streets. Sort something out straight away, Kate. Did they lead to the brothel? No. No, it's a great story. And even when I was at Pompeii, the guide loved telling us that story.

And yeah, there is that kind of myth that if you follow the penises, you'll get to the brothel. But it's not actually true. If you try and follow the penises in Pompeii, you will just end up lost. There's so many, so many of them them it doesn't lead to the broth I mean I don't know maybe some of them did and that's the other thing in it is that maybe some of them were painted in their day maybe they had color-coded penises like a weird ordnance survey thing for orienteers I don't know but no they don't lead to the brothels they don't and the other one that is kind of in debate is whether or not this idea that the sex workers had a penis imprinted on their sandals that they would like leave penis marks in the sort of the ground the dirt to get people to follow and that

again is probably a bit of a myth but one thing that really shocked the Victorian archaeologists when they were uncovering Pompeii for the first time was the amount of sex and they were quite upset as well because they'd had this idea of the ancient Roman world being like sort of the pinnacle of civilization and classical thought and philosophy and elevated thought and society and here they are uncovering it and there's sex everywhere and the Victorians were mortified they had to hide all the really erotic things that they were finding. The winged penises. There's a famous statue of the god Pan

having sex with a goat when they discovered that. And they had to be put in a special museum in the 19th century. And you had to have a special permit to go and look at it. It was known as like the secret museum. This is the secret cabinets. The secret cabinets, isn't it?

Yes. Did you go and see that at the Naples Museum? I't get around to it no which i gutted i definitely will do the next time round but yeah like they were just they were so upset of like oh my god these people were absolute perfect yeah it's very interesting especially when you have the victorian perspective of it all you know what they thought and what actually the reality is in the archaeology and let's go down therefore to the present day people like yourself looking back at ancient Rome and look focusing on sex work let's say so time of Pompeii's let's say first century beginning of the Roman Empire ancient Rome in places like Pompeii and I guess across the Roman Empire I mean how is sex work viewed it's viewed as very much a part of everyday life we can we

understand that from places like Pompeii and some of the surviving literature and sources. But it was viewed with stigma by the time you get to Rome. Ancient Greece, yeah, there was still a stigma. But now when you get to Rome, it's enshrined in law because sex workers and gladiators, I think, went on as infams. So they were denied full Roman citizenship they couldn't vote and they weren't entitled to a few other things and they were in society were cast as infams infamous like apart from society so there's a stigma that's kind of embedded into the law around them but it's a really complex attitude to them because that doesn't mean that sex workers were viewed as just awful

infamous people because like gladiators you got some really famous courtesans some really you know amazing stories and people that make an awful lot of money doing what they did and some of them were hugely respected so it's this really strange ambivalence that happens it's certainly legal we don't start getting laws pertaining specifically around sex work until quite late in the roman empire and even then they were sort of pertaining to men selling sex and that was much later on so it was very much a part of everyday life there was shame attached to the person selling sex not to the person buying sex. Okay, so selling sex, would that also refer to, let's say, a pimp as well?

Would they also be a received infamous person? Pimping, actually, I read somewhere that the word for a pimp and the word for the person who trained a gladiator is the same. They were viewed as the same in the Latin and both had this stigma to them. Anything that was to do with selling your body in a public space attracted that particular stigma. Do we know what sorts of people would visit these establishments? Are we talking like high-end elite Romans or would these be other figures in Roman society? We're not quite sure. If you were a super wealthy Roman, you probably had access to your slaves who were denied rights, who you would have sexual access

to. But you could still go to the brothels. But it's probably not the super, super, super rich going to them. But obviously, they were accessible to everybody. But certainly the brothel that they've discovered in Pompeii, it seems to have been, it's not a very luxurious establishment. It's like a garden shed. It's tiny, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, I visited there recently. Go on then, let's talk about, therefore, this particular building in Pompeii.

I mean, how do we know, are we quite sure, that this was a brothel in ancient Roman times? This is a brothel. Right, okay. So there was a historian called Wallace Hadrill who proposed a criteria, three points that a building had to meet to be considered a brothel. I mean, this isn't like, you know, set in stone, but this is what he said. So it had to have stone beds in a small room that was accessible to the public. One. It had to have sexually explicit frescoes on the wall. Two.

