Thursday, April 19, 2012

Ancient Brothels: Sex Trade in Pompeii (Part Two)


*Disclaimer* as you can guess from the title, this post reverences sexual themes and art work. If you want to see the art work or other things mentioned, feel free to Google Image search "Brothels of Pompeii" but because this is a blog I created for a class, joking about it briefly is ok, but I don't find it appropriate to post graphic photos here. Thank you!
 

For part two about the Brothels of Pompeii, I decided to focus on the layout of the buildings themselves as well as focus on the largest and most famous brothel in the city.

Brothels of this period were usually small and then divided further into a couple small rooms. These rooms were hardly furnished at all, which makes sense for their purpose. Usually they had a mattress of sorts on a brick platform that serves as a bed.


I don't know who this is, but I think he's a few centuries late...
But anyway, this is an example of the brick platform
 that the mattress would be on in the rooms.

The largest brothel in the city was Lupanar. It had ten rooms and is known today for its erotic artwork. Before we get too far into the facts, I wanted to share some translations that I found funny. The word Lupanar is Latin for “brothel” but literally translates to mean “den of she-wolves”. They say this is because lupa was a slang term for “prostitute” in a predatory sense.



Back to the site, the brothel is situated at the intersection of two side roads on Via dell’Abbondanza near the town center, not far from the Forum and the Stabian Baths, which had a rear entrance on the Vicolo del Lupanare. As a trading town, Pompeii was visited every day by people, especially by traders from other towns. Luck for them, phalluses engraved on the road surface or on stones set into the facades of houses gave clear indications on how to reach the brothel. The brothel was managed by the “leno” (an owner of the prostitutes, a.k.a. pimp) who bought the girls as slaves, primarily in the East.

There are some interesting graffiti scribblings that have been found on the walls. 134 different ones to be exact. As you would expect, they are rather crude, they were how customers expressed their opinions of the brothel and the prostitute’s performances. I’ll share a few, with editing on language of course. Though I’m sure you can guess the words I replaced.

 
      Hic ego puellas multas futui----“Here I [had sex with] many girls”
         Felix bene futuis----“Lucky guy, you get a good [time]”

Though the names cannot be linked to any known historical figures, probably because they had their own mistresses or slaves, some have been traced to other graffiti in other parts of the city. There are also a few times when the “authors” respond to each other’s carvings.

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Links to Sources:

http://www.pompeii.org.uk/s.php/pompei-proibita-en-214-s1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupanar_(Pompeii)#Brothels


Ancient Brothels: Sex Trade in Pompeii (Part One)

*Disclaimer* as you can guess from the title, this post reverences sexual themes and art work. Because of this there will not be many photos in this post. If you want to see the art work, feel free to Google Image search "Brothels of Pompeii" but because this is a blog I created for a class, I don't find it appropriate to post them here. Thank you!


So as many of you have probably figured out from past posts, Pompeii and Roman culture in general was not conservative by any means. They were very sexually open and this is seen in the explicit artwork is everywhere and has caused many controversies. Thus, it was not too surprising when I found out there were many brothels in the city.


This is looking into one of the smaller
rooms within a brothel that the women
 would have 'worked' in

It was once thought that there were as many as thirty-five brothels in Pompeii. That is practically one on every corner! This has since been proven untrue, however. The greatest indicator that thirty-five is too large of a number is the size of the city itself. Pompeii housed around ten thousand inhabitants in 79 CE when it was destroyed. Doing the math, that equates to 286 people or about 71 men for every brothel. That seems excessive, especially when we compare the numbers to the ancient city of Rome, which is estimated to have forty-five brothels for a population over one million. Pompeii could not have supported such a vigorous sex trade. Though it is important to remember that thirty-five is the number of brothels, the houses or ‘place of business’ for the prostitutes, so that was not the number of working women in the city. Some brothels would have housed several women and there would be prostitutes working full or part time in bars and inns, and sometimes the street.

So why did people think there were so many brothels? Well many archaeologists assumed any building with erotic paintings, sculpture or graffiti was a brothel. It was pointed out that visiting any public bathroom today and it is not out of place to see boastful sexual writing, and it does not indicate a sex trade. This is why this form of identification was problematic to say the least. In addition, if you remember the blog about the bathhouses, those too had erotic mosaics but they were probably seen more in humor. I compare it to our culture today, there are many sexual images in the media and in art etc., but that does not mean we have whorehouses everywhere.

Now, after considering the fact that any erotic symbol in any form does not denote a brothel, it seems that there are only ten in the city of Pompeii. This is much more likely because that equates to one brothel for every 250 adult males. However, it is likely that not all buildings used as brothels were created or used for that singular purpose. These would have been counted in the high number of thirty-five but left out of the more conservative estimate of ten. In addition, sex trade probably was not limited to brothels. It was pointed out that wealthy Romans with slaves would not have visited brothels or prostitutes for they already owned people for free sexual use.

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Link to Source:

http://emma-oxenby-wohlfart.suite101.com/how-many-brothels-were-there-in-pompeii-a175213