Scholars also sussed out the liberti population by examining government documents. Emperor Augustus passed a law that kicked liberti off the grain dole,6 and that allows scholars to count how much the dole roster shrank when liberti were excised. Based on those numbers, and grave markers, researchers extrapolate that up to three-quarters of free people in cities were either ex-slaves or their descendants. Sandra Joshel, author of Slaves in Rome, used similar methods to measure slave populations, which she pegs at roughly 30 percent of all people living in cities. Obviously we can’t arrive at any exact numbers, especially because we have so few records of the slave and liberti groups. But there is no denying that Roman slavery and manumission were common, and liberti represented the new face of Roman urbanism in the first century.
We can even see distinctly liberti anxieties reshaping architecture at Pompeii. Painfully aware of negative stereotypes about them, these new middlers often tried to build houses that could blend into rich neighborhoods by appearing to be more sumptuous than they actually were. One strategy, which I saw at the House of the Tragic Poet, was to create an illusion of more space inside. The owners of this famously well-decorated house wanted neighbors to think they had a large peristyle garden surrounded by marble columns, the way Julia Felix did. So they placed a few columns at a cunning angle in their modest garden, making it appear to passersby on the street that they were seeing a little slice of a much bigger peristyle. These faux villa decorations seem like a direct forebearer of the way people today make small rooms look bigger by using tall mirrors and brightly painted accent walls.
Some middlers tried to assimilate into the upper classes by adopting their elevated tastes. One of the most evocative and haunting examples of this is a fresco from a stately villa called the House of Terentius Neo on Via Stabiana. (Its name comes not from the owners, but from an election poster outside that urges passersby to vote for Terentius Neo.) In the painting, a married couple stand together, posed exactly like two aristocrats would be in family portraits seen throughout the city’s elite villas. And yet the pair are defiantly middlers. The man, a baker, is dressed in a citizen’s toga, which means he’s neither aristocrat nor slave. The woman holds a pen and wax writing tablet, which are the tools of a bookkeeper. This likely identified her as a liberta, since bookkeeping was a common job for female slaves. There’s something beautiful and defiant about this couple who chose to be painted in an elite style, but not to hide the signs of their former servitude. It was a subtle but powerful way of asserting that liberti were as good as their freeborn counterparts.
Other liberti dealt with their class anxiety by reveling in ostentatious displays outside their homes, as if to thumb their noses at the haters. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the House of the Vettii. A pair of liberti wine merchants, likely brothers, the Vettii had a palatial villa in the fashionable northwestern region of the city. Next to their front door, they painted a picture of Priapus weighing his giant erection on a comically tilted scale. Keep in mind that Priapus’ generously sized member was a symbol of wealth in ancient Rome, and male nudity was not considered obscene. Despite all that, this painting would have read as low-class satire, a dirty joke for gutters rather than peristyles. It was as if the brothers wanted to remind their aristocratic neighbors of their low-class origins—and their incredible financial success in spite of it.7
On the prowl for more signs of liberti life, I met archaeologist Sophie Hay on Via Stabiana, several blocks south of the House of the Vettii. Hay spent years excavating a nearby taberna and adjoining villa that belonged to a libertus named Amarantus. The day was hot, and the noontime sunlight was brutal. When Hay arrived, her shoulder-length blond hair in slight disarray, she was parched. We hunkered down together at the edge of the road like two ancient Romans, sharing the bottle of cold water that I’d filled from the mouth of a cupid on one of Pompeii’s many restored fountains. As we talked, Hay’s story brought to life the working-class neighborhood that had been here two millennia ago.
