Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex Work in Ancient Rome About this episode 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.
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1:44 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. 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 spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Does that feel safer? I feel safer. Right, on with the show.
2:16 Kate Lister? 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 burlesque 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 taverna,
2:58 Kate Lister? 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.
3:18 Speaker 04 What do you call a man?
3:19 Speaker 05 Oh, money, of course.
3:21 Speaker 04 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:23 Speaker 05 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it.
3:35 Speaker 04 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
3:38 Speaker 06 Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, darling.
3:47 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Caitlester. Sex work has been 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 am going to be joined by some truly fantastic guests. And we are going to explore the ways in which sex work existed and how it has been treated throughout history.
4:28 Kate Lister? 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.
4:51 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixters' Sheets. It's only Professor Anise Strong. How are you doing?
4:58 Speaker 07 Terrific, thank you.
5:00 Kate Lister? 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?
5:18 Speaker 07 Honestly, it was in particular, early on in graduate school, I happened on the story of this one woman named Vestilia, who lived right around 2,000 years ago. And Vestilia was a really wealthy woman, a senator's wife, and she was apparently notorious for having many lovers.
5:39 Kate Lister? I like her already.
5:41 Speaker 07 Yes. So she's has 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.
5:55 Kate Lister? So the husband was okay, but the emperor decides to get involved?
5:59 Speaker 07 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.
6:07 Kate Lister? Okay.
6:08 Speaker 07 And the husband refuses. And the emperor says, well, she's an adulteress. And at that point, Vestilia 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.
6:24 Kate Lister? Oh, there's a move. Oh.
6:26 Speaker 07 Yes.
6:27 Kate Lister? Okay.
6:27 Speaker 07 Because sex workers can't commit adultery because it's their job to sleep with people.
6:33 Kate Lister? Okay.
6:34 Speaker 07 Ah, and apparently Vespary 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.
6:49 Kate Lister? Wow.
6:51 Speaker 07 Can we still do that? Is that an option?
6:53 Kate Lister? No.
6:55 Speaker 07 I think not so much. So the Emperor Tiberius is not thrilled by this, this dodge. And so he passes a whole new law that says that wives of seditors cannot be sex workers.
7:07 Kate Lister? Spoilspot.
7:08 Speaker 07 Indeed.
7:08 Kate Lister? Right, okay. And what happens to Vespary? Does she end up on an island starving to death?
7:13 Speaker 07 She does end up on an island, unfortunately. He, 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.
7:30 Kate Lister? What is it with Rome exiling women to islands? That's a running theme I've noticed.
7:36 Speaker 07 It is a running theme. So there's 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.
7:49 Kate Lister? Wow.
7:51 Speaker 07 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.
8:32 Kate Lister? 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?
8:53 Speaker 07 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 favourite 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 debauched things, but that there are powerful and influential sex workers and that they have too much.
9:28 Kate Lister? That's where we draw the line.
9:29 Speaker 07 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.
9:44 Kate Lister? Wow. So the thing that it's very easy to miss about Roman history as well is it's a lot longer than you think it is. The period that you're looking at, is it hundreds of years or thousands of years?
9:56 Speaker 07 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. You know, I end with the Ambrys Theodora in Constantinople, who was certainly a sex-adjacent worker in that she got her start as sort of a exotic dancer for the chariot racing team. So.
10:22 Kate Lister? 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?
10:41 Speaker 07 So mostly there are laws. These sort of parallels 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. So 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.
11:24 Kate Lister? What kind of protections?
11:26 Speaker 07 These aren't consistent, but there's a case of a woman named Manilia, who's a 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?
12:05 Kate Lister? Not impressed with that one. What did the Romans make of that?
12:08 Speaker 07 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.
12:20 Kate Lister? Oh, they did something nice. Oh, I'm so pleased.
12:24 Speaker 07 I know, it's not as I say.
12:25 Kate Lister? 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.
12:36 Speaker 07 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, that's huge. As 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...
12:56 Speaker 07 How often that worked in practice is, is a lot harder to say and so on.
13:02 Kate Lister? Was there a legal status that they occupied, the status of infam? What was that?
13:06 Speaker 07 So infamia is basically, you're still a citizen, but yeah, it's sort of literally bad reputation and so forth. But you're not considered.