And the presence of sexually explicit graffiti boasting about sexual prowess and that kind of stuff. And there's only one building in the whole of Pompeii that meets all three of those criterias. And that's the i can never pronounce it properly the loop the lupinar yes yes the worst absolutely i mean because i'm guessing you've been there case i mean when you go inside isn't it it just feels quite tiny it's dingy but you know the queues of people who go in to look at the lupinar today always massive everyone wants to look at that don't they absolutely we've got and as you said and the frescoes i mean if we focus on the frescoes therefore maybe in the

lupinar but also elsewhere i mean what types of sex are depicted what things are we talking about another story that goes around and that's still told in pompeii is the idea that the erotic pictures on the wall of the lupinar were like a menu and that because pompeii was a port town there might be people there that didn't speak the language and they could just sort of point I'll have one of them and one of them and one of them that's probably not it's probably not the case it's probably just there to be like this is a brothel there are people having sex but there's an array of sexual acts on display there's cunnilingus which I've always been quite intrigued about,

because that particular sex act had a lot of stigma around it in the ancient world. There are certain Roman sources where it's, like, used as an insult to say that someone goes down on a woman, because it was sort of seen as this emasculating act. Nonsense, bullshit, fellas, please do it. It's amazing. If I can just speak up for everyone there, but certainly in the ancient world there was this idea that only lesbians and men whose penises didn't work would do that particular act, and yet there it is in this huge fresco on the brothel, so maybe it was a specialist service, don't know, but there's also threesomes, there are women on top, they're having sex from behind. There's, I mean, it's really anything that your imagination can think of is being depicted on the walls in the brothels.

And as you mentioned there, so therefore we also have examples of sexual boasts in graffiti that are left by the potential clients of the people who came to this brothel. And you can still see those boasts today. You can. Now, I'm not going to try and butcher latin because i don't speak latin i'm one of those historians that like i write it out in the book and then i have to try and say it out loud and i suddenly realize i don't know what that's always entertaining but yeah fair enough yeah yes so there's lots of graffiti and the graffiti tells us so many important things so a lot of it is quite funny at least i think it's funny i don't know if i'm supposed to but there's things like someone called mola is described as a fucktress that's quite a good one there are names like Victoria and Phoebus appear a few times there's graffiti that reads things like here I

fucked many girls when I came here I fucked and then I returned home is another one I don't know why after doing the act you'd hang around to draw on the walls, but there we go. And my favourite part of it is that it looks like the sex workers themselves wrote some of this graffiti and that they were making fun of clients or perhaps talking to each other because there's one that translates to Mr. Garlic Farts, which I can't remember. that translates to Mr. Garlic Farts,

which I kind of like. This is the idea, like 2,000 years ago, I had some sex worker in Pompeii who was just like, oh my God, he stank. He's terrible, yeah. And I had to write it on the wall. And I like to imagine the other ones that are perhaps with him next time just being like, God, yeah, Jesus,

Mola was right about that. Mr. Garlic Farts, there you go. Mr. Garlic Farts. Infamous legacy of one particular Pompeii citizen. yeah jesus mola was right about that mr garlic farts there you go mr garlic farts infamous legacy of one particular pompeii citizen that's how you've gone down in history okay going back let's talk about the brothel a bit more i mean this seems to be the one building you say that seems to be identified as a brothel in pompeii are there thoughts by others that there were other brothels or is this the only one that we can say for sure and then presume that maybe sex work was happening just in other types of houses that we maybe don't just call brothels? I would imagine that it was happening in taverns.

I think there's clear evidence it was happening in the bathhouses. That's not just true in ancient Rome. That's true in Greece. That's true in the medieval period. The close association between public bathing and sex work, cruising for clients, being available is pretty close. I mean, the word bagnio, which was medieval brothel, means bathhouse. You know, so the two are very, very closely linked. So there's nude bathing, there's sex work going on there as well.

