Whores in Pompeii??
Slabs of volcanic stones formed streets that clearly contained imprints from chariot tracks. Those ruts in the roads were deepest near the famous brothel with its well preserved one foot square frescos advertising the various positions available for about the cost of a half liter of wine at today's prices. The positions advertised were not all that imaginative but if you are interested, google whorehouse in ancient Pompeii and pictures of these restored frescos will appear. For the sake of keeping this blog "R" rated, I will not show them here.
The actual cubicles were hardly larger than 6 x 6, with a stone bed with a pillow against the back wall of each room, covered, presumably with blankets. On the streets nearby were phallic symbols carved into the paving stones with the business ends pointing towards the brothel. The guide explained that such symbols did not signal widespread decadence, but rather a healthy respect for the principle of fertility. Ya, right. But I suspect Rome was no more or less sex-soaked than any other time. If you were to suddenly bury in ash any given city of 20,000, on any given age, you might well preserve such a place. The explosion of pornography on the internet may, however, be a quantum leap (or quantum fall) in human degeneration. Certainly what troubled me more than the activities of sailors in Pompeii in 79 AD was the training center for gladiators who submitted themselves to rigorous discipline of their guilds, where even a slight infraction was punished by time in chains. On the day of the eruption in 79 AD, 30 gladiators died in chains.
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