13:16 Kate Lister? That's a really weird legal status. Like you've got the legal status of being a bit of a wrong'un.
13:21 Speaker 07 Yeah, a bit of a wrong'un. And then 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 the street. Is catcalling the right word for England or?
13:41 Kate Lister? Yes, yeah, yeah. Catcalling the women or the women catcalling?
13:45 Speaker 07 Men catcalling women, but it's a law in gradation. 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 respectably. If the woman is dressed like a matron.
14:01 Kate Lister? That's, that's the Romans I know and love. There they are. Okay.
14:05 Speaker 07 And you catcall, you get a worse fine. Whereas if the woman is dressed like a sex worker, even if she 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.
14:33 Kate Lister? 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 like sometimes you see on like Reddit forums and sometimes I read it in popular history books that, that sex workers, by law, they had to have bleached blonde hair and red lips. And I'm never quite sure if that's right.
14:54 Speaker 07 Yeah. So we see that a couple of times, reference the law, they have to wear yellow and/or they have to wear togas. And the 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
15:34 Speaker 07 is that that's the garment you wear when you're saying you're acting in public. You're being the most public person.
15:43 Kate Lister? I see. Okay, yes, I can see the joining the dots there. The, the men wear it when they're out in public. And because you're a public woman, you have to dress like that, too.
15:54 Speaker 07 Right. But that said, we see a couple of references to that in histories and legal texts. But there is not a single surviving visual representation of a woman that is definitely of a sex worker.
16:10 Kate Lister? God damn it. So close.
16:12 Speaker 07 So
16:12 Kate Lister? So close.
16:13 Speaker 07 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, and 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, you know, attention for, for their jobs. And this idea that they're all, you know, going around, yeah, with the bleached blonde hair or the yellow togas.
16:45 Kate Lister? Who else would have been regarded as an infamia? Who else would have got that legal category?
16:50 Speaker 07 Actresses, absolutely, are one of the big categories there. And definitely some bleed over between actresses and sex workers. Waitresses in taverns.
17:02 Kate Lister? Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Okay.
17:04 Speaker 07 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 women shopkeepers. So I think, again, it's a spectrum rather than a binary, as with so many things.
17:28 Kate Lister? What sources do you use to try and get as close as you can to the real lived experience of people who'd been selling sex in ancient Rome? Because it's notoriously difficult to try and get to.
17:40 Speaker 07 So, most of our sources are written by men, which is something we can't really get around, unfortunately.
17:45 Kate Lister? No.
17:46 Speaker 07 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.
18:03 Kate Lister? Let's talk about Pompeii. We've got to talk about Pompeii.
18:07 Speaker 07 Of course.
18:07 Kate Lister? 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?
18:21 Speaker 07 Absolutely. Also, you had a great episode with Sarah Leffert Richardson, who's amazing, like, 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.
18:40 Kate Lister? The only one that we know about.
18:43 Speaker 07 So I think there are a bunch of other buildings that I think were used as brothels. But often, they are cases like, they're 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 bat houses. But the Pompeii Lupinare seems to have been designed for that from 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
19:24 Speaker 07 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-
19:38 Kate Lister? 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 for that.
19:52 Speaker 07 So, shagging, maybe some people standing in line, like, it's, it's very much a, 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 inside, 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.
20:24 Kate Lister? I love the fact that the graffiti is some of the people that worked 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.
20:36 Speaker 07 No. And I think there's a, a couple of blocks away, there's a tavern, the Tavern of Salvius, which has these famous sort of comic strip frescoes right outside it, which seem to suggest things you shouldn't do in a 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 Mirtale," Mirtale being a name. And the thing is, Mirtale is one of the names that shows up most frequently in the brothel a couple of blocks over, in one of those front rooms, one of the two nicest rooms.
21:17 Speaker 07 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, or possibly his own daughter, saying, "You don't want to do it with Mirtale."
21:38 Kate Lister? Oh, there's the Romans that I know and love. There they are, yep.
21:43 Speaker 07 So that sense of competition, like, "This is not a tavern for people who like this woman." This is-
21:50 Kate Lister? God, that's wild, isn't it?
21:54 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Anice after this short break.
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23:23 Speaker 08 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same.
