Prostitution in ancient Rome was legal and licensed. Men of any social status were free to engage prostitutes of either sex without incurring moral disapproval, [1] as long as they demonstrated self-control and moderation in the frequency and enjoyment of sex. Most prostitutes were female slaves or freedwomen. The balance of voluntary to forced prostitution can only be guessed at. Privately held slaves were considered property under Roman law, so it was legal for an owner to employ them as prostitutes.
Slave-owning patrons and investors may have sought to avoid loss of privilege by appointing slaves or freedmen to manage their clandestine investments.
Latin literature makes frequent reference to prostitutes. Historians such as Livy and Tacitus mention prostitutes who had acquired some degree of respectability through patriotic, law-abiding, or euergetic behavior. The high-class " call girl " meretrix is a stock character in Plautus 's comedies , which were influenced by Greek models. The poems of Catullus , Horace , Ovid , Martial , and Juvenal , as well the Satyricon of Petronius , offer fictional or satiric glimpses of prostitutes.
Real-world practices are documented by provisions of Roman law that regulate prostitution, and by inscriptions , especially graffiti from Pompeii. Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum from sites presumed to be brothels has also contributed to scholarly views on prostitution. Most scholarship on Roman prostitution implies a social hierarchy, whereby a meretrix "woman who earns, paid woman" , is a free-born, higher-class registered prostitute , scortum possibly from "hides, leather" is an impoverished low-class street-walker, and amica a purely euphemistic "lady-friend".
Scortum is an insult in some circumstances but affectionate banter in others, and amica is euphemistic, used in Roman comedies by naive adolescent clients to downplay the commercial basis of their relationship. There are no low-class street prostitutes in Roman comedies. In most modern scholarship, meretrix plural: meretrices is taken to be the standard term for a registered female prostitute, a higher class of sex worker β the more pejorative scortum can be used for prostitutes of either gender, with a distinctly condemnatory edge when used by Roman moralists.
