| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Thomas A. J. McGinn. Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 416. $55.00.

Prostitution in ancient Rome is a topic which, until recently, received remarkably little scholarly attention. Thomas A. J. McGinn's erudite study of the legal rules affecting female prostitution from 200 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. is therefore particularly welcome. 1

A shift of focus to the margins, as McGinn points out, has characterized many recent studies in social and cultural history, and his own work is often sensitive to the insights such an approach can offer. McGinn is generally alert to the symbolic significance of prostitution for the Romans. The extensive battery of legal prescriptions that regulated the status of prostitutes (along with the practitioners of other disgraceful professions such as acting and fighting in the arena) enshrined them as a crucial point of reference in the Roman social hierarchy. One of the strengths of this book is its emphasis on the ambiguity of prostitution for the Romans. Laws such as the Augustan prescriptions on marriage and adultery allocated prostitutes a conspicuously lowly place in society. Prostitutes were treated as despicable yet necessary, if legitimate marriage was to be protected. At the same time, prostitution was legitimized by the taxation system (at least after Caligula). McGinn rightly emphasizes problems with an "evolutionary hypothesis," arguing convincingly that Roman jurists and legislators did not develop a consistent "policy" toward prostitution. He stresses instead the ad hoc responses of lawmakers to divergent, sometimes contradictory trends in Roman society. . . .

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