People would have been soliciting in the streets then as now and then of course if you're super wealthy one of the very very high-end courtesans you probably wouldn't be working out of a brothel to begin with you'd probably have your own establishment and then there'd be people having sex with slaves which yeah as you also highlighted earlier with like the elites having their own basically sex slaves in their own villas and so on and you know high-ranking courtesans and so on and so forth it almost seems as if there was in ancient roman times and forgive me if my language isn't quite right but it was almost like a sex work hierarchy can we presume that there was potentially something like that happening in ancient roman society placed up on pay there still is when we look at sex work today it's a very complex

experience and it's very subject to class and how we how we view it like the poorest of the poor the people who are engaged in what we'd call survival sex work that are soliciting on the streets for example they're the ones that attach the most stigma and the most scrutiny and the most brutality from the law whereas we have other words like escort or um sugar baby or there's and it's all everyone's kind of doing the same thing, but one attracts a lot of stigma, and the other one just doesn't. And that's certainly the case in the ancient world. And you can see that. I mean, if you look at someone, she's Greek, but the famous Greek courtesan, Phryne, who started life as a slave, it would seem, but then bought her freedom,

or her client bought her freedom. And then she earned so much money by the end of her career she was able to offer to rebuild the walls of Thebes after Alexander the Great had knocked them down but the city refused because she only said that she'd only do it if they would erect a monument to her that said destroyed by Alexander the Great rebuilt by Phryne the courtesan and they wouldn't do it but she had that much money by the end of it so it is deeply layered and very complex how it's viewed at one hand it's shameful and terrible and on the other hand your courtesans or your meretrees as they were called at the time could become fabulously wealthy and almost independent and have a kind of a skewed agency that wives never could have

who would be expected to stay at home breed children and just generally not be seen in the public world whereas a courtesan because they're already part of the infam they can be seen in the public world that's also interesting in itself if we go on a quick tangent then kate so like let's say with roman elite woman married as you say that patriarchal nature of it you know they had to stay at home that that Roman ideal of the Roman matriarch and so on and so forth people like that they couldn't become sex workers this idea of adultery was very much yeah you do off the table yeah that was a different world wasn't it adultery was severely punishable especially for the wives point of view and so it was perfectly

fine for men to have sex with women who were selling sex or being forced to sell sex but it was shameful for the person doing the selling the wife could only have sex with him and she wasn't allowed to have sex with other people so it's this really skewed complex morality it just it's not a great look for any women there really really, no matter who you are. It's really interesting. I'm glad you brought the story of Alexander Graham Fruni. I love that story. I don't know that much, so I'm so glad you brought it up.

There you go. Learned something new as well from there. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on not just the Tudors from History Hit, my guests and I run through the full gamut of human emotion and experience. From the heartbreak of the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth not being able to marry arguably the only man in the world she ever really wanted to marry, may have for that reason not married anyone else. To a prenatal battle of the sexes. A male and a female seed meet in the womb at conception and whichever one is stronger determines the sex of the unborn child.

From Lady Jane Grey facing her executioner. You can't help but feel just the utmost sympathy for this young girl. To why the laughing cavalier is, well, laughing. He strikes me as someone who goes off on a sort of swaggering booze up. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So with the lives of these sex workers at all, do we know anything about the life of a sex worker in, let's say, Rome and Pompeii? We know bits and pieces. We know fragments. And this is true of the entire history of sex work, because you're dealing with a marginalised group of people,

often a criminalised group of people, people that face a lot of stigma if they disclose and by its nature it's secretive so it's very difficult to access their stories and their experiences there are some surprising things that we've discovered about the lives of sex workers in pompeii so example those that were working in the brothel, the lupinar. It's always been assumed that they were slaves, that they were being forced to work there. But actually, some of the graffiti on the walls of the people that were working there gives a family name. And that wasn't given to a slave. So it seems that there were some freeborn people working there, which kind of complicates that. And I suppose, obviously, you want to be very careful about looking, applying modern things to something that far in the past. But I would imagine that kind of complicates that and I suppose obviously you want to be very careful about looking applying