If you turned right onto Via dell’Abbondanza from Via Stabia, then turned right again onto a narrow side street called Citarista, you’d find Amarantus’ bar a little ways down. When the liberti set up shop there, the centuries-old villa attached to his bar was badly in need of repair, thanks to years of neglect and the recent earthquake. Amarantus wanted to give it a posh do-over, but apparently he preferred to do it in the cheapest way possible. Artisans restored a beautiful dining room in the back of the house, complete with frescoes. But when it came to what Amarantus did with his atrium, Hay didn’t mince words. “The roof is crappy,” she said. “It was just reeds held together with lime.” The impluvium was little more than moldings on the floor in the shape of a pool that couldn’t actually hold water. In fact, most of the atrium served as a dusty storage area for dozens of amphorae filled with wine for the taberna. Amarantus kept the previously high-class bedrooms off the atrium intact, but he housed his mules and dogs there; Hay herself excavated the animals’ remains where they lay when the ash fell. Perhaps Amarantus was imitating the style of the fullery and bakery up the street, where workshops filled the atria once used by local luminaries to make business deals or political maneuvers. But the bar owner apparently also wanted his house to retain some of its former aura as a villa. Otherwise, why bother building a fake impluvium into the middle of his warehouse space?
Whatever his pretensions to upward mobility, Amarantus’ customers were likely other liberti or middlers like himself. “It was probably not a posh bar,” Hay said with a grin. “It was for artisans and people laboring in workshops. The neighborhood has at least two or three paint shops and a garum manufacturer. There’s a lot of mercantile activity going on, and there’s another bar opposite to him. They are probably feeding and watering the locals.” Hay’s colleagues have figured out some of the menu items from the bar, too. By analyzing food remains from the taberna cooking pots, and in a giant pile of what Amarantus’ customers left behind in his toilet cesspit, they’ve determined that Amarantus’ taberna offered staple items like fish, nuts, and figs. The food, Hay says, was plentiful and high quality. Pompeii may have been shaken by class divisions, but the farms surrounding it were bountiful enough to feed rich and poor. Amarantus was also experimenting with imported wine; among his 60 amphorae of Cretan wine, Hay found one amphora of wine from Gaza. “It’s the only wine from Gaza ever found at Pompeii,” she marveled. “I like to think he was trying to offer his customers something a little different.”
Amarantus was also, like many of his liberti neighbors, participating in local politics. Archaeologists first discovered Amarantus’ name—a Latinized version of a Greek name, appropriate for a former slave—in a hand-painted sign outside his shop that urged patrons to vote for his preferred candidate. Unfortunately, the painter misspelled both Amarantus’ name and the name of his candidate. “Maybe the guy who painted the sign was a bit drunk,” Hay suggested. There was a painter’s shop next to Amarantus’ place, and she speculated that maybe Amarantus had traded some wine for his neighbor’s skill with the brush. The results may not have been an artistic masterpiece, but they offer strong evidence that Amarantus was knitted into the political fabric of his city—just like the baker and his wife who urged people to vote for Terentius Neo. Sure, Amarantus spent most of his time working at the bar. But he also had passionate opinions about how his middler customers should cast their votes.
Queen of the Cocksuckers
Seven blocks north of Amarantus’ bar, on a shady side street near the city walls, astute observers out for a stroll would find a very different electoral suggestion. There, someone scrawled misspelled graffiti that reads: “Isadorum aed / optimus cun lincet.” A rough translation would be: “I implore you to vote Isadorus for Aedile / he licks cunt the best.”8 It was surely a backhanded compliment. Though perhaps Isadorus felt a flush of pride at being named for his sexual prowess, Romans generally considered performing oral sex a lowly task for slaves and women. But this satir
ical election notice is hardly unusual; Pompeii is saturated with sexual graffiti and imagery. Archaeologists excavating the city in the 18th and 19th centuries were shocked to discover loads of erotic paintings displayed on the walls of fine houses, and pictures of disembodied penises decorating public squares, shopfronts, and even sidewalks. The fertility god Priapus and his astonishingly large penis weren’t found exclusively at the House of the Vettii, though that’s a particularly memorable rendition. Priapus was a popular icon all over Pompeii. The city is perhaps as well known for its dirty pictures as for its importance as an archaeological treasure.
