The History of Prostitution Part 5

Taverns or houses of entertainment were also in some measure brothels. The law regarded all servants waiting upon travelers at inns or taverns as prost.i.tutes.[113] It would appear, also, that butchers', bakers', and barbers' shops were open to a suspicion of being used for purposes of prost.i.tution. The plebeian aediles constantly made it their business to visit these in search of unregistered prost.i.tutes, though, as might be expected from the number of delinquents and the very incomplete munic.i.p.al police system of Rome, with very little success. The bakers'

establishments, which generally included a flour-mill, were haunted by a low cla.s.s of prost.i.tutes to whom allusion has already been made. In the cellar where the mill stood cells were often constructed, and the aediles knew well that all who entered there did not go to buy bread.[114]

Finally, prost.i.tution to a very large extent was carried on in the open air. The shades of certain statues and temples, such as those of Marsyas, Pan, Priapus, Venus, etc., were common resorts for prost.i.tutes. It is said that Julia, the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, prost.i.tuted herself under the shade of a statue of Marsyas. Similar haunts of abandoned women were the arches of aqueducts, the porticoes of temples, the cavities in walls, etc. Even the streets in the poorer wards of the city appear to have been infested by the very lowest cla.s.s of prost.i.tutes, whose natural favors had long ceased to be merchantable.[115] It must be borne in mind that the streets of Rome were not lighted, and that profound darkness reigned when the moon was clouded over.

HABITS AND MANNERS OF PROSt.i.tUTES.

A grand distinction between Roman and Greek prost.i.tution lies in the manner in which commerce with prost.i.tutes was viewed in the two communities. At Athens there was nothing disgraceful in frequenting the dicterion or keeping an hetaira. At Rome, on the contrary, a married man who visited a house of ill fame was an _adulter_, and liable to the penalties of adultery. An habitual frequenter of such places was a _moechus_ or _scortator_, both of which were terms of scathing reproach.

When Cicero wishes to overwhelm Catiline, he says his followers are _scortatores_.[116] Until the lowest age of Roman degradation, moreover, no man of any character entered a house of ill fame without hiding his face with the skirt of his dress. Even Caligula and Heliogabalus concealed their faces when they visited the women of the town.[117]

The law prescribed with care the dress of Roman prost.i.tutes, on the principle that they were to be distinguished in all things from honest women. Thus they were not allowed to wear the chaste _stola_ which concealed the form, or the _vitta_ or fillet with which Roman ladies bound their hair, or to wear shoes (_soccus_), or jewels, or purple robes. These were the insignia of virtue. Prost.i.tutes wore the _toga_ like men; their hair, dyed yellow or red, or filled with golden spangles, was dressed in some Asiatic fas.h.i.+on. They wore sandals with gilt thongs tying over the instep, and their dress was directed to be of flowered material. In practice, however, these rules were not strictly observed. Courtesans wore jewels and purple robes,[118] and not a few boldly concealed their profligacy under the _stola_. Others, seeking rather to avoid than to court misapprehension as to their calling, wore the green toga proudly, and over it the sort of jacket called _amiculum_, which, like the white sheet of baronial times, was the badge of adultery. Others, again, preferred the silk and gauze dresses of the East (_sericae vestes_), which, according to the expression of a cla.s.sical writer, "seemed invented to exhibit more conspicuously what they were intended to hide."[119] Robes of Tyre were likewise in use, whose texture may be inferred from the name of "textile vapor" (_ventus textilis_) which they received.

The law strictly prohibited the use of vehicles of any kind to courtesans.

This also was frequently infringed. Under several emperors prost.i.tutes were seen in open litters in the most public parts of Rome, and others in litters which closed with curtains, and served the purpose of a bed-chamber.[120] A law of Domitian imposed heavy penalties on a courtesan who was seen in a litter.

In the lupanar, of course, rules regarding costume were unheeded.