modern things to something that far in the past but I would imagine that the reason that people turned to sex work fell into sex work were forced into it remains probably very similar to the reason that people do now is they need to earn money and you can make a lot of money selling sex you just can't and I don't want to pretend for one second that there weren't absolute horrors and it must have been a very brutal scary experience in a lot of ways but sex work throughout its entire history it's really one of the only professions where a woman can out earn a man quite considerably there's no barrier to being able to do that there's no exams you have to pass and there's no training that you have to go through like you could start it tomorrow and you can earn a lot of money in a very short space of time and that's been true throughout its history so that's and i imagine that people in the ancient world in rome would

also have found themselves occasionally in positions where perhaps they didn't have a husband to protect them or they needed money everyone has to make a living don't they absolutely it's so interesting how also with the stories of sex work in pompeii from what you're saying how the archaeology is so key to learning more about that you know and how the literature because you say secretive really really interesting that talking about the brothel a bit more and its location the places that they could go obviously you know right next to quite a small winding street isn't it but actually in the whole sphere of pompeii it's not that far away from the central heart of pompeii or the barbs isn't it but actually in the whole sphere of pompeii it's not that far away from the central heart of pompeii or the baths isn't it which seems really interesting that you've got this big bath

complex and you've got the forum actually not too far away from this building that we know is the brothel and i get that again that's an example of like our modern lens struggles with it because today wherever you are in the world there are laws pertaining to sex work apart from in new zealand and new south wales where it's been decriminalized but there's always this need to control how do we control how do we stop it how do we control it how do we ban it how do we what do we do with it and one of the most common solutions is zoning like what you'd call the red light zone is just that well all right you can do it but you can only do it over there and you can only do it in this place at this time and we're going to control

it and that doesn't seem to have been the case in pompeii because like you said there are very important buildings to the town and the state and it would seem that it was just part of the architecture that that was sex and sex for sale was just very much part of the everyday world in pompeii talk to me therefore about gladiators and like the gladiator school and you know the archaeology we got in places like that which once again we've talked about sex workers in the brothel but gladiators despised in one sense but the celebrities in one other sense sex celebrities in one way too aren't they they are and there's a story that goes

around that they were pimped out to very very rich women which is a great story that we love from the ancient world i don't think there are many actual sources like proof of that i mean i'm sure in the entire history of the roman empire at some point some woman paid to shag a gladiator i've no doubt that that happened but whether or not they were routinely pimped out is tough to sort of get a handle on, is we don't have evidence for that. We know that the gladiators were viewed in the same legal terms as sex workers. We know that their trainers were referred to as pimps. So there's a very close association there and it was certainly an erotic spectacle half nude buffed guys wailing on each other and you know they didn't always kill each other it's kind of one of the the myths because they were quite expensive but whether or not they were also selling sex is a tricky one

and again it might not be because it didn't happen it might be because there was a lot of shame attached to a woman paying for sex that was absolutely scandalous so you're not going to find records of it there aren't going to be a receipt somewhere like a scroll with the date of the transaction or anything like that but it doesn't mean it didn't happen but we know gladiators were erotic i can't remember which emperor it was but he banned women from sitting in the first few rows of the coliseum in case they got too sexually excited they could only sit in the back lest they see a gladiator and just completely lose their shit altogether so we know that it had that close association i certainly

wouldn't be surprised if that happened it's interesting from the um archaeology done at pompeii i think it's a bit of a myth but there was always a story of well the fact is that they found the body of a woman in one of the gladiator barracks bedrooms with a gladiator at the time of the eruption

or somewhere around that I might be butchering completely but actually it might just be that they were seeking shelter somewhere there

and it might actually not be linked to that whole kind of myth of the gladiator it might not be or it might be but it could be shit the volcano is exploding I'm going to go, myth of the gladiator and women going to the... It might not be, or it might be... But it could be. Shit, the volcano is exploding.

