Pompei 12 tracce di vita intorno al denaro

Step 1 - Marine gate entrance

Whoever sits here should read this before anything else: if you feel like making love, ask Attica; she goes for sixteen asses. This offer of love for sale was incised at the Marine Gate, near a masonry seat attached to the city wall.

Love for sale

CIL IV 1751

Whoever sits here should read this before anything else: if you feel like making love, ask Attica; she goes for sixteen asses.

Comment

To those who came from the port to Pompeii through the steep ramp of Via Marina, a seat placed next to the gate offered a moment's rest before entering the city.

It is here that a woman with an exotic Greek name makes her explicit overtures to wayfarers perhaps just returned from a long voyage: "If you want me, ask for me and with sixteen asses you will enjoy refined pleasures."

A very great number of Pompeian inscriptions list prices for performing various kinds of love, ranging from just one to sixteen asses, for meetings with more sophisticated women, often with names of Oriental origin.

Generally, however, service prices ranged between two and four asses, affordable by almost everybody and equivalent to about a glass of wine or a loaf of bread.

These "basic necessities" were in fact prices controlled to make them accessible to the poor, slaves and the common people, so as to keep these social groups quiet.