Prost.i.tutes retained their hair black, but as to the rest of their person they were governed by their own taste. Nudity appears to have been quite common, if not the rule. Petronius describes his hero walking in the street, and seeing from thence naked prost.i.tutes at the doors of the lupanaria.[121] Some covered their busts with golden stuffs, others veiled their faces.

It has already been mentioned that the rate of remuneration exacted by the prost.i.tutes was fixed by themselves, though apparently announced to the aedile. It is impossible to form any idea of the average amount of this charge. The lowest cla.s.ses, as has been mentioned, sold their miserable favors for about two tenths of a cent; another large cla.s.s were satisfied with two cents. The only direct light that is thrown on this branch of the subject flows from an obscure pa.s.sage in the strange romance ent.i.tled "Apollonius of Tyre," which is supposed to have been written by a Christian named Symposius. In that work the capture of a virgin named Tarsia by a bawd is described. The bawd orders a sign or advertis.e.m.e.nt to be hung out, inscribed, "He who deflours Tarsia shall pay half a pound, afterward she shall be at the public service for a gold piece." The half pound has been a.s.sumed by commentators to mean half a Roman pound of silver, and to have been worth $30; the gold piece, according to the best computation, was about equivalent to $4. But whether these figures can be regarded as an average admits of doubt, even supposing our estimate of the value of the sums mentioned in the ancient work to be accurate.

The allusion to Tarsia suggests some notice of the practice of the Roman bawds when they had secured a virgin. It will be found faithfully described in that old English play, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," which is sometimes bound up with Shakspeare's works. When a bawd had purchased a virgin as a slave, or when, as sometimes happened under the later emperors, a virgin was handed to him to be prost.i.tuted as a punishment for crime, the door of his house was adorned with twigs of laurel; a lamp of unusual size was hung out at night, and a tablet exhibited somewhat similar to the one quoted above, stating that a virgin had been received, and enumerating her charms with cruel grossness.[122] When a purchaser had been found and a bargain struck, the unfortunate girl, often a mere child, was surrendered to his brutality, and the wretch issued from the cell afterward, to be himself crowned with laurel by the slaves of the establishment.

Thus far of common prost.i.tutes. Though the Romans had no loose women who could compare in point of standing, influence, or intellect with the Greek hetairae, their highest cla.s.s of prost.i.tutes, the _famosae_ or _delicatae_, were very far above the unfortunate creatures just described. They were not inscribed in the aedile's rolls; they haunted no lupanar, or tavern, or baker's stall; they were not seen lurking about shady spots at night; they wore no distinguis.h.i.+ng costume. It was in broad daylight, at the theatre, in the streets, in the Via Sacra, which was the favorite resort of fas.h.i.+onable Rome, that they were to be found, and there they were only to be distinguished from virtuous matrons by the superior elegance of their dress, and the swarm of admirers by whom they were surrounded. Indeed, under the later emperors, the distinction, outward or inward, between these prost.i.tutes and the Roman matrons appears to have been very slight indeed.[123] They were surrounded or followed by slaves of either s.e.x, a favorite waiting-maid being the most usual attendant.[124] Their meaning glances are frequently the subject of caustic allusions in the Roman poets.[125] Many of them were foreigners, and expressed themselves by signs from ignorance of the Latin tongue.

These women were usually the mistresses of rich men, though not necessarily faithful to their lovers. We possess no such biographies of them as we have of the Greek hetairae, nor is there any reason to suppose that their lives ever formed the theme of serious works, though the Roman erotic library was rich. What little we know of them we glean mostly from the verses of Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, Martial, and from such works as the Satyricon of Petronius, and the novel of Apuleius, and that little is hardly worth the knowing.