I'm going to go and shag a gladiator. There might be the priorities at work there, like, well, sod this then. We're on the last few minutes of the bucket list. I'm going to get stuck in. Making up for lost time. But, you know, it could be that as well. That's one of the stories. It could be be that as well that's one of the theories

that's one of the myths about pompeii is they find these bodies all the time and then we're trying to create stories around it like there've been very famous bodies at pompeii that you know recent research has actually found that oh shit it's a woman not a man things that we think we know about it we don't and there's some poor bugger i think it's in pompeii and he's forever preserved and he looks like he's having apeii and he's forever preserved and he looks like he's having a wank and he probably wasn't he just like fell under the ash in this unfortunate position and is now preserved forevermore so we have to be really careful like making these stories about it but of course there would have been women in the gladiator

barracks i would imagine that in that situation then the volcano was actually erupted which must have been terrifying unbelievably terrifying that they probably weren't shagging they were probably taking shelter i would imagine yes the archaeology trying to create these stories you know that's one of the things about Pompeii isn't it the amount of stories that i created and same with sex work as well i mean keeping a bit more on this and then maybe we can expand a bit more to roman at that time and the thing i just want to talk about kate in regards to sex workers you mentioned how for a woman to pay for sex with a gladiator very much frowned upon looked

down upon wouldn't be receipts of that do we know about men as sex workers in pompeii we know bits we know bits and pieces there are names of men who were working in the brothel, the Lupinar in Pompeii. So the names Paris and Castrinus, they're written on the walls. We don't know who they were. We don't know if they had female clients. Probably not. Probably not because of the shame attached to it. But maybe they did. But I think it's much more likely they were selling sex to other men. And there are some descriptions of them as being very beautiful but we just don't know that much about them but we know that there were men selling sex throughout the ancient world like for example in 390 AD an edict of emperor Theodosius I made forcing or selling men into prostitution a capital offence so So he's passed a law that means that this is now illegal,

which tells us a few things. First of all, it was going on, obviously. And the law didn't actually have the effect. If he was pretending he was trying to protect people, he wasn't, because that law led to several brothels in Rome being attacked, burnt to the ground, and the men that were working in them being dragged out and being beaten in the streets. And also, it didn't work because in the reign of Constantine

I, a tax was imposed to discourage men from selling sex. So they're still doing it. So the law to prevent it. And of course, the state is taxing all of this. So on one hand, they're passing laws saying it's illegal to do it and that men are being dragged out in the street and beaten and on the other hand the state always collects the tax from the sex workers so you can even go back to pompeii and you expect you know with taxes being collected from a establishment like the lupin at that time hundreds of years before because how interesting yeah and i guess okay you mentioned constantine and theodosius there and that's for my mind that instantly made me think about Christianity.

And it is so interesting that you highlighted Theodosius, the 390 edict, which you insert there, and the burning down of brothels. Because it's also at that time, if my memory is correct, that he issues an edict to Theodosius, basically banning what they call paganism. Anything but Christianity being worshipped in the empire. So you get the tomb of Alexander the great potentially being burned down other big buildings being burned down which associated not with christianity well done theodosis what a tool well but it's so interesting that brothels are also burned down at that time they are also included in that that for me that's i love these tangents but i just think that's so interesting combined with like all these other big monuments that we normally think of.

Yeah, that it's linked in with paganism, and anything from this kind of old world view that they had of debauchery and decadence, and what they thought of as paganism. But it was certainly when Rome converted to Christianity that you start to get the first laws pertaining to people selling sex, and quite open persecution of people selling sex as well okay this has been absolutely really interesting absolutely incredible i must ask for yourself you've obviously done work about sex work throughout

history when looking at sex work in ancient rome i'm not going to say how does it compare or anything like that but it must be interesting looking at this ancient culture compared and looking at similarities and differences. Case studies like Pompeii with other examples of sex work in different societies throughout the medieval Tudor, even into the more modern world. It is. And it's tempting when you look at especially Rome and Greece, even. We still have that kind of Victorian hangover of like, oh, my God, they were perverts, like there was sex everywhere. And there's a temptation to view it as oh it must have been great i've heard people talk about sacred prostitution or temple prostitution and try and make the case that i mean that's more in like ancient mesopotamia

but make the case that people selling sex were once holy and revered and it's probably not the case or if there are elements of that it's certainly not the case for everybody this is a very brutal patriarchal world that's built on slavery and that feeds into the people selling sex so it's tempting to view it as like oh it was awful it was tough but i would kind of make the case that i think it was probably awful and tough being a poor person in these cultures anyway but rome is fascinating in particular because you have this shift when they convert to Christianity. That's particularly interesting is to see what the change is and how they view themselves. And places like Pompeii are fascinating because