But all these dick pics are in fact part of what makes Pompeii an archaeological treasure in the first place. They are perhaps the most jarring example, for modern Westerners, of the radical cultural disjunction between pre-Christian Roman culture and what came after. For the people of Pompeii, the Vettii brothers’ Priapus painting would have been immediately legible as a rambunctious way of signaling their financial success. Penis-shaped wind chimes and carvings were considered lucky, and many shops had them on display for the same reason that shopkeepers today put those cute waving cats (maneki-neko) in their windows. There was not much taboo on sexual imagery in ancient Rome, reflecting a culture that didn’t treat sex and sexual organs as the forbidden subjects they would become in the Christian world.
Despite changing attitudes toward sex in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the sexual objects found at Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum are still kept in a special “Secret Cabinet” area of the Naples Museum. There, curious students of history can gaze in awe at baskets full of clay dicks, or admire charming penis figurines with feet, wings, and their own little penises (yes, they are penises with penises, because you can never have enough luck). Plus, there are elegant statues of gods humping various animals and people.
The lure of this forbidden history is what draws so many visitors to Pompeii’s brothel, called a lupanar (she-wolves’ den). It’s a plain, triangular two-story building located at an intersection in Amarantus’ neighborhood off Via dell’Abbondanza. The lupanar was likely as sensational two millennia ago as it is now, but for very different reasons. Today, of course, tourists who were forced to learn Latin in school are titillated by the idea that the supposedly great men who shaped our culture were also boinking in a place with smutty pictures on the walls and built-in plaster beds. Back in Amarantus’ day, it would have been a special treat to buy sex at what University of Washington archaeologist Sarah Levin-Richardson calls a “purpose-built brothel.”9 The reason she uses the phrase “purpose-built” is to underscore that it was a specialty retail outlet. Horny Romans could buy sex pretty much anywhere entertainment was to be found, and sex workers typically worked out of rooms in tabernas or shop fronts built into their masters’ villas. Others worked the streets around busy areas like the Forum. Devoting an entire establishment to sex work would have been unusual, sort of like a restaurant serving only food made with chocolate. It was quite simply an unusual establishment. That’s probably why the lupanar at Pompeii is the only purpose-built brothel that archaeologists have yet uncovered in the Roman world.
The day I visited the lupanar, it was the most crowded attraction in the park. A steady stream of tourists entered the front door on one street, passed quickly through a hallway punctuated by entrances to rooms with built-in beds, and exited just as quickly through another door onto the next street. Directed by tour guides speaking Italian, Japanese, and English, they glanced up at the erotic frescoes painted in a series of panels above the doorways, where men and women cavorted in various groups and positions. It looked a bit like the brick-and-mortar version of a gateway to an adult website: Click here for threesomes; Click here for gay male; Click here for doggy style. As someone who grew up with internet porn, the faded images of half-dressed figures on pillow-strewn beds struck me as relatively tame, like a sex comedy set in a college dorm. Though today the place feels airy and open, during its heyday many of the rooms were cramped and dark.
It was common for liberti to become sex workers, but some of the workers here were slaves with no choice about what they did. Still, Levin-Richardson has uncovered evidence that the women of the lupanar were not in some horrific Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. Many took rebellious pride in their work. Levin-Richardson spent years studying the city’s purpose-built brothel for clues about what its employees were like. She found some of her answers in dirty graffiti, much like the fake election poster about “cunt licking.” Though it was long believed that the plentiful graffiti in the lupanar was written by men, Levin-Richardson points out that a great deal of it is clearly authored by women. Female literacy was common in Pompeii, and literate slaves helped their masters keep household accounts like the liberta in the portrait at the House of Terentius Neo. At least a few of the sex workers here had to be literate because she found graffiti written by a person who identifies herself as female. One simple sentence, written on the lupanar’s wall, reads: “fututa sum hic.” It means “I (a woman) was fucked here.”10
Other graffiti are boastful claims from women about their sexual prowess. Several women identify themselves as “fellatrix” or “fellatris,” which is a female noun version of the verb “to suck.” One possible translation might be “queen of the cocksuckers.” Particularly fascinating is a phrase written in the brothel’s hallway: “Murtis · Felatris.” The stylized letters, complete with middle dot, imitate the way names and titles of prominent men were written on the Forum walls. Murtis, Queen of the Cocksuckers, wrote her name in the same fashion a Rector provinciae would, turning her marginal role as a prostitute into something as exalted as a governor. Other women took on the title “fututrix,” converting the verb futuere (to fuck in the active role, to penetrate) into a noun that could be translated as “fucktress” or “fuckmistress.” Women who called themselves fututrix were not just playing with the idea of a political title like Murtis did. They were also claiming a dominant social role. In Roman culture, men made a strong distinction between the penetrating and penetrated person during sex; the penetrated person was viewed as low status, like women or slaves. As a fututrix, the woman was the penetrator, and thus her client was subordinate.
