The lupanar of Pompeii: what archaeology really says

It is today one of the most sought-out buildings on the site of Pompeii. People often enter it as they would a curiosity, drawn by the frescoes and by the idea of a “real Roman brothel”. Archaeology invites us to slow down. The lupanar of Pompeii is the building whose identification as a place designed for prostitution is the most solid. That authorises neither a voyeur’s gaze, nor too hasty a count of all the city’s other “brothels”. Most of the women whose names are carved on these walls lived in a condition of dependence. Many were, very probably, slaves.

One building, and many debates

Thomas A. J. McGinn, in The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World (2004), calls this place the “purpose-built brothel”. The review published the same year by the Bryn Mawr Classical Review stresses the “reliability” of this identification, in contrast with the rest of the dossier. The Parco Archeologico di Pompei presents it, in regio VII, among the buildings that can be visited on the site. We therefore have a building, not a legend.

The number of the other places is another matter. McGinn, the same review reports, stands at the high end of the range: up to twenty-six brothels in Pompeii, plus thirteen cellae meretriciae, small rooms sometimes called “cribs”. He also discusses the possible role of taverns and baths as more informal venues. These figures are an estimate, and a high one. They must not be read as a definitive inventory. The scholarly debate bears precisely on the criteria of identification — what one requires, for instance, to distinguish a brothel from a simple room, or from an inn — and on what must be regarded as established before one speaks of a place of prostitution.

The prejudice of the early excavators

This debate has a history. McGinn devotes a chapter to the historiography of the “Pompeian brothel” and to the sexual prejudices of archaeologists, over two centuries. David Gaimster, already cited in connection with the secret museums, puts it differently: the early excavators, faced with erotic paintings, often concluded that they were dealing with brothels. The sexual image became, on its own, proof of use. Brothels were seen wherever the decoration unsettled the nineteenth-century eye.

This is a poor reflex, and it has proved durable. An explicit fresco can decorate a room of pleasure, an inn, a private house. It does not, on its own, tell us the occupation of those who lived there. Conversely, the lupanar of regio VII does not need to be turned into a spectacle in order to be what it is: a place of sexual work, designed as such, in a Roman city.

Names on the walls, not an attraction

Inscriptions, gathered in particular in McGinn’s appendices, have preserved names, sometimes a price, sometimes a mention of a service. The review cites, among others, Eutychis Graeca and Veneria. These names are not a picturesque gallery. They remind us that we are speaking of people, most often placed in a relation of constraint. The same review notes that McGinn, in the last pages of his book, addresses the exploitation of the women involved in Roman prostitution, and that he does not glorify their lives. That is the tone that must be kept here.

The frescoes will not be described as a catalogue. The lupanar will not be turned into one attraction among others. The place, moreover, long disappeared from the public itinerary: the booklet of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples recalls that, under fascism, the Lupanar of Pompeii was closed in 1931. Like the Gabinetto Segreto, it troubled the image of a moral Rome, little inclined, according to the ideology of the time, to vice and superstition.

Looking at the place for what it was

What archaeology allows us to say, with caution, is already a great deal. A building in Pompeii can be identified, more securely than the others, as a brothel built for that use. The number of comparable places in the city remains debated, and McGinn’s high estimates have not closed the discussion. The early excavators too often took an erotic image for proof. The women who worked there were not postcard figures. Many had not chosen their lot.

To visit this place, or simply to read its history, therefore requires a quite different gaze from that of piquant curiosity. If this demand speaks to you, the Selfgasm shop welcomes a neighbouring way of treating desire: taking it seriously, without turning it into a spectacle, and without forgetting that pleasure has meaning only if it is chosen.

Sources

• Thomas A. J. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel, University of Michigan Press, 2004. Review: Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004.04.40. BMCR 2004.04.40
• Parco Archeologico di Pompei, list of visitable buildings, regio VII, “Lupanar”. Pompeiisites.org
• Antonio Coppa, booklet of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, on the closing of the Lupanar in 1931. MANN booklet (PDF)

Photo: façade of the Lupanar of Pompeii (Regio VII, Insula XII), photograph by General Cucombre, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.