The object of the Julian laws was to preserve the Roman blood from corruption, and still farther to degrade prostitutes. These aims were partially attained by prohibiting the intermarriage of citizens with the relatives or descendants of prostitutes; by exposing adulterers to severe penalties, and declaring the tolerant husband an accomplice; by laying penalties on bachelors and married men without children; by prohibiting the daughters of equestrians from becoming prostitutes.[77] Tiberius, from his infamous retreat at Capreæ, sanctioned a decree of the senate which enhanced the severity of the laws against adultery. By this decree it was made a penal offense for a matron of any class to play the harlot, and her lover, the owner of the house where they met, and all persons who connived at the adultery, were declared equally culpable. It seems to have been not uncommon for certain married women to inscribe themselves on the ædile’s list as prostitutes, and to occupy a room at the houses of ill fame. This was pronounced a penal offense; and every encouragement was held out, both to husbands and to common informers, to prosecute.[78]
In other respects the republican legislation is believed to have been unaltered by the emperors. The formality of inscription, its accompanying infamy, the consequences of the act remained the same. Prostitutes carried on their trade under the ædile’s eye. He patrolled the streets, and entered the houses of ill fame at all hours of the day and night. He saw that they were closed between daybreak and three in the afternoon. In case of brawls, he arrested and punished the disturbers of the peace. He punished by fine and scourging the omission of a brothel-keeper to inscribe every female in his house. He insisted on prostitutes wearing the garments prescribed by law, and dyeing their hair blue or yellow. On the other hand, he could not break into a house without being habited in the insignia of his office, and being accompanied by his lictors. When the ædile Hostilius attempted to break open the door of the prostitute Mamilia, on his return from a gay dinner, the latter drove him off with stones, and was sustained by the courts.[79] The ædile was bound also, on complaint laid by a prostitute, to sentence any customer of hers to pay the sum due to her according to law.[80]
CLASSES OF PROSTITUTES.
It was the duty of the ædile to arrest, punish, and drive out of the city all loose prostitutes who were not inscribed on his book. This regulation was practically a dead letter. At no time in the history of the empire did there cease to be a large and well-known class of prostitutes who were not recorded. They were distinguished from the registered prostitutes (meretrices) by the name of prostibulæ.[81] They paid no tax to the state, while their registered rivals contributed largely to the municipal treasury; and, if they ran greater risks, and incurred more nominal infamy than the latter, they more frequently contrived to rise from their unhappy condition.
We have no means of judging of the number of prostitutes exercising their calling at Rome, Capua, and the other Italian cities during the first years of the Christian era. During Trajan’s reign the police were enabled to count thirty-two thousand in Rome alone, but this number obviously fell short of the truth. One is appalled at the great variety of classes into which the prostibulæ, or unregistered prostitutes were divided. Such were the Delicatæ, corresponding to the kept-women, or French lorettes, whose charms enabled them to exact large sums from their visitors;[82] the Famosæ, who belonged to respectable families, and took to evil courses through lust or avarice;[83] the Doris, who were remarkable for their beauty of form, and disdained the use of clothing;[84] the Lupæ, or she-wolves, who haunted the groves and commons, and were distinguished by a particular cry in imitation of a wolf;[85] the Ælicariæ, or bakers’ girls, who sold small cakes for sacrifice to Venus and Priapus, in the form of the male and female organs of generation;[86] the Bustuariæ, whose home was the burial-ground, and who occasionally officiated as mourners at funerals;[87] the Copæ, servant-girls at inns and taverns, who were invariably prostitutes;[88] the Noctiluæ, or night-walkers; the Blitidæ, a very low class of women, who derived the name from blitum, a cheap and unwholesome beverage drunk in the lowest holes;[89] the Diobolares, wretched outcasts, whose price was two oboli (say two cents);[90] the Forariæ, country girls who lurked about country roads; the Gallinæ, who were thieves as well as prostitutes; the Quadrantariæ, seemingly the lowest class of all, whose fee was less than any copper coin now current.[91] In contradistinction to these, the meretrices assumed an air of respectability, and were often called bonæ meretrices.[92]
Another and a distinct class of prostitutes were the female dancers, who were eagerly sought after, and more numerous than at Athens. They were Ionians, Lesbians, Syrians, Egyptians, Nubians (negresses), Indians, but the most famous were Spaniards. Their dances were of the same character as those of the Greek flute-players; the erotic poets of Rome have not shrunk from celebrating the astonishing depravity of their performances.[93]
Horace faintly deplored the progress which the Ionic dances—Ionice motus—were making even among the Roman virgins.[94] These prostitutes carried on their calling in defiance of law. If detected, they were liable to be whipped and driven out of the city;[95] but as their customers belonged to the wealthier classes, they rarely suffered the penalty of their conduct.
Apart, again, from all these was the large class of persons who traded in prostitutes. The proper name for these wretches was Leno (bawd), which was of both sexes, though usually represented on the stage as a beardless man with shaven head. Under this name quite a number of varieties were included, such as the Lupanarii, or keepers of regular houses of ill fame; the Adductores and Perductores, pimps; Conciliatrices and Ancillulæ, women who negotiated immoral transactions, and others. Then, as almost every baker, tavern-keeper, bath-house-keeper, barber, and perfumer combined the lenocinium, or trade in prostitutes, with his other calling, their various names, tonsor, unguentarius, balnearius, &c., became synonymous with leno. This miserable class was regarded with the greatest loathing at Rome.[96]
This hasty classification of the Roman prostitutes would be incomplete without some notice, however brief, of male prostitutes. Fortunately, the progress of good morals has divested this repulsive theme of its importance; the object of this work can be obtained without entering into details on a branch of the subject which in this country is not likely to require fresh legislative notice. But the reader would form an imperfect idea of the state of morals at Rome were he left in ignorance of the fact that the number of male prostitutes was probably full as large as that of females; that, as in Greece, the degrading phenomenon involved very little disgrace; that all the Roman authors allude to it as a matter of course; that the leading men of the empire were known to be addicted to such habits; that the ædile abstained from interference, save where a Roman youth suffered violence; and that, to judge from the language of the writers of the first, second, and third centuries of the Christian era, the Romans, like some Asiatic races, appeared to give the preference to unnatural lusts.[97]
HOUSES OF PROSTITUTION.