23:33 Speaker 08 I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipscombe, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
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24:00 Speaker 03 We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America.
24:06 Speaker 02 We're talking ghosts caught on camera.
24:08 Speaker 03 Demonic possessions.
24:10 Speaker 02 Cursed mirrors.
24:11 Speaker 03 Bigfoot.
24:11 Speaker 02 Poltergeists.
24:12 Speaker 03 Exorcisms.
24:13 Speaker 02 Near-death experiences.
24:14 Speaker 03 Unsolved mysteries.
24:15 Speaker 02 Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world.
24:22 Speaker 03 Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
24:39 Kate Lister? One of 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 it to that point, I didn't even realize enslaved people could have money to go to a brothel.
25:00 Speaker 07 No, absolutely. I think when you start thinking about the clientele, which is 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 owner, probably something like the equivalent of a dollar or maybe a pound a day.
25:21 Kate Lister? Right.
25:22 Speaker 07 And you have a choice at that point. You could save it up and hope that in five, 10 years, you could 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 gladiatorial 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 could use it to buy yourself out of slavery.
26:06 Kate Lister? 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 richer, more wealthy people would have had sex with their slaves, with enslaved people?
26:23 Speaker 07 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.
26:48 Kate Lister? Okay.
26:48 Speaker 07 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. Those are the people who have some extra money to spend and who are going outside of the household for their sexual needs. So those enslaved people and then free working-class men who aren't married or don't have enslaved people themselves.
27:19 Kate Lister? Were the people working in these brothels, would they all have been enslaved? And do we know anything about their experience?
27:26 Speaker 07 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, you know, our word fornicate comes from the idea of having sex under an arch because you could lean your back up against it. To people working in a brothel who probably have slightly more comfort and protection, all the way up to the wealthy freelance courtesans or escorts who I think were also significant figures within Roman society. And those would mostly, I suspect, not have been enslaved.
28:09 Speaker 07 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.
28:22 Kate Lister? The professional mistresses, they're always fascinating because, as you said, 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.
28:41 Speaker 07 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, almost likewise, 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. It's like, you'll never believe, I went to dinner tonight in so-and-so's house and his mistress, you know, the courtesan, 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 gonna stalk
29:22 Speaker 07 out of the house because I can't believe I'm dining with a sex worker.
29:28 Kate Lister? Are there some notable names left to us that we know about these sort of celebrity courtesans from the Roman period?
29:34 Speaker 07 Yes, absolutely. Marcia is from the imperial period. She winds up as the principal mistress of the emperor Commodus, which is not bad at all. And Commodus is famous now because of the movie Gladiator.
29:49 Kate Lister? Yes, I was just about to say, wait a minute, wasn't that Joachim Phoenix and didn't he get killed by a gladiator?
29:54 Speaker 07 Yes, he did. But in the first draft of the script, Marcia played an important role. And then Ridley Scott wrote her out, much to my sadness. Yes, it is true.
30:08 Kate Lister? Right, I'm gonna write him a letter after this. We're not, that's outrageous. Okay, so who was Marcia?
30:15 Speaker 07 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 Commodus's sort of principal mistress. And then she starts functioning as a sort of quasi-empress in a lot of ways. And we're told that she has a huge amount of wealth and financial power.
31:00 Speaker 07 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, as god-loving, which is not a term we see elsewhere, sort of interestingly. So sympathetic, but maybe not Christian herself. We're told that Commodus really liked to have her dress up in gladiatorial costume as an Amazon.
31:41 Speaker 07 And sort of cosplay as an Amazon gladiator, although it doesn't seem necessarily like she ever fought Lyraena directly. She stops a couple of conspiracies against him, but then ultimately, one of her close friends happens to find a death list that Commodus has written up with her name on it.
32:03 Kate Lister? Oh, oh, it's time to get out of town. That's, it's time to leave now.
32:08 Speaker 07 Except rather than getting out of town, what she does is she inspires with that friend or one or two others and they murder Commodus.
32:15 Kate Lister? Oh, Marcia, oh no.
32:16 Speaker 07 Yes. No Maximus involved, no gladiator involved. They just have his personal trainer strangle him in his bath.
32:23 Kate Lister? Did she get away with it?
32:25 Speaker 07 Ah, she gets away with it briefly. She gets away with it for about three months and then the sort of puppet-
32:30 Kate Lister? She's not sent to an island, is she?
