Judging by the crowds of people who regularly block the Vicolo del Lupanare in Pompeii, the ancient world's only purpose-built brothel (VII.12.18–20) is a ‘must see’ tourist location. Its overwhelmingly positive reviews on TripAdvisor® are mostly of a theme, a curious mixture of titillation and disgust. They emphasise the dank nature of the space, the harshness of the beds and the smallness of its rooms. Its sex workers are also written off in similarly utilitarian terms, faceless individuals, quickly used and forgotten. It would seem that we know nothing. In this enjoyable volume L.-R. builds upon much of the pioneering work on the materiality of Pompeian brothels by authors such as A. Wallace-Hadrill and T. McGinn, and of A. Varone on the graffiti, to present a richly textured encounter with the structure and its people. The purpose-built brothel is revealed as a place of relative comfort and conviviality. It offered something more emotionally satisfying than a perfunctory encounter around the back of the tombs, through crafting an environment that catered to the penetrative masculine desires of its clients, for whom such a role may not have been part of their own exploited lives. The voices of its prostitutes are also heard, no longer abstract projections of sexual desire painted onto the walls advertising services, but through their material culture and graffiti a welcome view of their agency is revealed. This is, however, no sanitised world of happy hookers and satisfied johns, but a vision of a particular social context and of the exploitation and oppression of prostitute and customer alike, and their struggle to escape and reclaim their humanity, if only momentarily, from this.

The volume is divided into two main sections: Part 1 examines the material evidence of the ground floor brothel and its upper storey in terms of their architecture, material and visual culture, and graffiti, devoting a chapter to each; Part 2 explores the people, its female and male prostitutes and their clients, attempting to come to terms with the physical, social and emotional experiences of these marginalised groups. Together these two sections comprise a major reassessment of the evidence that is unafraid to confront received wisdom and to make insightful connections and interpretations. For example, in Chapter 1 the architecture and rudimentary decoration of the brothel is used to make a link with other low-status establishments for eating, drinking and lodging. An example of this type of architecture are the bars containing masonry triclinia (e.g. I.11.16). Obviously, in the brothel there are masonry beds rather than dining couches, but like the bar couches they drew their inspiration from higher status furniture. When taken together, it is apparent that the interior space of the brothel was designed to emulate a refined and relatively private boudoir experience, albeit one that was very much on a budget.

The people of the brothel start to come into focus in the consideration of the material finds (Chapter 2) and the graffiti (Chapter 3). Speed and throughput do not appear to have been a priority with the suggestion that the prostitutes ate and drank with their clients and may also have provided them with shaves, alongside other forms of bodily care. This was a lively group who scratched their names, greetings, conversations, threats and boasts into the plaster wall painting. Again, the time taken to create or participate in this literary and visual world continues to reinforce the image of a leisurely experience and of a community. Evocatively, L.-R. draws attention to the flickering lamps within the rooms and the potential for a sense of motion to be created in the incisions, ‘phalluses could seem to grow and ejaculate (or on the contrary, to shrink)’ (p. 46). The uneven distribution of the graffiti, however, with its concentration in the easternmost two rooms would suggest that, while all the rooms were used by multiple prostitutes and the same prostitute could work out of different rooms, it is likely that the facility was not working to its maximum capacity. Whether this makes it a ‘failed [business] experiment’ (p. 116), though, is more difficult to be certain of, but what it does open up are discussions about the types of experiences that could be on offer from different types of prostitutes elsewhere across the economic and social hierarchy from common streetwalkers to high-class courtesans.

The erotic frescoes from the brothel provide further insights into its clientele and their desires. The customers seem to range from servile to freeborn, ‘from those who could write only their name [and likely those who could not], to those who could quote a snippet of Vergil’ (p. 99). Compared with the imagery of erotically themed frescoes from elsewhere in the city, notably from the apodyterium of the Suburban Baths (VII.16.a), those from the brothel (investigated in Chapter 4) are almost coy. Rather than depicting a world of elite leisure, luxury and fantasy-sex, they were more simply designed to ‘offer a vision of normative sexual acts between generic individuals whom any client could easily identify and objectify’ (p. 65). For those who worked in the service of others, this lack of ‘problematic’ acts and visual status markers was deliberately done to almost shield the servile from any memories of being the sexual playthings of their current or former owners. Here in the brothel they could eat and drink, reclining like free men, and engage in the type of penetrative masculine sex depicted in the frescoes that might have been denied to them beyond its walls (Chapter 6).

The sexual and emotional exploitation of the brothel's female and male prostitutes is traced in its graffiti and material culture (Chapters 7 and 8). Relationships were forged between themselves and also with clients as part of the experience on offer, perhaps as a way of creating longer-term bonds of benefit to the prostitute. The tables could also occasionally be turned upon their clients through scorn and derision and, at least for the male prostitutes, through the threat of sexual violence. Far from the generic projections of desire seen in the frescoes, the graffiti written by the workers are a witness to their voices, agency and carefully crafted personas.

With its upstairs comprising a number of rental spaces, rather than lodgings for higher-status clients (Chapter 5), the brothel can be seen to be part of the sort of diverse investment portfolios that were likely to have been common in Pompeii in the years following the ad 62 earthquake. Downstairs, it offered something unique in the city, at least as far as can be seen from the building and its contents, a leisurely penetrative masculine sexual experience for a varied, albeit comparatively poor, clientele. Through L.-R.’s impressive investigation of every aspect of the structural, material, visual and epigraphic evidence we see a cleverly constructed business model catering to a clearly thought out, although perhaps a somewhat niche, market. While some may quibble at elements of the interpretation and the ways in which evidence is occasionally moulded to fit in with the prevailing direction of the narrative, for this reviewer such concerns are secondary to an overall admiration for what is presented. The focus upon a specific building and its contents moves the debate away from arguments about the moral zoning of the landscape and the visibility of prostitution within it. Instead, L.-R. gives voices and agency to the people of the brothel in a nuanced exploration of low-status individuals in Roman culture.