Prostitution in antiquity has long interested scholars (R. Flemming, JRS 89 (1999), 38–61; A. Glazebrook and M. M. Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean (2011); T. A. J. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution (2004)). The ‘world's oldest profession’ continues to inspire new frameworks conceiving of sex labour, people who practised it, those who promoted it and the clients who patronised it, most recently Anise K. Strong's monograph on ‘the fluidity and mutability of roles of “whore” and “wife” in the Roman world’ (1). S., who has worked on reception of Roman sexuality in TV and film, analyses the complex relationship between meretrices and matronae in literature, epigraphy and material culture from republican Rome (second century b.c.e.) to the High Empire (third century c.e.), primarily, but not exclusively, in Italy.

S.’s introduction asserts that it was not women's sexual activity that elicited men's distrust of meretrices, but rather such women's lack of economic ties to a husband or family; praise of virtue or accusation of vice were dependent on perceived loyalty to a masculine partner. This qualification allowed elite men writers to shame matronae for perceived ‘whore-like’ behaviour, while elevating ‘whores’ who demonstrated (economic) self-sacrifice to their men. Also included is a taxonomy of S.’s terminology, including ‘whore’, ‘prostitute’ and ‘courtesan’, though it is under-defined with confusing overlap of labels. S. then explores (ch. 1) the competing archetypes of the femina bona (wool-working, fertile, faithful to husband/family) and mala meretrix (selfish, greedy, promiscuous, independent); the former publicly chooses and performs virtue over vice and saves money for her family, while the latter, lacking a permanent bond to any man, alienates Roman men from their wives and their wealth. These transgressions, more than sexual activity, ‘brand them as whores’ (25). But the avaricious prostitute, S. suggests, was a literary fabrication rather than an historical figure, an outlet for elite anxiety over perceived or feared infiltration of elite social circles or a disruption of Roman social hierarchy.

S. next (ch. 2) examines the actions of five literary or historical ‘bonae’ meretrices and the behaviours that set them apart: they demonstrate the loyalty of wives while never seeking to actually become them. Their self-sacrifice reinforces ideologies of feminine virtue and reprimands Roman citizen wives who fail to measure up to the exempla. Ch. 3 explores the shifting cultural attitude towards meretrices in places of power, asserting that in the Republic, meretrices with access to powerful men (like Chelidon and Volumnia Cytheris) destabilised the Roman social order by usurping legitimate masculine power and displacing respectable matronae, according to authors like Cicero. By the High Empire, however, with political power removed from the Senate to the emperor's palace, an influential meretrix/concubine (Acte, Caenis) was a lesser evil for authors like Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Plutarch than an imperial Roman wife or mother with the power of family and status. Ch. 4 analyses the literary treatment of matronae who operated in the public sphere for independent gain; accusations of sexual misconduct and the label of meretrix were applied, but the women's economic agency seems to have been the real threat. S. seeks also to identify why some elite women received the title of meretrix, while others considered promiscuous (like Augustus’ daughter Julia) did not.

S. next emphasises archaeological material, first examining the difficulty of assessing erotic art for evidence of prostitution (ch. 5), then the problems inherent in identifying or labelling brothels (ch. 6). Because there are no definitive representations of prostitutes in art, identification must be made from contexts, like visual accoutrements, image location and portrayed activities, all problematic for the scholar. S. departs from A. Wallace-Hadrill's brothel-identification model (in T. J. Cornell and K. Lomas (eds), Urban Society in Roman Italy (1995), 39–62) to challenge the old notion that meretrices and matronae were segregated in the urban landscape and proposes new criteria for assessment of potential brothels. Ch. 7 analyses the roles of meretrices and matronae in religious festivals, asserting that in some festivals, moral/social status defined participation, while others ‘offered another chance to blend and undermine social and moral distinctions between these groups’ (172). The volume ends with an under-developed extension (ch. 8) of the ideological concept of the ‘whore’ from Christian Late Antiquity to the modern era.

S. has attempted the weighty task of bringing together the disparate literary, historical and archaeological evidence for prostitution in ancient Rome and imposing a unifying theory upon it. Seeking to ‘fill in the void between the two theorized poles of meretrix and matrona … and to deconstruct any supposed structuralist dichotomy’ (209), S. reveals the permeability of social labels and their use in controlling Roman women. In this aim S. is successful, as the stereotypes of and invective against malae meretrices establish, reinforce and perpetuate expectations for the bonae matronae, and these expectations in turn further inculcate the status of meretrices as ‘Other’ in a kind of ideological ouroboros. The monograph is not without flaws: New Comedy is a significant source of information on perceptions about ancient sex labourers as well as their perceptions about themselves (albeit as voiced by a masculine, but non-elite, non-Roman author), but S. mostly ignores it in favour of elegy or satire. Titles are misspelled (Cistaria for Cistellaria), quotations are misattributed (lines in Truculentus are attributed to a character from Menaechmi), or blanket statements are made without noting exceptions (notably, ‘the character of the prostitute who willingly gives up her lover does not appear in Menander’ (46–7) ignores Habrotonon in Epitrepontes, who does just that). Also contentious are the labels of women in elegy — debate continues over whether some are wives or meretrices, particularly Arethusa in Propertius 4.3, whom S. designates ‘wife’ without noting scholarship to the contrary (S. L. James, Mnemosyne 65.3 (2012), 425–44). The ambiguity of this status actually serves S.’s argument and is a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, this monograph is a useful revisitation of old tropes, and S. presents a new theoretical framework for unpacking Roman moral ideologies.