32:32 Speaker 07 She's not sent to an island. The puppet guy they've put is 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 Commodus. And so she gets executed.
32:48 Kate Lister? Right. Oh, Marcia. Oh, that was all a bit dramatic and unnecessary. Why would Commodus want to kill her?
32:56 Speaker 07 Ah, so Commodus 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.
33:09 Kate Lister? Ah, enough said. Right. Okay, he was losing it. Right.
33:13 Speaker 07 He's losing it. And she's like, I don't think that's such a good idea. I think, you know, he should be focusing on, you know, the reigning and...
33:21 Kate Lister? And wow.
33:22 Speaker 07 He decides she's spoiling his fun.
33:23 Kate Lister? Oh, dear. Marcia, that would have been a much better gladiator, I have to say.
33:28 Speaker 07 I think so. I mean, I'm biased, obviously, here, but...
33:33 Kate Lister? What about Theodora? We should talk about her, known as Theodora from the bottle.
33:38 Speaker 07 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.
34:03 Kate Lister? Okay.
34:04 Speaker 07 And that seems to have involved a fair amount of striptease, although-
34:07 Kate Lister? That kind of dancing. Gotcha.
34:09 Speaker 07 That kind of dancing, yes.
34:10 Kate Lister? Yeah.
34:10 Speaker 07 Although, again, our sources here are, um...
34:15 Speaker 07 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 he or her is 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.
34:46 Kate Lister? Wow.
34:47 Speaker 07 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.
34:59 Kate Lister? Interesting move.
35:00 Speaker 07 It's the first case that we know anywhere in 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.
35:24 Kate Lister? Cheers.
35:26 Speaker 07 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 nuns.
35:36 Kate Lister? Okay. What I, oh, do we have any information about how successful this particular project was?
35:43 Speaker 07 Uh, so our very hostile source claims that a lot of these sex workers throw themselves off the walls of the convent, which suggests unsuccessful.
35:53 Kate Lister? That didn't go too well, then.
35:55 Speaker 07 It certainly seems to have been a short term thing at best. It's an all unclear that past Theodora's raid, that sex work, it continues to be officially illegal. But I don't think that sex work convention completely stops in Constantinople, from what we can tell. Another example, one of the things I did find in 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
36:28 Kate Lister? I think so.
36:29 Speaker 07 The people who do wind up in power and influence do not think this is a good career.
36:34 Kate Lister? It must have been so dangerous and so precarious. And women have so few rights anyway.
36:41 Speaker 07 Yes.
36:41 Kate Lister? It must have been extraordinarily volatile existence.
36:46 Speaker 07 And a short career as well, yeah.
36:48 Kate Lister? And a short one. I mean, for the few that made it to be, well, I was gonna say the few that made it to be the emperor's mistress, but even she
36:54 Speaker 07 Yeah.
36:54 Kate Lister? Met a sticky end, didn't she?
36:58 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Anice after this short break.
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38:23 Kate Lister? 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 in general in Rome?
38:34 Speaker 07 So it definitely seems to have made it much less respectable. Again, until Theodora, 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
39:18 Speaker 07 the people really like seeing these nude plays.
39:21 Kate Lister? We want our nude actresses on display. That's what we want. Stop messing about with it.
39:26 Speaker 07 Yeah, so we have 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 you have records of them 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 the sex workers are racing through the streets while the crowds throw vegetables at them. So...
39:59 Kate Lister? Oh, that doesn't sound nearly as much fun.
40:01 Speaker 07 No.
40:02 Kate Lister? Where was that happening?
40:03 Speaker 07 That happens, there's, I've counted about 14 different Italian and French cities where that happens.
40:11 Kate Lister? Oh my god.
40:12 Speaker 07 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 an elderly Jewish man and have them race through the streets.
40:35 Kate Lister? There we go. There we go. The one nice thing that the Romans did, and now look at what they're up to.
40:39 Speaker 07 Yeah.
40:40 Kate Lister? Honestly, they're absolutely bonkers.
40:42 Speaker 07 But in any case, there starts to be criticism from elites and from the church.
40:47 Kate Lister? Does there?
40:48 Speaker 07 Uh, 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.
