The slave-prostitutes of Pompeii find solidarity and empowerment

Author: Elodie Harper Publisher: Head of Zeus Year: 2021 Pages: 454

Set in 74AD (the Vesuvius eruption took place five years later, in August 79AD), this story takes us to that hotbed of pleasure, sybarites and commercial sex that was Pompeii.

Amara was once a beloved daughter of a doctor in Greece until her father’s death plunged her family into abject poverty. She is highly educated, beautiful and determined.

Her father had no sons and so he imbued her with all of his knowledge. Amara thought this meant her future would look very much like his, but she was sorely mistaken.

Bartered off, like live-stock, and at the end sold by her own mother, she ends up enslaved in Pompeii’s brothel, owned by a man she despises.

Sharp, clever and resourceful, Amara is forced to dissemble, to hide her talents. For now her only value lies in the desire she can arouse in others.

But Amara’s spirit is far from broken. By day, she walks the streets with the Wolf Den’s other women, her fellow slaves, finding comfort in the laughter and dreams they share.

For the streets of Pompeii are alive with opportunity. Out here, even the lowest slave can secure a reversal in fortune. Amara has learned that everything in this city has its price.

The city is a hotspot, welcoming people from all over the Mediterranean, celebrating the perfunctory rites of the old religion with its surfeit of feasts and always with sex as the common thread, levelling social distancing which otherwise is strict and rigid.

From the very opening chapter and right until the end, this is a very traumatic read.

Scenes of rape, violence and both mental and physical abuse feature repeatedly and ensure that the reader becomes aware of the truly hopeless situation these women were forced into.

There are, however, moments of purity and also of happiness. These are scant and fleeting but they do break up the monotony and degradation that were Amara’s, and the other women’s, existence. Interaction with the other women is often the source of hard-fought-for joy. Together they grow to love and find strength in one another.

There are men too in the story, obviously, and not all of them are hardened slave-drivers. Some are ordinary blokes with humane sensitivity but, at the end, quite ineffective. Others come out from real history, like the Admiral, Pliny the Elder.

Elodie Harper is the daughter of actress Suzy Kendall. She is a reporter and presenter at ITV News Anglia. Her story Wild Swimming won the 2016 Bazaar of Bad Dreams short story competition, which was judged by Stephen King.

Her job as a journalist

(she also worked at Channel 4 News) has seen her join one of the most secretive wings of the Church of Scientology and cover the far right hip hop scene in Berlin, as well as crime reporting in Norfolk where her first two novels were set – The Binding Song and The Death Knock.

The Wolf Den is the first in a trilogy of novels about the lives of women in ancient Pompeii.