The first five poets mentioned--Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Tibullus--devoted no small portion of their time and talent to the celebration of their mistresses. But beyond their names, Lydia, Chloe, Lalage, Lesbia, Cynthia, Delia, Neaera, Corinna, &c., we are taught nothing about them but what might have been taken for granted, that they were occasionally beautiful, lascivious, extravagant, often faithless and heartless. From pa.s.sages in Ovid, and also in one or two of the others, it may be inferred that it was not uncommon for these great prost.i.tutes to have a nominal husband, who undertook the duty of negotiating their immoral bargains (_leno maritus_).

The only really useful information we derive from these erotic effusions relates to the poets themselves. All the five we have mentioned moved in the best society at Rome. Some of them, like Horace, saw their fame culminate during their lifetime; others filled important stations under government. Ovid was intimate with the Emperor Augustus, and his exile is supposed to have been caused by some improper discoveries he made with regard to the emperor's relations with his daughter. Yet it is quite evident that all these persons habitually lived with prost.i.tutes, felt no shame on that account, and recorded unblus.h.i.+ngly the charms and exploits of their mistresses in verses intended to be read indiscriminately by the Roman youths.

Between Ovid and Martial the distance is immense. Half a century divided them in point of time; whole ages in tone. During the Augustan era, the language of poets, though much freer than would be tolerated to-day, was not invariably coa.r.s.e. No gross expressions are used by the poets of that day in addressing their mistresses, and even common prost.i.tutes are addressed with epithets which a modern lover might apply to his betrothed.

But Martial knows no decency. It may safely be said that his epigrams ought never again to be translated into a modern tongue. Expressions designating the most loathsome depravities, and which, happily, have no equivalent, and need none, in our language, abound in his pages. Pictures of the most revolting pruriency succeed each other rapidly. In a word, such language is used and such scenes depicted as would involve the expulsion of their utterer from any house of ill fame in modern times. Yet Martial enjoyed high favor under government. He was enabled to procure the naturalization of many of his Spanish friends. He possessed a country and a town house, both probably gifts from the emperor. His works, even in his lifetime, were carefully sought after, not only in Rome, but in Gaul, Spain, and the other provinces. Upon the character and life of courtesans in his day he throws but little light. The women whose hideous depravity he celebrates must have been well known at Rome; their names must have been familiar to the ears of Roman society. But this feature of Roman civilization, the notoriety of prost.i.tutes and of their vile arts, properly belongs to another division of the subject.

ROMAN SOCIETY.

It was often said by the ancients that the more prost.i.tutes there were, the safer would be virtuous women. "Well done," said the moralist to a youth entering a house of ill fame; "so shalt thou spare matrons and maidens." As this idea rests upon a slender substratum of plausibility, it may be as well to expose its fallacy, which can be done very completely by a glance at Roman society under the emperors.

Even allowing for poetical exaggeration, it may safely be said that there is no modern society, perhaps there has never existed any since the fall of Rome, to which Juvenal's famous satire on women can be applied.[126]

Independently of the unnatural l.u.s.ts which were so unblus.h.i.+ngly avowed, the picture drawn by the Roman surpa.s.ses modern credibility. That it was faithful to nature and fact, there is, unhappily, too much reason to believe. The causes must be sought in various directions.

Two marked distinctions between modern and ancient society may at once be noticed. In no modern civilized society is it allowable to present immodest images to the eye, or to utter immodest words in the ear of females or youth. At Rome the contrary was the rule. The walls of respectable houses were covered with paintings, of which one hardly dares in our times to mention the subjects. Lascivious frescoes and lewd sculptures, such as would be seized in any modern country by the police, filled the halls of the most virtuous Roman citizens and n.o.bles.[127]

Ingenuity had been taxed to the utmost to reproduce certain indecent objects under new forms.[128] Nor was common indecency adequate to supply the depraved taste of the Romans. Such groups as satyrs and nymphs, Leda and the swan, Pasiphae and the bull, satyrs and she-goats, were abundant.

Some of them have been found, and exhibit a wonderful artistic skill. All of these were daily exposed to the eyes of children and young girls, who, as Propertius says, were not allowed to remain novices in any infamy.

