Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (15 page)

Most Vestals kept their bodies and reputations intact. There were precautions in place to prevent temptation (their temple was closed to all men at night, even doctors), but it was inevitable that some would fail. When a Vestal had sex, the crime was
incestum
—an offense that incorporated incest (all Roman men were their family) and sexual defilement. Because that loss of virginity was a direct assault on the state, general calamities were often blamed on Vestal
incestum
. In what seemed like an instant, they transformed from high priestesses to monstrous scapegoats.

The very fact of Rome’s troubles was taken as proof of Vestal unchastity. In 483 BC, the city was at war with the Volsci and the Veii. Rome’s superior resources should have permitted it to make short work of these enemies, but Rome was wasting its advantages on internal struggles. To make matters worse, there were daily heavenly prodigies showing the gods’ anger and portending disaster. The city was in a panic. Its priests could not figure out what was causing the problems, even after consulting animal entrails and bird flight patterns. They then concluded that a Vestal must have been misbehaving. “These terrors finally resulted in the Vestal Virgin Oppia being condemned for
incestum
and executed,” wrote Livy.

In 215 BC, in the alarm over Rome’s defeat at the Battle of Cannae, the Vestals Opimia and Floronia were found guilty of
incestum
. One of them was buried alive; the other was allowed to commit suicide. A century later, after the destruction of the army of Marcus Porcius Cato in Thrace, three Vestals were put on trial for conduct more fitting to prostitutes than to professional virgins. “Three had known men at the same time,” wrote Cassius Dio. “Of these, Marcia had acted by herself, granting favours to one single knight . . . Aemilia and Licina, on the other hand, had a multitude of lovers and carried on their wanton behaviour with each other’s help.”

If that was not bad enough, the fire in Vesta’s temple began to sputter out on its own—a sure sign of Vestal misconduct—and a bolt of lightning killed a noble girl on her horse, leaving her singed dress hiked up above her waist. At first, only the Vestal Marcia was found guilty, but the public’s thirst for a sufficient remedy for all this trouble was too strong for a single verdict to stand. A second trial was convened, and the other two Vestals convicted. All three were buried alive.

Vestals were sometimes prosecuted in the absence of a calamity. Emperor Domitian’s moral reforms were punctuated by trials against Vestals for
incestum
. The chief Vestal, Cornelia, was buried alive in 83 AD, but she did not go down quietly: “Is it possible?” she demanded of Domitian as he watched her being led to the hole. “Does Caesar think that I have been unchaste, when he has conquered and triumphed while I have been performing the rites?” In other words, how dare Domitian accuse her when he has enjoyed good fortune? The execution went forward.

Some Vestals were able to acquit themselves at trial with impressive feats of magic. The priestess Tuccia was charged, in 230 BC, with giving away her virginity based on one man’s accusation. Calling Vesta to her aid, she led a crowd to the Tiber River, where she pulled up a quantity of water with a sieve. To everyone’s amazement, the water did not drain out of the holes. She took it back to the forum, where she dumped the river water onto the feet of her judges. Her life was spared, and her accuser was never heard from again. Another time, after the sacred fire went out on the Vestal Aemilia’s watch, the priests inquired as to whether she had been entertaining men. In the presence of everyone, she cried out:

O Vesta, guardian of the Romans’ city, if, during the space of nearly thirty years, I have performed the sacred offices in a holy and proper manner, keeping a pure mind and a chaste body, manifest yourself in my defence and assist me and do not suffer your priestess to die the most miserable of all deaths; but if I have been guilty of any impious deed, let my punishment expiate the guilt of the city.

She then threw a piece of her clothing on the cold altar where the fire had burned. Instantly, a flame burst through the linen. With that, the city was safe again, and Aemilia cleared.