I stepped out of the flow of people streaming through the lupanar and into one of the rooms with its now-bare plaster bed. In the 70s CE, this place was piled with blankets and pillows, lit by lamps, and full of freshly painted graffiti proclaiming its occupants to be as elite as the men who owned them. By looking beyond the writings of rich men, into the back streets and slave quarters, we find evidence for a society where rigid Roman social roles were being literally rewritten from the bottom up. Former slaves like Amarantus and the Vettii brothers could achieve wealth and influence. Women like Julia Felix could be property owners. And the names of sex workers like Murtis would be remembered for thousands of years, while the names of her clients burned to dust.
And yet, despite over two centuries of researchers excavating Pompeii, very few people understood the world inhabited by Murtis and Amarantus until recently. Partly that’s because data archaeology has given us new tools to explore the lives of nonelites. But it’s also due to a more fundamental problem with the way we study history. Though people of the 19th and 20th centuries treasured Pompeii, returning to it repeatedly for further excavation, there were parts of its culture they wanted to forget. When they came upon sculptures of genitalia or dirty graffiti, they locked these things away in “secret cabinets” because it was too hard to step outside their Christian values and look at those artifacts with Roman eyes. Only in 2000 was the “secret cabinet” in the Naples Museum opened to the general public. Roman sexuality is so alien to modern people’s sensibilities in the West that it was practically illegible. Museum curators in previous centuries treated lucky penis charms like pornography, and historians didn’t consider prostitutes worthy of study.
But turning away from understanding this part of Roman culture prevents us from fully appreciating th
e social fabric of a place like Pompeii, where privates were quite literally public.
Roman toilet etiquette
I barely glanced at the arches and pedestals in the Forum. I was hunting for an unmarked room to the northeast of this hallowed hall for elite politicians. I finally found it, identifiable only by a single window placed far above eye level in its high wall. Inside, a trough along the wall was choked with dirt and weeds. It was one of the city’s few public bathrooms, and its design was as jarring as seeing a disembodied penis painted next to a shopkeeper’s door. Today it’s difficult to make out the shape of the toilets in what was once a rather dark, enclosed space with that one high window to let out the stench. But with the help of Olga Koloski-Ostrow, a Brandeis University classicist who has written an in-depth study of Pompeii’s sewers,11 I was able to piece it together. Along one wall ran a deep trench that was once full of gushing water headed for the sewer. A few stone blocks jutting from the wall marked where there would have been a bench with several evenly spaced U-shaped portals for the great men of the Forum to lift their togas and relieve themselves. “There’s about 30 centimeters between seats,” Koloski-Ostrow told me. “It was pretty standardized. Unless you’re very fat, you’re not rubbing thighs with the guy next door.”
Still, there were none of the privacy barriers between toilets that we expect in bathrooms today. Everybody was sitting nearly cheek-to-cheek on a bench. And there was even less personal space when it came to toilet paper. When a Forum visitor was finished doing his business—these public toilets were largely reserved for men—he would grab a stick with a sponge on the end called a xylospongium, dip it in a shallow gutter of running water at his feet, thread it through a hole in the bench below his bum, and wipe. In public and private toilets, xylospongia were shared.
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