40:58 Kate Lister? Not about the fact that they thought it would be funny to tie a sex worker, young woman, to a disabled Jewish person. That bit's fine.
41:07 Speaker 07 No, that, that bit's fine. No, but you might give the, the wives ideas, you see.
41:12 Kate Lister? Honestly.
41:13 Speaker 07 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.
41:30 Kate Lister? I just, to have been a fly on the wall at these meetings.
41:35 Speaker 07 Indeed.
41:36 Kate Lister? Who came up with that?
41:37 Speaker 07 Because you see, the problem is that the women might be corrupt.
41:40 Kate Lister? Oh yeah, of course, of course. Right, exactly, exactly.
41:43 Speaker 07 And so you move them to where only the priests, who obviously can't possibly be corrupted, by seeing.
41:50 Kate Lister? 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 have heard. That is, that is just properly Monty Python stuff.
42:10 Speaker 07 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 stop those with the new Pope.
42:16 Kate Lister? It wasn't still being done in the eighties or something. No, that was...
42:19 Speaker 07 No.
42:22 Speaker 07 We did not accuse.
42:25 Kate Lister? 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 a Dorus, I think, is a name scrawled on the walls.
42:41 Speaker 07 Yes. So there are definitely some men, almost certainly primarily for male clients, I think.
42:48 Kate Lister? Do you 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 Isidoras should be elected to a local official. He's the best cunt, like a, or something like, like, like that. And I looked at that, I was like, is there any chance in the world that a woman client could, probably not. What do you think?
43:10 Speaker 07 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 favorable comments about the sexiness of the gladiators. And so.
43:24 Kate Lister? Gladiator groupies.
43:25 Speaker 07 I think it's much more likely that we have gladiator groupies and people who are quite possibly playing the gladiators for their, their sexual favors than we have women going to the actual brothel. But I think the higher a gladiator for a private show is, is very likely.
43:44 Kate Lister? Wow.
43:45 Speaker 07 Happening and is suggested by some of our other sources there, I think.
43:49 Kate Lister? As far as we know, the majority of men selling sex would have been selling it to men.
43:53 Speaker 07 Yes. And there we know there's one in Rome, we know there's a specific street in Rome where you went for, for male sex workers that was distinct from where you'd go to find female sex workers. So they had their own, 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 from a male sex worker.
44:27 Kate Lister? Wow. So is that a sort of final question then? Because I'm always interested in this. When, 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 Marsha that that wound up being murdered, but like, did you retire from this job? Did you like, like, could you go on to something else afterwards?
45:01 Speaker 07 So there's, there's one person who who comes to mind. So I think the, 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, I mean, you have a couple of examples of people who seem to go from being sex workers to, say, cooks or managers at a tavern to
45:23 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
45:23 Speaker 07 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 Crestis. 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.
46:01 Kate Lister? Oh, that's interesting.
46:03 Speaker 07 So that's the only person who lists themselves explicitly as a sex worker on their gravestone. And
46:13 Kate Lister? Wow.
46:14 Speaker 07 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
46:30 Kate Lister? Wow, yes.
46:31 Speaker 07 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.
46:51 Kate Lister? But let's hope.
46:52 Speaker 07 Let's hope.
46:54 Kate Lister? Anis, 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?
47:08 Speaker 07 Absolutely. So the easiest place is my website at Western Michigan University. You can absolutely buy my book on prostitutes and matrons of the Roman world. I have a variety of articles. If you want to hear more about Marcia, 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.
47:30 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming talk to talk to me today. You've been marvelous.
47:34 Speaker 07 Thank you very much.
47:39 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Anis 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 [email protected] . Coming up, we've got an episode on the truth behind Jane Austen and the second installment 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, Betwixt and Sheats, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History
48:24 Kate Lister? Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
48:36 Speaker 02 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera.
48:51 Speaker 03 Demonic possessions.
48:52 Speaker 02 Cursed mirrors.
48:53 Speaker 03 Bigfoot.
48:54 Speaker 02 Poltergeists.
48:55 Speaker 03 Exorcisms.
48:56 Speaker 02 Near-death experiences.
48:57 Speaker 03 Unsolved mysteries.
48:58 Speaker 02 Missing persons. Each week we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world.
49:05 Speaker 03 Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
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