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Hi! So the first thing to state is that it’s impossible to answer the title question, how many women ended up in prostitution in ancient Rome, in any sort of rigorously quantified way. We just don’t have the evidence to attempt an actual count. We can attempt an impressionistic answer (and spoiler alert: the impression our sources give is lots), but the records we would need to provide solid numbers do not now exist and, for most parts of the Roman world, probably never did.

That said, we can go over the state of the impressionistic evidence for numbers, and we can also make a stab at the social views of prostitution (which are better attested) and the role of slavery and trafficking in the supply of prostitutes. Let’s dive in.

How Many Prostitutes – Impressionistic Evidence

So the reason why we can’t precisely answer that question is that our literary sources just are not interested in counting up prostitutes for us, and even in the few parts of the Roman world where formal records might have been made (there’s some suggestion that prostitutes might have been registered by magistrates in the city of Rome), these records were not preserved and copied through the intervening thousands of years. Sources that traditionally supplement the literary record also have little to say; it’s difficult to archaeologically distinguish a crib from a bedroom or (despite some valiant attempts) the skeleton of a prostitute from that of any other woman. A lot of prostitution took place in multipurpose venues such as taverns, theaters, or temples rather than dedicated buildings, and even dedicated brothels appear to have been mixed in indiscriminately with other housing stock, not zoned into red-light districts, so archaeologically they are also hard to pick out from the crowd of other buildings except when they are unusually well preserved (as at Pompeii). Prostitution is not the kind of profession Romans were likely to proudly advertise in inscriptions on their tombs. A lot of the material culture associated with prostitution – clothing, perfume, beauty products, etc. – is archaeologically ephemeral and is not in any case unique to prostitution. And even when we have sources like street graffiti that calls women prostitutes, (as we do in Pompeii), it’s usually impossible to know whether any particular case is truth or insult. Do modern writings on bathroom grout provide reliable, trustworthy information about the people they discuss?

Now that we’ve covered a few of the challenges, Chapter 2 of Thomas McGinn’s The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World – A Study of Social History and the Brothel briefly covers much of what we are able to say about the scale of prostitution: 

“Prostitution was, on any estimate, widespread. […] it was commonplace and accessible to customers and did not show any signs of being tucked away in remote areas of the Roman city. […] A Roman customer might encounter prostitutes in bars, hotels, outside circuses and amphitheaters, and at festivals and fairs.”

 As you can see, there is a noticeable lack of hard numbers!

And an important caveat here is that McGinn is obliged to make some use of comparative evidence (that is to say, looking at better records from other societies with prostitution and using it to fill in the gaps, trusting that there are cross-cultural similarities), even to support statements as broad and nonspecific as prostitution was, on any estimate, widespread. This should again highlight the weakness of our evidence.

McGinn also spends some time covering evidence for the prices charged by Roman prostitutes (quite cheap as far as we can tell, which might suggest there was no scarcity of supply) and the literary evidence for where prostitutes might be encountered (in any and every part of the Roman urban landscape, which also does not suggest low numbers). Putting these various threads together, despite the weakness of evidence, all the evidence we do have points to quite a lot of prostitution going on in Roman towns and cities.

Yet another caveat here, though, is that prostitution is definitely spoken of in our literary sources as a characteristically urban vice, something associated with town and city life. Practically all of our other evidence (brothels, graffiti, etc.) is also urban. While towns and cities were at the heart of Roman civilization, the majority of the population were always rural, and I think, based both on what our sources say and on consideration of the economics of prostitution (which should aim for areas densely populated with customers), we should infer that prostitution was not nearly as much of an institution in rural areas. Most prostitutes likely plied their trade in towns and cities, and their customers likely either dwelt there or went there occasionally.

We might speculate that any sex trade that did exist in the countryside may have been more likely part-time and opportunistic – an occasional side gig – rather than a full-time occupation. That would also suggest the possibility of a different supply structure – perhaps more weighted towards poor free women whose services might occasionally have been sold by themselves or the husbands or fathers whose power they were in, and less weighted towards slavery (on which see below). But the record of rural life is far worse than even the gap-filled urban record, so this is just guessing about what seems plausible. We really can say very little with confidence about rural sex trade.

(Before moving on, I want to mention that McGinn’s book, cited above, spends quite a lot of its attention specifically on evidence from Pompeii, including an entire chapter on the Pompeiian building we have most confidently identified as a brothel, quite possibly the same brothel that you mentioned visiting. If you are interested in further reading, it is definitely the place to start.)

Social Views of Prostitution

Questions about the status of prostitution, social views of it, etc. are better able to be answered. With the important caveat that a lot of our literary evidence comes from the elite – who might well look down on brothels as dirty, violent, disreputable establishments that catered to the poor and rowdy masses – the view that comes down to us is overwhelmingly not one that treats prostitution as just another line of work. Disgrace, dishonor, pollution, moral filth – prostitution is absolutely slammed in Roman literature. It was not just one example of a disgraceful profession but the paradigmatic disgraceful profession to which all else that was disreputable could be compared. To be a prostitute was to be decisively and permanently excluded from the community of honor, the body of respectable citizens, to the extent that even prostitutes who were not slaves were actually stripped of important civil rights that attended honorable citizen status. If you were a streetwalking prostitute, the most honorable of Roman women, priestesses, were supposed to avoid even looking at you, and in public these priestesses had attendants who ranged ahead of them and drove prostitutes out of the priestess’s path so that seeing them would not pollute holy eyes. If you were a brothel inmate, no honorable Roman woman could even enter under that roof without calling her social status into grave question, much less behave like the women who worked there.

To sum up, prostitution was not just any old profession in Roman eyes, not even just one that happened to be disreputable, it was a polar opposite of honorability. Female honor was not just different from prostitution but defined in opposition to it. Likewise, though the image of the male prostitute was less iconic than of the female throughout antiquity, it was one incompatible with and opposite to male honor.

For further related reading, I touch on the disgracefulness that attended actresses (relevantly, by association with prostitution) in this recent answer.