Prostitution, sexuality, and the law in ancient Rome Book

History of Orgasm Industry

In his admirably controlled and detailed analysis of the laws themselves, McGinn has provided an invaluable guide to what they do and do not say -- reliable readings that represent the best current analysis of the Augustan laws that attempted to govern the marriage and sexual mores of the Roman elite. In the light of McGinn's own detailed analysis of the evidence, however, it might well be argued that the Roman state had nothing reasonably describable as "a policy" towards prostitutes or prostitution. Indeed, the state and its legal apparatuses seemed not to care very much about the persons or the moral status of the commerce. As with the parallel field of the study of slavery, masses of potential comparative historical data produced in recent decades are therefore rendered all but useless for the modern-day Roman historian.11 Whereas the modern states of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries did assume a specific interest in controlling and regulating prostitutes, and they have been willing to use the medical, moral, legal, social-work, and policing apparatuses to this end, the practice of prostitution in Roman society seems to have exhibited rather the opposite of this social and moral position, as did the Roman state itself. The Roman government had two types of interest. The first was in defining and protecting the symbolic orders of "honest" persons that constituted the citizen body, extending from the ordinary "model" free citizen to persons of senatorial status. The other was a simple economic interest: prostitution as a potential source of tribute, of more tax revenues. But this is hardly properly describable as a "legal" interest in the same fashion as the Augustan legislation and juristic law studied by the author. It is therefore difficult to accept McGinn's claim that one of the purposes and conscious designs of the Augustan laws was to marginalize prostitutes and pimps. This is a complex objection to sustain, since an automatic result of laws defining "the good" is by default to delimit "the bad." The contrast, however, is precisely between the determination of the modern state to regulate and to define its "under classes" and the main concern the Roman state had with the condition of its social and political elite because it could assume that "others" did not count. The laws could therefore draw their strength from the already established marginality of prostitutes in order to use them as a sign.

Given the very few studies of actual working prostitutes that historians have produced, by contrast with the more abundant and convincing social work studies on this spectrum of sex work, it seems, indeed, that the law might be a rather bad guide to actual practice. In the end, therefore, the reader is likely to be persuaded by McGinn's conclusion that, more than anything else, the Roman law made a fundamental contribution to the construction of a moral ideology (p. 84). Perhaps the real story about Roman "sexuality" that his analysis reveals is that in its legal guise (and others) it was very much perceived, and acted upon, by the social elites as a matter of class. As historians, we are therefore still left some distance short even of the fictive imagination of Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, a cinematic exploration that plays with the dynamics and potentialities of moral "deviance" and space suggested by the marginality of sex work and, at the same time, drives home the sheer drudgery, boredom, and exhaustion of the daily labor involved.