Episode Details

What if one of the most celebrated intellectual cultures in human history — a civilization that gave us philosophy, democracy, and the foundations of Western thought — built its social life around a system that turned most of the people providing pleasure into property?

That is not a rhetorical question. It is, unfortunately, a historical description.

We are moving forward in time, from Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East to the Mediterranean — specifically to Athens in its classical period, roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and then to Rome at its imperial height. Two civilizations that still shape our assumptions about law, democracy, beauty, reason, and human dignity. Two civilizations that also built some of the most elaborately regulated, deeply embedded, and extensively documented systems of commercial sex in the ancient world.

Let's be careful here. "Regulated" and "documented" are not the same as "fair" or "humane." What the Greeks and Romans actually created was a sophisticated architecture for managing desire in ways that served male citizens — and that relied almost entirely on the labor of people who had very little say in the matter.

Athens: The Tiered System of Women