Courtesans in Ancient Pompeii: A life of glamour or grind?

The brothel in Pompeii—called a "lupanar" or wolf den by the Romans—is over 2,000 years old. It is the only surviving purpose-built brothel from the ancient world, encased in ash by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 until its discovery in the 19th century. Unlike human beings who pass down their most expensive or precious heirlooms, the volcano made no distinction about what it preserved for future generations. The indiscriminate nature of Pompeii’s destruction (and preservation) means the site gives us fascinating glimpses into the world of an overlooked group of Roman women—those who worked in the sex trade.

I chose to reimagine these women’s lives in my Wolf Den trilogy, which begins in AD 74. In the first book, the main character Amara is enslaved in Pompeii’s lupanar, and the narrative arc of the series is her fraught, determined journey "upwards" through Roman society until we see her in the final book, The Temple of Fortuna, as a wealthy courtesan. The brothel where The Wolf Den is set is a real building which you can visit. It is a small, cramped place, consisting of a single corridor, a latrine and five cells with stone beds. The cramped physical space suggests very little privacy—there may have been curtains across the cell doors as is described by the Roman author Petronius, but equally there may not have been.

The most famous aspect of the lupanar is the erotic frescoes—paintings of men and women having sex—which appear over the cell doors. Their impact ensures the women have been seen purely through their sexual role, not only in their own time, but also on the tourist trail in ours. If the frescoes were the most we could learn about the women, that might be disappointing, but remarkably some of the graffiti has also survived. Some is boasting by customers but even these phrases give us something of the women: their names. The characters in my books—Beronice, Fabia, Paris, Felix, Victoria and Cressa—were all named after real men and women mentioned in the brothel’s graffiti.

In a couple of cases the graffiti gave me a little more; Victoria is referred to as "Victrix Victoria" (Victoria the conqueror) and elsewhere as "unconquered." I chose to see this as reflecting my fictional Victoria’s own view of herself. Among the graffiti, there are also doodled images—a ship, a bird, a face. Brothel life may have involved a fair amount of waiting around, stuck in a dreary cell, and so in my book I saw these doodles as a form of escapism for those who had so little freedom.

Enslaved women in the Roman world did not have to be working in a brothel to be sexually exploited. This is summed up in a piece of street graffiti in Pompeii: "Take hold of your slave girl whenever you want, it's your right to use her." The "low" status of enslaved women means almost nothing of their personal thoughts or feelings survive, but Pompeii’s graffiti proves a rare exception. An inscription by the theatre reads: "Methe, slave-girl of Cominia from Atella, loves Chrestus. May Pompeian Venus be dear to them both and may they always live in harmony." Methe’s assertion of human dignity is even more remarkable because it is so at odds with the prevailing (male) social attitude towards women of her class. Methe’s assertion of her own emotional world influenced how I imagined my own character Amara’s feelings about her life.

Courtesans were one of the few groups of Roman women working in the sex trade who were recognised as having feelings as well as a physical role—in fact a demonstration of "love" for a patron was demanded. Courtesans lives were financially precarious, reliant on youth, appearance, and the whims of their patrons, but they were often freedwomen and certainly had more opportunities for agency than those enslaved in brothels. Pompeii gives us a powerful image of courtesans at play (or work) in an evocative fresco of a banqueting scene. Two women in transparent dresses are reclining on a couch, their arms around their sprawling, drunken lovers—one of whom is being helped to clutch a drinking horn—while a serving woman hovers expectantly in the background.

The painting is from the colourfully named House of the Chaste Lovers and is one that I drew on to imagine the ways Amara served her patron Rufus, a wealthy Pompeiian playboy. The transparent material worn by the women in the fresco is a fine silk, described by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History: "they cover a woman, [but] at the same moment reveal her naked charms." Amara sees this material as an investment for entertaining clients at dinner parties. I enjoyed imagining her later meeting Pliny at just such a party, given he was the one who wrote about the silk.

Pliny is instrumental in changing Amara’s fortunes and a tiny minority of courtesans did rise to positions of genuine power. This is what I imagined for Amara when she finds a patron in the Imperial freedman Demetrius, who takes her to Rome. Her role in his life as a genuine confidant is echoed in contemporary Roman accounts of the real courtesan Antonia Caenis, who served the Emperor Vespasian. Even in the Pompeii fresco of the Chaste Lovers there are hints of a courtesan’s potential power. The erotic paintings of the lupanar predominately show the women being physically dominated, but in this painting the women are alert, physically higher than their drunken clients, even controlling their movements. It may have been a rare woman who got the upper hand, but for the most ambitious courtesans it was not beyond all hope.

The Temple of Fortuna by Elodie Harper, published by Head of Zeus, is out now