Again, though a Horace would use polite expressions in addressing Tyndaris or Lalage, the Latin tongue was much freer than any modern one. There is not a Latin author of the best age in whose writings the coa.r.s.est words can not be found. The comedies were frightfully obscene, both in ideas and expressions. A youth or a maiden could not begin to acquire instruction without meeting words of the grossest meaning. The convenient adage, _Charta non erubescit_, was invented to hide the pruriency of authors, and one of the worst puts in the wretched plea that, "though his page is lewd, his life is pure." It is quite certain that, whatever might have been the effect on the poet, his readers could not but be demoralized by the lewdness of his verses.

Add to these causes of immorality the baths, and a fair case in support of Juvenal will be already made out. A young Roman girl, with warm southern blood in her veins, who could gaze on the unveiled pictures of the loves of Venus, read the shameful epigrams of Martial, or the burning love-songs of Catullus, go to the baths and see the nudity of scores of men and women, be touched herself by a hundred lewd hands, as well as those of the bathers who rubbed her dry and kneaded her limbs--a young girl who could withstand such experiences and remain virtuous would need, indeed, to be a miracle of principle and strength of mind.

But even then religion and law remained to a.s.sail her. She could not walk through the streets of Rome without seeing temples raised to the honor of Venus, that Venus who was the mother of Rome, as the patroness of illicit pleasures. In every field and in many a square, statues of Priapus, whose enormous indecency was his chief characteristic, presented themselves to view, often surrounded by pious matrons in quest of favor from the G.o.d.

Once a year, at the Lupercalia, she saw young men running naked through the streets, armed with thongs with which they struck every woman they saw; and she noticed that matrons courted this flagellation as a means of becoming prolific. What she may have known of the Dionysia or Saturnalia, the wild games in honor of Bacchus, and of those other dissolute festivals known as the eves of Venus, which were kept in April, it is not easy to say, but there is no reason to believe that these lewd scenes were intended only for the vicious, or that they were kept a secret.

When her marriage approached the remains of her modesty were effectually destroyed. Before marriage she was led to the statue of Mutinus, a nude sitting figure, and made to sit on his knee,[129] _ut ejus pudicitiam prius deus deliba.s.se videtur_. This usage was so deeply rooted among the Romans that, when Augustus destroyed the temple of Mutinus in the Velian ward in consequence of the immoralities to which it gave rise, a dozen others soon rose to take its place. On the marriage night, statuettes of the deities _Subiqus_ and _Prema_ hung over the nuptial bed--_ut subacta a sponso viro non se commoveat quum premitur_;[130] and in the morning the jealous husband exacted, by measuring the neck of his bride, proof to his superst.i.tious mind that she had yielded him her virginity.[131]

In the older age of the republic it was not considered decent for women to recline on couches at table as men did. This, however soon became quite common. Men and women lay together on the same couch so close that hardly room for eating was left. And this was the custom not only with women of loose morals, but with the most respectable matrons. At the feast of Trimalchio, which is the best recital of a Roman dinner we have, the wife of the host and the wife of Habinus both appeared before the guests.

Habinus amused them by seizing his host's wife by the feet and throwing her forward so that her dress flew up and exposed her knees, and Trimalchio himself did not blush to show his preference for a giton in the presence of the company, and to throw a cup at his wife's head when her jealousy led her to remonstrate.[132] The voyage of the hero of the Satyricon furnishes other pictures of the intensely depraved feeling which pervaded Roman society. The author does not seem to admit the possibility of virtue's existence; all his men and women are equally vicious and shameless. The open spectacle of the most hideous debauchery only provokes a laugh. If a man declines to accede to the propositions which the women are the first to make, it must be because he is a disciple of the _aversa Venus_, and whole cities are depicted as joining in the hue and cry after the lost _frater_ of a noted debauchee.