The Vestal college lasted for about a millennium, until the fire was put out forever and the order disbanded in the fourth century AD by the Christian emperor Theodosius. Judging by Rome’s long run, the priestesses mostly protected the people well by keeping the sacred fire lit and men out of their beds. In a sex-soaked culture in which aristocratic women tried to register as prostitutes, the Vestals’ untouched genitals were a guarantee of Rome’s longevity.
⁵

BODIES FOR SALE: SLUMMING IT WITH PROSTITUTES AND PERFORMERS

Until the Christian era, Rome welcomed its droves of prostitutes without moral qualm, taxing their earnings and never interfering with men’s enjoyment of them. They were everywhere—in taverns, brothels both luxurious and squalid, on the streets, and in the marketplaces. It was disgraceful to be a prostitute, but the sex trade was legal. Rather than stop the activities of prostitutes, Rome’s laws were designed to prevent respectable wives and daughters from acting like whores. That turned out to be quite a challenge. Many Roman women with healthy sexual appetites were not ready to live out their lives in domestic rectitude. This resulted in often-futile legal mesures by Roman men to prevent Roman women from engaging in unsanctioned sex.

Prostitutes lived on the margins, and had almost no legal protection. There are no examples of Roman prostitutes agitating for more rights than they had. Many were slaves, and would have been killed had they tried to do so. But, like slaves and sewers, prostitutes were indispensable. Sex workers were excluded from most temples and almost every other aspect of public life, but they still enjoyed a small measure of integration into society and religion.

Every year, on the first of April—the same day on which matrons renewed their fidelity vows in the cult of Venus Verticordia—other celebrations went on in men’s bathhouses. There, the shamed women who serviced men for money burned incense to Fortuna Virilis, the aspect of the goddess Fortuna that represented women’s sexual fortune. These simultaneous celebrations expressed Rome’s paradoxical beliefs about the sexuality of women. Fortuna Virilis was concerned with the fortunes of women who sold sex, while Venus Verticordia was supposed to steer married women in the opposite direction. Wives were tolerated at best, but as the mothers of Roman citizens they were capable of gaining public respect—if they kept themselves out of trouble. Prostitutes were savored even as they were degraded.

The popular springtime Floralia festival was also the domain of prostitutes. Flora was a successful courtesan who had left a pot of money on her death to finance games and celebrations in her honor. The Senate, uncomfortable with an event built around a prostitute, tried to dress up the celebrations with respectability by recasting Flora as a fertility goddess associated with flowers and crops, and the festival as a ritual meant to guarantee a good harvest. However, dignity seems to have been the last thing on anyone else’s mind. The five-day festival was a combination of a sexual be-in and prostitution trade fair, “celebrated with all wantonness as is suitable to the memory of a harlot,” according to Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century AD. Prostitutes fought as gladiators in the arenas and performed lewd farces and mimes in the theaters. They walked onstage wearing clothes, but never for long, as the audience would soon demand that they remove their garments and display themselves. When the priggish Cato stormed out of one performance—one wonders what he expected to see there—the audience was relieved that he’d left, rather than remained and inhibited the show. When the Senate could take the lewdness no longer, it discontinued the festival—but subsequently reinstated it after a hailstorm damaged the springtime blossoms.

Prostitutes were, then, good for something else besides sex: flowers and seeds, at least. The Floralia did nothing to make the trade respectable, but it was sanctioned by the government. The memory of Flora did not tempt respectable women to cross the line.
⁶
Not all whore-goddesses kept themselves at such a safe distance, however.

The Egyptian deity Isis, loving and merciful mother, wife, and harlot, was beloved of Romans of all classes and especially by women. Unlike Roman-grown cults, with their precise rituals and rigid membership rolls, the worship of Isis was flexible and inclusive. Her temples were often found near brothels, and were natural gathering places for prostitutes, but the cult’s easy, sensual mix of social groups sparked repeated government repression, especially when it influenced matrons to forget themselves.

In 19 AD, Emperor Tiberius found the perfect opportunity to shut the operation down. He was told of a virtuous if rather stupid wife named Paulina, who had given herself in the temple of Isis to a Roman knight impersonating a god. The knight had been trying unsuccessfully to bed Paulina for some time. Knowing of her devotion to Isis, he paid temple priests to tell her that Anubis, a divine associate of Isis, had fallen in love with her, and that the god wanted to meet her at the temple. She happily agreed, and spent the night in sacred intercourse with her disguised seducer. Despite their friends’ smirks, Paulina and her husband were convinced they had been blessed. Finally, the self-satisfied knight could hold the secret no longer, and told her that she had been had. The news got to Tiberius, who crucified the priests, demolished the temple, and had the statue of Isis thrown into the river. The cult would pop up again, but official Rome was never comfortable with any organization that mixed wives and prostitutes.

