What Are Brothels In Pompeii's Lupanar?

The information about brothels in Pompeii is much disputed. Some of the common markers of a brothel, like sexual graffiti, erotic art, and small rooms with stone beds, are found in more than 35 sites around the city. These include bars, inns, and baths, as well as stalls on the street that could easily have been shelter for the poor. However, there is only one location, now called the Lupanar, which has been conclusively identified as a brothel.

The Lupanar is located just behind the Suburban Baths, about two blocks east of the forum. The area surrounding it seems to be rife with possibilities for prostitution, including “one crib virtually across the street, another down the block, the largest hotel in town lying across the way, a sizeable

tavern facing one entrance, and the Stabian Baths a few steps away,” but it appears to be the only ‘purpose-built brothel’ in town (McGinn, 15). It is a small, two-story building with five “cubicles opening off of a corridor” (Clarke, 196). It is unclear what the use of the upper floor was, but it has been postulated that it housed the establishment’s prostitutes. Each room contains a masonry bed which was likely covered with a mattress while the brothel was in use, along with vivid erotic art. The walls are also covered in ancient graffiti, nearly all sexual in nature. One graffiti named a man named Africanus as the owner of the brothel, but the evidence is so limited that we can’t pinpoint who owned the establishment.
As was stated earlier, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where and how many brothels Pompeii had. We can identify the Lupanar because of it’s more than one hundred sexual graffiti next to the stone beds. However, many of the same indicators were present on their own in other locations throughout the town. For example, the Suburban Baths contained erotic imagery, and, like many baths, sexual graffiti. Eleven known street-front buildings had small cell-like rooms, or cellae meretriciae, with masonry beds that we typically equate to brothels in the ancient world, but without the other telltale signs. These could just as easily have been shelters to protect the homeless or very poor. Finally, many bars and inns contained sexual graffiti. However, these could easily be “boasts and defamations” (Levin-Richardson, Facilis). Some ancient literature also cites bars and inns as seedy establishments where all manner of immoral business took place.
In modern times, we often associate erotic art with prostitution. However, this is simply not the case in the Roman world. Phalluses were symbols of good luck, and erotic art was put in plain view of respectable women and children. However, after further study, we can understand the “distinction between the location of paintings of actual (i.e., non-mythological) persons engaged in explicit lovemaking, and that of allusive and/or mythological representations of sex” (McGinn, 19). The former was often a mark of prostitution, if not a brothel; the latter was simply a part of life. Still, “often the inclusion of erotic paintings in a decorative scheme led them [early archaeologists] to call the building a brothel” (Clarke, 95) This has led to uncertainty over the number and location of brothels in Pompeii. For example, the House of the Centenary and the House of Caecilius Indicus both contained erotic art, but were first and foremost homes for the middle-class and elite (Clarke, 163).
Pompeii’s Lupanar has informed the scholarly debate about the place of prostitution in the Roman world.

Modern sensibilities cause us to assume that brothels and prostitution were underground operations. However, there is evidence in Martial 7.61 that Emperor Caligula enforced a tax on prostitution, “which was pitched at a high rate and enforced with great vigour, in many places collected by the military” (McGinn, 18). Additionally, there seems to have been a relationship between politicians and places where sex may have been sold-- “the dice throwers ask for Cn. Helvius Sabinus” (CIL IV 3435). It has been suggested that in the Roman world, prostitution was seen almost as a necessary evil off of which money was to be made. In fact, one of the first recorded negative opinions was that of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, in the third century CE, where he says, “...having entered the brothel, the location of the sewer and the slimy black hole of the rabble, he has befouled his own sanctified body, God’s temple, with hateful filth…” (Ep. 55.26 [CCSL 3.1.289]). This suggests, but does not by any means confirm, that the thought of prostitution as a terrible practice was not introduced until the Christian era, and was therefore not prevalent at

Pompeii.