you see just how immediate sex work was in their worldview. fact one of my favorite stories about rome and sex work and i don't know how true this is but i love this one so you know the myth of how rome was created yes romanus and remus yeah right and how were they raised uh well here we go here it's back to the wolf isn't it yes this is a she wolf go for itate's tell us this is a great story they was apparently they were suckled by the she-wolf and then there are later accounts that say that they were then adopted by a woman called aka aka lorencia and in some versions she's the wife of a shepherd and in some versions she's a sex worker and the latin word slang for a sex worker was lupa wolf the lupa so it has been suggested and not even by historians looking back by kind of people at the time that actually the

story of romulus and reem has been raised by a she-wolf was a distortion of the truth as they were raised they were raised by a hooker that's been suggested that the she-wolf story is just quite a convenient glossing over the truth. I think it was 4th century Mauritius Severus Honoratius who wrote that this myth was willfully misinterpreted to conceal the truth. So that's how central sex work was to the Romans. It might have actually been part of their foundation narrative. And regardless, because of the word lupa, it is, you know... Lupa.

You know, the lupinar, the brothel, the lupinar. Yep, the wolf's den. The wolf's den, exactly. That linking to the mythical founding of Rome and the suckling of Romulus and Remus. I like that story more. Don't you like that one more? That they were raised...

Absolutely. They were raised by a hooker called Attica and then eventually the story got out and everyone was like, no, no, it's an actual wolf. It was a wolf. Shut up. I mean, it's a really interesting topic to look at and I think it's one that needs to be looked at as well because sometimes we focus too much on battles

and big cities and so on and so forth. So it seems like a central part of societies like Pompeii for large segments of that ancient population and presumably that was repeated elsewhere in the Roman Empire too all the way up to Hadrian's Wall and places up there okay before we completely wrap up in regards to Pompeii or ancient Rome in general in regards to sex work is there anything else that you'd love to mention before we wrap up this special ancients betwixt crossover I mean i suppose the only thing that i really want to highlight is so there's the expression that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world isn't there and that isn't entirely true in order to have a profession you need to have money you

need to have the concept of money which although that seems completely part and parcel and natural to us we have to remember that is ultimately a made-up thing that we all made up that's not going to help you if you default on a bank loan but that's just the truth so any indigenous people or any people before we turned up and went this is money they didn't have sex work because they didn't have jobs you see the figure that is universal so the first profession was probably midwifery or a doctor. The figure of the medicine man or the person that delivers babies is universal. So it's not true that prostitution is the oldest profession. But this is one of my favourite facts.

I think it was in 2005, there was an experiment conducted by a scientist, I think his name was Keith Chen. And he basically taught a group of capuchin monkeys about money he gave them like these little tokens and allowed them to trade them for little cubes of jelly and he sort of was trying to teach them like this is money this has got value and as soon as it clicked he caught the female monkeys trading sex with the male monkey it's like it's built into us as soon as they taught them the value you saw female monkeys swapping sex for their money oh my god well there we go there we go there you go kate you are also the host of a brilliant podcast tell us a bit more about it oh betwixt the sheets it's so much fun i

have a ridiculous amount of fun doing it and then i'm always quite surprised i almost forget that other people listen to it it's like i just sit here and chat to really interesting people and then the magic elves at history hit record it and then put it out and then I go oh god yeah people have listened but I love it and it goes out twice a week it's full title is betwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal in society which is very broad but it's sort of really anything kate thought was interesting which isn't as catchy but yeah we do talk about everything with a slightly historical slutty bent and it's proven incredibly popular one of the most popular history at podcasts kate thank you so much for taking the time to come on the ancients podcast today anytime it was so much fun talking to you thank you well there you go there was our fellow history hit host dr kate lister

talking all things sex work in pompeii we've got one more episode in our special pompeii series and that will be coming next week where we cover the ultimate destruction of pompeii and its rediscovery some 1500 years later so So stay tuned for that. Now, last things for me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out, well, you know what you can do. You can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue our mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible.

But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.