Brazen prostitutes – hark to the real voices of Rome
extraordinary place in history: there’s no other time so distant from the present about which we know so much.
De la Bédoyère’s command of these disparate sources is masterful, and his curation of them forms the backbone of the book. Starting each chapter from a broad theme – food, sex, death – he unfolds reams of evidence for his reader. Almost every paragraph introduces a new name, anecdote, episode or archaeological discovery: one short section on prostitution draws on a legal case, a folk-legend involving a night with the demigod Hercules, an anecdote about Pompey the Great’s love life, the epitaph of an “honest” madam and two fully priced advertisements.
The breadth of de la Bédoyère’s subject-matter does lead to some unsupportable generalisations – can we really say the Romans were “relaxed about sex”? – and his structuring of the evidence has a conversational unpredictability that will frustrate some readers. On one page, you’re in Egypt with a 2nd-century BC diplomatic mission; turn over, and you’re in the praetorian garrison of 1stcentury AD Rome.
But his approach has undeniable appeal. Populus is filled with oddities. A delicacy known as “Trojan pig” was made by stuffing the belly of a pig with other animals; the austere statesman Cato the Elder claimed only to touch his wife when it thundered; the emperor Commodus decapitated African ostriches in the arena with specially-designed curved arrows; Rome’s best doctors were called to report on the deteriorating health of a wax effigy of the late emperor
Pertinax, who had been murdered months before; finally, the effigy was declared dead and given a state funeral.
The anecdote-heavy approach in Populus isn’t just lively, it’s consequential. The norms that governed Roman life were – like ours – never set down as written rules. They were flexible, open to reinterpretation, the result of constant negotiation between past ideals and present realities. Thanks to de la Bédoyère, they emerge here as they would have been felt: the cumulative product of thousands of decisions made by individual Romans every day.