The Clothing of Roman Prostitutes--Still a Mystery

Wall painting from the Villa San Marco, Stabiae.
Is she a prostitute?  How could we tell?

More than two years ago, I did some reading in an attempt to learn what kinds of clothing were likely worn by prostitutes in ancient Rome.  The short answer to that question appeared to be that scholars don't really know what the prostitutes wore, because the written evidence on the subject is, at best, lacking in context and difficult to interpret.

I received a copy of one of the books I mentioned when I originally discussed this topic, Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (Faraone, Christopher A. & McClure, Laura, eds., University of Wisconsin Press, February 6, 2006), as a birthday present this year.  Thus, I've had the opportunity to review not only Olsen's article about the clothing distinctions between matrons and whores, but also to read the other articles in that book about prostitution in antiquity.

When I first wrote about this topic, a Roman-era reenactor commented to chide me for (apparently) accepting the idea that there was such a thing as sacred prostitution in ancient Rome. Having read Prostitutes and Courtesans, it's clear that, if anything, he understated the case.  The weight of modern scholarship maintains that there is no evidence for sacred prostitution anywhere in the ancient world, period. The belief that there was such a thing appears to have arisen from a variety of translation errors (and perhaps some overheated scholarly imaginations) during the Victorian period and afterward.  

With that idea in mind, I re-read Kelly Olsen's essay in this volume, "Matrona and Whore:  Clothing and Definition in Roman Antiquity" with a view toward ascertaining whether I had missed any useful information in it.  Unfortunately, Kelly's conclusions amount to saying that there is no way to be certain what Roman prostitutes wore.  As I read her essay, those conclusions are:

• Roman society attributed specific symbolism to different types of costume; for example, the stola and palla denoted the proper Roman matron, and, due to Augustus's statute, the toga, when worn by a woman, denoted loose morals (either as an adulteress or a whore).  Male costume also carried symbolism of various kinds.
• However, we have no evidence that women typically wore the costume symbolic of their rank and status, and some evidence that many of them did not. 
• Thus, to quote from Olsen's conclusion, "Matron and whore were surely distinguishable from each other on the street but perhaps not as easily as our authors [i.e., the Roman authors whose remarks form a large part of our evidence for prostitutes' clothing] could have wished (and certainly they are exaggerating the similarities between matron and prostitute for rhetorical purposes)." (pages 200-201).

A logical conclusion from Olsen's research is that real women in ancient Rome varied their clothing choices deliberately, to evoke clothing symbolism that suited their individual purposes.  This topic is squarely addressed in a more recent article on Roman women's clothing, by Mary Harlow of the University of Leicester, titled "Dressing to Please Themselves:  Clothing Choices for Roman Women," in Dress and Identity (Harlow, Mary, ed, University of Birmingham IAA Interdisciplinary Series: Studies in Archaeology, History, Literature and Art 2, 2012).  A copy of Harlow's essay can be downloaded for free from this page.

In  the "Dressing to Please Themselves" essay, Harlow seeks to determine to what extent Roman women had and used free choice in selecting particular attire to present a particular image of themselves to the public.  Her conclusion, based largely upon the quantity of Roman cosmetic tools found by archaeologists and literary evidence of the wide availability of fabrics in different fibers (including silk, which was expensive and available in improper transparent weaves) and colors, is that women likely did alter their public image by varying their clothing and cosmetics--though the evidence of their having done so remains sparse:

Evidence demonstrates that within a relatively limited repertoire of styles a range of choice existed in terms of colour and textiles, and also that colour was very much part of the Roman visual world. The constant refrain against female adornment throughout the time span of the Roman empire suggests that women certainly were exploiting the market that was available to them despite any disquiet it might cause their menfolk. Roman writers were adept at manipulating the image of the dressed (and undressed) woman to suit their agenda and presumably women were equally as adept at manipulating their own draped clothing to suit their agenda, or at least give them power over their immediate social space. (page 43)

My conclusion, after reading the analyses of Olsen, Harlow, McGinn, and others, is that we cannot generalize about what Roman prostitutes wore for the same reasons we cannot generalize about what modern prostitutes wear--because individual women choose whether and how to signal their status by their clothing, or may decide to give false or misleading information about that status in different situations.  A woman may choose dress like a prostitute to conceal her identity, or for sexual stimulation, and a prostitute may dress like a high-class matron to conceal her status as a prostitute, or to attract a different sort of customer.  Moreover, prostitutes are not, to our knowledge, depicted in sculpture or fresco art, so we cannot even discern what the conventional "prostitute's toga" looked like.  Without further evidence, the clothing of Roman prostitutes likely will continue to remain a mystery.  

Who Is The Girl In That Toga?

For years, I had been hearing, usually as a throw-away line, the repeated claim that prostitutes in ancient Rome wore the toga. Implied (though not always stated) in this claim was the idea that they were the only female toga wearers.

Recently, I started thinking more seriously about this idea. I wondered what the support for it was, and whether it is true. In addition, I started to wonder why prostitutes were wearing the toga, and how the garment that represented a man's pride in his Roman citizenship somehow became transmogrified into a woman's badge of shame.

So I began attempting to gather information on both issues. First, I sought to confirm (or refute) the main point that prostitutes wore the toga. I started checking out websites first (because that was easiest). It soon became clear that most of them were simply repeating what they had heard from other third (or fourth or fifth) hand sources, without even providing any references for potential documentation, let alone any rationale. However, there are a few that are worth at least a brief examination.

