Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Book Review

Thomas A. J. McGinn. Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient
Rome. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 416. $55.00.

Prostitution in ancient Rome is a topic which, until recently,
received remarkably little scholarly attention. Thomas A. J. McGinn's
erudite study of the legal rules affecting female prostitution from
200 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. is therefore particularly welcome.

A shift of focus to the margins, as McGinn points out, has
characterized many recent studies in social and cultural history, and
his own work is often sensitive to the insights such an approach can
offer. McGinn is generally alert to the symbolic significance of
prostitution for the Romans. The extensive battery of legal
prescriptions that regulated the status of prostitutes (along with
the practitioners of other disgraceful professions such as acting and
fighting in the arena) enshrined them as a crucial point of reference
in the Roman social hierarchy. One of the strengths of this book is
its emphasis on the ambiguity of prostitution for the Romans. Laws
such as the Augustan prescriptions on marriage and adultery allocated
prostitutes a conspicuously lowly place in society. Prostitutes were
treated as despicable yet necessary, if legitimate marriage was to be
protected. At the same time, prostitution was legitimized by the
taxation system (at least after Caligula). McGinn rightly emphasizes
problems with an "evolutionary hypothesis," arguing convincingly that
Roman jurists and legislators did not develop a consistent "policy"
toward prostitution. He stresses instead the ad hoc responses of
lawmakers to divergent, sometimes contradictory trends in Roman
society.

McGinn's mastery of Roman legal scholarship is most impressive.
Occasionally his detailed exposition of scholarly debate serves to
obscure the main thrust of his own argument; on the whole, though, he
is a clear guide through the sometimes rebarbative controversies that
tend to characterize modern studies of the Roman jurists. Individual
chapters offer some enlightening discussions of specific areas of the
law. Chapter three, for example, treats the Augustan marriage laws
with great clarity, while chapter five's discussion of the Augustan
adultery law is particularly helpful in its treatment of the
prescriptions governing husbands' pimping of their wives, as well as
the other strategies by which the law assimilated adulteresses to
prostitutes. As McGinn emphasizes, this law reflected and reinforced
the role of the prostitute as symbol of sexual shame in Roman
society. Later chapters examine, among other topics, the laws
governing the taxation of prostitutes and those restricting the use
of slaves as prostitutes.

In his opening chapters, McGinn tackles the problematic question of
defining the prostitute. For Roman jurists, he suggests, the key
issue was promiscuity, rather than, as one might expect, payment.
Subsequent chapters seem to operate on the assumption that Romans
were generally in agreement over who was and who was not a
prostitute. Only the adulteress, a figure given new prominence
through the Augustan legislation, threatened to blur this
distinction, according to McGinn. Yet promiscuity is surely harder to
define than payment. How many lovers must a woman have to count as a
prostitute? There must have been many women (and indeed men) who were
seen as prostitutes by some people but not by others. McGinn does not
tackle the issue of the high-class courtesan, such as Cicero's
contemporary Volumnia Cytheris, on the grounds that Roman jurists
make almost no reference to such people. Courtesans are treated with
admirable subtlety in James Davidson's recent study of classical
Athens, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical
Athens (1997), which suggests that the indefinability, the
unpredictability of the exchange between the courtesan and her
"friend" was a crucial part of her allure. When is a present a
payment? If the courtesan chooses her partners carefully, how can she
count as "sexually indiscriminate," an important criterion in the
juristic definition of prostitution? Such issues are not taken
account of by McGinn.

As the introduction immediately makes clear (although the title does
not) this study focuses on female prostitution. In chapter two,
McGinn does give a full account of the legal disabilities affecting
male prostitutes, but they receive little mention elsewhere in his
study. One might question how far it is possible to make sense of
Roman attitudes to female prostitutes without giving serious
consideration to attitudes toward their male counterparts. McGinn's
treatment of sexuality is largely restricted to (often perceptive)
discussions of female sexual honor, but these could have been pushed
much further. What, for instance, does it say about Roman attitudes
to female sexuality that complaisant husbands are regularly
identified as effeminate? Surely McGinn is misguided when he suggests
that female prostitutes enjoyed, even if only notionally, the same
sexual freedom as Roman men. Nevertheless, this is an impressive work
that will long remain the central reference point for anyone studying
Roman prostitution.

Catherine Edwards
University of Bristol

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