The _commessationes_, which Cicero enumerates among the symptoms of corruption in his time, had become of universal usage. It was for them that the cooks of Rome exhausted their art in devising the dishes which have puzzled modern gastronomists; for them that the rare old wines of Italy were stowed away in cellars; for them that Egyptian and Ionian dancing-girls stripped themselves, or donned the _nebula linea_.[133] No English words can picture the monstrosities which are calmly narrated in the pages of Petronius and Martial. Well might Juvenal cry, "Vice has culminated."[134]

It is perhaps difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise, considering the examples set by the emperors. It requires no small research to discover a single character in the long list that was not stained by the grossest habits. Julius Caesar, "the bald adulterer," was commonly said to be "husband of all men's wives."[135] Augustus, whose youth had been so dissolute as to suggest a most contemptuous epigram, employed men in his old age to procure matrons and maidens, whom these purveyors of imperial l.u.s.t examined as though they had been horses at a public sale.[136] The amours of Tiberius in his retreat at Capreae can not be described. It will suffice to say there was no invention of infamy which he did not patronise; that no young person of any charms was safe from his l.u.s.t. More than one senator felt that safety required he should remove his handsome wife or pretty daughter from Rome, for Tiberius was ever ready to avenge obstacles with death. The sad fate of the beautiful Mallonia, who stabbed herself during a lawsuit which the emperor had inst.i.tuted against her because she refused to comply with his beastly demands, gives a picture of the age.[137] Caligula, who made some changes in the tax levied on prost.i.tutes, and established a brothel in the palace, commenced life by debauching his sisters, and ended it by giving grand dinners, during which he would remove from the room any lady he pleased, and, after spending a few minutes with her in private, return and give an account of the interview for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the company.[138] Messalina so far eclipsed Claudius in depravity that the "profuse debauches" of the former appear, by contrast, almost moderate and virtuous.[139]

Nero surpa.s.sed his predecessors in cynic recklessness. He was an habitual frequenter of houses of prost.i.tution. He dined in public at the great circus among a crowd of prost.i.tutes. He founded, on the sh.o.r.e of the Gulf of Naples, houses of prost.i.tution, and filled them with females, whose dissolute habits were their recommendation to his notice. The brief sketch of his journeys given by Tacitus, and the allusions to his minister of pleasures, Tigellinus, leave no room for doubting that he was a monster of depravity.[140]

Pa.s.sing over a coa.r.s.e Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a mean Vespasian, and a dissolute t.i.tus, Domitian revived the age of Nero.

He seduced his brother's daughter, and carried her away from her husband, bathed habitually in company with a band of prost.i.tutes, and set an example of hideous vice while enacting severe laws against debauchery.

After another interval, Commodus converted the palace into a house of prost.i.tution. He kept in his pay three hundred girls of great beauty, and as many youths, and revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he could no longer share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he a.s.sumed the dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with the spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus, whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpa.s.sed even the most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his pride to have been able to teach even the most expert courtesans of Rome something more than they knew; his pleasure to wallow among them naked, and to pull down into the sink of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity in which he lived the first officers of the empire.

When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no need of inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial--and he was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian--would only laugh, and copy the model before him. It may safely be a.s.serted that there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly depraved a state of morals as Martial's epigram on his wife.

SECRET DISEASES AT ROME.

At what period, and where, venereal diseases first made their appearance, is a matter of doubt. It was long the opinion of the faculty that they were of modern origin, and that Europe had derived them from America, where the sailors of Columbus had first contracted them. This opinion does not appear to rest on any solid basis, and is now generally rejected. The fact is, that the venereal disease prevailed extensively in Europe in the fifteenth century; but the presumption, from an imposing ma.s.s of circ.u.mstantial evidence, is that it has afflicted humanity from the beginning of history.