ROME PUT ITS prostitutes on the same level as actors, animal fighters, and gladiators. All were marked with
infamia
, because they made their living with their bodies. As people who were used and leered at, they were living affronts to the
dignitas
of Roman citizens and were open to physical abuse. Protection from corporal punishment marked citizens from noncitizens, particularly slaves. If a prostitute was beaten or raped by a customer, she had no cause to complain. Actors were also subject to beating for anything that “violated the public order.” Gladiators, whose business was violence, were reduced to the vulnerability of slaves when they took an oath to suffer branding, beating, and death. Living at such a reduced level, these
infames
were barred from doing anything other than plying their trades. They were not allowed to join the army, hold public office, or marry freeborn Romans. As people without a shred of honor, they also could not be trusted to tell the truth in court.

A prostitute was condemned to a life of being the Other. The word “prostitute” itself comes from the Latin
prostare
, “to stand out,” and Roman prostitutes were indeed marked apart. Under a law passed during the reign of Augustus during the first century AD, they were forced to wear a toga distinct from the
stola
worn by matrons. The rule permitted no subtle distinctions among women: They were either prostitutes or not. Prostitutes were also registered by the state—not out of health concerns, but to prevent downward migration by upper-class women through licentious behavior. Membership on the list lasted a lifetime.

At the same time, life outside the boundaries of respectability had its advantages. Prostitutes and other
infames
had almost complete sexual freedom, greater than many of the men they serviced. The lives of prostitutes (or at least an idealized vision of them) made more than a few respectable women envious. “Slumming it” by the upper classes has always been glamorous in its way, and this was especially true in Rome. Good women were not supposed to degrade themselves, but did so often enough. More common than stories of virtuous Roman women dying for their honor were cautionary tales of upright wives and daughters gone wrong.

Perhaps the most lurid example was that of the “imperial whore” Messalina, young wife of the emperor Claudius. As Juvenal and the consul-historian Cassius Dio tell it, she stole away from the palace late one night disguised in a blonde wig and cloak. Attended by only one maid, she slipped through the city’s darkened streets to a brothel, where she installed herself in a cell “reeking with long-used coverlets.” There, assuming the name Lycisca (“Wolf-girl”), she transformed herself into a champion whore. She took on dozens of men in a sexual contest with the other women of the house, beating them handily and “asking from each [customer] his fee.”

When closing time came and the brothel-keeper dismissed the girls, Messalina was “still hot from the stretching of her stiffened vulva, worn out from her sexual partners without being satisfied by them,” and was not ready to leave. Reluctantly, she returned home, stained by the grime of her night’s work. Nor was that her only venture into prostitution: She also did business in the palace, where she set up a brothel with a staff of women drawn from the “highest ranks.”

Emperor Augustus’s daughter (and later Tiberius’s wife) Julia the Elder was no better. She sold herself on the very spot in the forum where her father had proposed a set of restrictive marriage and adultery laws. That she was married and living one of the highest possible profiles mattered nothing to Julia. “Whatever she desired she claimed as her right,” wrote Seneca. Her embarrassed father had no choice but to exile her.

LICENTIOUSNESS FOR ITS own sake is understandable, but what was the attraction for wellborn women of doing it for pay? For all that has been written on the subject, there is no ready answer. Messalina and Julia didn’t need the money. Neither did the notorious noblewoman Vistilia, but for her becoming a prostitute was a practical solution to an urgent legal problem: While prostitutes were exempt from prosecution for adultery, women from aristocratic families like Vistilia’s were not. She did not sell herself for money, but she was an adulteress. Facing charges in 19 AD for conducting extramarital affairs, she decided to register herself on the official list of prostitutes. As an adulterous wife, she would have faced a series of penalties, only one of which was being downgraded to the status of a prostitute; yet if she was already a registered prostitute at the time of trial, she would avoid a conviction altogether. The shame of being on the list was supposed to be enough to discourage women from the respectable classes from ever considering prostitution, but by Vistilia’s time that was no longer always the case. Other women of rank were trying to do likewise, not because they were selling their bodies but because they faced big penalties for sleeping around.