Wikipedia's article on prostitution in ancient Rome says simply, "Female prostitutes were the only Roman women who wore the toga, a formal garment otherwise only male citizens were permitted to wear. This crossing of gender boundaries has been interpreted variously. Expensive courtesans wore gaudy garments of see-through silk." At the end of this passage is a citation to the following source:

Catharine Edwards, "Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome," in Roman Sexualities (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 81.

There is, interestingly, no reference to prostitutes in Wikipedia's essay on the toga itself. That article refers, albeit somewhat vaguely, to a fact I ultimately confirmed elsewhere; namely, that the toga was originally worn by male and female Romans alike. The web page on Roman costume created by Barbara McManus of the College of New Rochelle states this fact, but adds an odd conclusion that merely whetted my curiosity:

Although women had apparently worn togas in the early years of Rome, by the middle of the Republican era the only women who wore togas were common prostitutes. Unlike men, therefore, women had an item of clothing that symbolized lack of (or loss of) respectability—the toga. While the toga was a mark of honor for a man, it was a mark of disgrace for a woman. Prostitutes of the lowest class, the street-walker variety, were compelled to wear a plain toga made of coarse wool to announce their profession, and there is some evidence that women convicted of adultery might have been forced to wear “the prostitute's toga” as a badge of shame.

Another web article claims: "In the early republic, clothing for women was simple and indistinguishable from that of men. Both sexes initially wore plain woollen togas. This changed by the middle of the republic when distinctions in the clothing became clearer. The toga became an almost exclusively male garment. The only women who were allowed to wear it were prostitutes who had to wear rough woollen togas in public to advertise their trade."

This site, an on-line version which appears to be an online version of William Smith's A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, (John Murray, London, 1875), avers that "The Stola was the characteristic dress of the Roman matrons as the toga was of the Roman men (Cic. Phil. II.18). Hence the meretrices were not allowed to wear it, but only a dark-coloured toga (Tibull. IV.10.3; Mart. I.36.8)". Clearly, then, there are references in classical literature to the wearing of some kind of toga by prostitutes.  Professor Lillian May Wilson, in her landmark work The Roman Toga (originally published by Johns Hopkins Press, 1924), confirms this:

According to literary references, the toga in very early times was also worn by women as well as by men, and we shall see that the wearing of it by young girls was continued at least until about the beginning of the imperial period. But in later times the plain inference from literary passages is that the wearing of it was discontinued by women excepting those of the disreputable sort." (p. 27) (emphasis supplied).

Professor Wilson cites Juvenal (II, 68) and Martial (X, 52) for the statement I have quoted above. Unfortunately, I am no Latin scholar, and Google Translate makes a terrible hash of the relevant passages from Martial--so terrible that I cannot make anything useful enough of them to be worth quoting here.

In any event, there appears to be grounds in Roman literature for believing that all Romans once wore the toga, and when wearing the toga ceased to be customary for women, it somehow remained the custom to compel loose women to wear it.  That makes no sense to me. Why should a garment that was once worn by both sexes but ultimately was identified with men be associated with disgrace when worn by a woman? More precisely, why should the garment that symbolized Roman citizenship when worn by a man be forced upon a woman as a symbol of sexual disgrace?

Anne Duncan, in an essay published in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (University of Wisconsin Press, February 6, 2006), suggests that the symbolism involved with prostitutes wearing the toga may relate to the fact that prostitutes, unlike decent women, were expected to act for themselves in the world--like men--and that this was the reason they continued to wear the toga after decent women had ceased to do so:

But why the toga, of all garments? It was not only because it signified that the prostitute had lusts more appropriate to a man.  Wearing the toga, the ultimate signifier of Roman citizen manhood, marked out the female prostitute as a public figure, while working both to naturalize and to privilege the customary garment of respectable Roman women, the palla. ... Respectable Roman women, while apparently not as secluded as women were (at least ideally) in classical Athens, did not go out in public unattended, and they did not conduct business in the public eye alone.  The female prostitute, on the other hand, made her living in the streets, or sitting in front of a brothel, or, if she was very unfortunate, in places like graveyards; she worked in the public eye, and she worked alone. She acted, in this way, more like a citizen man, out on business in the Forum, than a woman, tending to stay at home, or go out accompanied by servants/male guardians. (p. 270)

I wonder if there wasn't a slightly different reason why prostitutes retained the toga in republican/early imperial Rome. In the ancient world, prostitutes often were a kind of priestess. In Rome, citizen men also performed certain priestly functions for their households, typically while togated. Perhaps the Roman prostitute once had a similar function, which she discharged while wearing the toga, the ultimate Roman garment, and her association with the garment remained after her religious or ceremonial function had long since been discarded.

In my search, I learned that there is a book-length study of Roman prostitution: Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law In Ancient Rome, by Thomas A. J.McGinn (Oxford University Press, Jan. 30, 2003).  I intend to track down a copy of this book (by interlibrary loan, if all else fails), and see how Professor McGinn addresses the subject.  (The Google Books preview I link to above, sadly, omits most of the discussion of the wearing of togas by prostitutes.)  Hopefully, Professor McGinn will have mustered sufficient evidence to permit at least some reasonable inferences as to the answer to my question, as well as some more detail about what a prostitute's toga looked like.

EDIT:  (March 16, 2012)  I just put in a request to obtain a copy of McGinn's book by interlibrary loan.  Once I obtain and read it, I'll see where I go with this.  Possibly his bibliography will suggest a lead, or there'll be something in the text I don't know of yet that will give me a clue where to go next.  Thanks for all the wonderful comments so far!