Still, it is strange that Greek and Latin authors do not mention it. There is a pa.s.sage in Juvenal in which allusion is made to a disgusting disease, which appears to bear resemblance to venereal disease. Epigrams of Martial hint at something of the same kind. Celsus describes several diseases of the generative organs, but none of these authors ascribe the diseases they mention to venereal intercourse.

Celsus prefaces what he says on the subject of this cla.s.s of maladies with an apology. Nothing but a sense of duty has led him to allude to matters so delicate; but he feels that he ought not to allow his country to lose the benefit of his experience, and he conceives it to be "desirable to disseminate among the people some medical principles with regard to a cla.s.s of diseases which are never revealed to any one."

After this apology, he proceeds to speak of a disease which he calls _inflammatio colis_, which seems to have borne a striking a.n.a.logy to the modern _Phymosis_. It has been supposed that the _Elephantiasis_, which he describes at length, was also of a syphilitic character; and the symptoms detailed by Aretous, who wrote in the latter half of the first century, certainly remind the reader of secondary syphilis; but the best opinion of to-day appears to be that the diseases are distinct and unconnected.

Women afflicted with secret diseases were called _aucunnuentae_, which explains itself. They prayed to Juno Fluonia for relief, and used the _aster atticus_ by way of medicine. The Greek term for this herb being _Bonbornion_, which the Romans converted into _Bubonium_, that word came to be applied to the disease for which it was given, whether in the case of females or males. Modern science has obtained thence the term Bubo. The Romans said of a female who communicated a disease to a man, _Haec te imbubinat_.[141]

We find, moreover, in the later writers, allusions to the _morbus campa.n.u.s_, the _clazomenae_, the _rubigo_, etc., which were all secret diseases of a type, if not syphilitic, strongly resembling it. It must be admitted, however, that no pa.s.sage in the ancient writers directly ascribes these diseases to commerce with prost.i.tutes.

Roman doctors declined to treat secret diseases. They were called by the generic term _morbus indecens_, and it was considered unbecoming to confess to them or to treat them. Rich men owned a slave doctor who was in the confidence of the family, and to whom such delicate secrets would naturally be confided. But the ma.s.s of the people were restrained by shame from communicating their misfortunes; as was the case among the Jews, the unhappy patient was driven to seclusion as the only remedy. However cruel and senseless this practice may have been as regarded the sufferer, it was of service to the people, as it prevented, in some degree, the spread of contagion.

Up to the period of the civil wars, and perhaps as late as the Christian era, the only physicians at Rome were drug-sellers, enchanters, and midwives. The standing of the former may be inferred from a pa.s.sage in Horace, where he cla.s.ses them with the lowest outcasts of Roman society.[142] The enchanters (_sagae_) made philtres to produce or impede the sensual appet.i.te. They were execrated, and even so amorous a poet as Ovid felt bound to warn young girls against the evil effects of the aphrodisiacs they concocted.[143] Midwives also made philtres, and are often confounded with the _sagae_. The healing science of the three cla.s.ses must have been small.

About the reign of Augustus, Greek physicians began to settle at Rome.

They possessed much theory, and some practical experience, as the Treatise of Celsus shows, and soon became an important cla.s.s in Roman society. It was not, however, till the reign of Nero, that an office of public physician was created. Under that emperor, a Greek named Andromachus was appointed _archiater_, or court physician, and _archiatii populares_ were soon afterward appointed for the people. They were allowed to receive money from the rich, but they were bound, in consideration of various privileges bestowed on their office, to treat the poor gratuitously. They were stationed in every city in the empire. Rome had fourteen, besides those attached to the Vestals, the Gymnasia, and the court; other large cities had ten, and so on, down to the small towns which had one or two.[144] From the duties and privileges of the _archiatii_, it would appear they were subject to the aediles.

It may seem almost superfluous to add that no careful medical reader of the history of Rome under the empire can doubt but the archiatii filled no sinecure, and that a large proportion of the diseases they treated were directly traceable to prost.i.tution.

CHAPTER V.