Prostitution in Ancient Rome - The Prostitutes

The Prostitutes

Although both women and men practiced prostitution, the evidence for female prostitutes is more ample. A prostitute could be self-employed and rent a room for work. A girl (puella, a term used in poetry as a synonym for "girlfriend" or meretrix and not necessarily an age designation) might live with a procuress or madame (lena) or even go into business under the management of her mother, though mater might sometimes be a mere euphemism for lena. These arrangements suggest the recourse to prostitution by free-born women in dire financial need, and such prostitutes may have been regarded as of relatively higher repute.

Prostitutes could also work out of a brothel or tavern for a procurer or pimp (leno). Most prostitutes seem to have been slaves or former slaves.

Some professional prostitutes, perhaps to be compared to courtesans, cultivated elite patrons and could even become wealthy. The dictator Sulla is supposed to have built his fortune on the wealth left to him by a prostitute in her will. Romans also assumed that actors and dancers were available to provide paid sexual services, and courtesans whose names survive in the historical record are sometimes indistinguishable from actresses and other performers. In the time of Cicero, the courtesan Cytheris was a welcome guest for dinner parties at the highest level of Roman society. Charming, artistic, and educated, such women contributed to a new romantic standard for male-female relationships that Ovid and other Augustan poets articulated in their erotic elegies.