This is simply fascinating (and maybe NSFW):

[These coins] were used in ancient Rome to request and pay for different “services” in brothels and from prostitutes on the street. Since there were a lot of foreigners coming to the city that did not speak the language and most of the prostitutes were slaves captured from other places the coins made the transactions easy and efficient. One side of these coins showed what the buyer wanted and the other showed the amount of money to be paid for the act.

The value of a handjob, the value of a blowjob, the value of some gay sex, the need to communicate desire, the roads leading to Rome, the slave economy.

Thanks for the link goes to one, Christopher Ryan, of the two authors of Sex at Dawn.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

29 replies on “Fucking Money”

  2. @1 thanks for that. I love the title of the professor’s book, “Is That a Spintria in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?” At least Charles accomplished that super-smooth namedrop.

  3. So gay sex cost XIII but you could get hetero stuff for as little as III, and most under X?

    Gays were good for the economy.

  8. It’s too bad we don’t learn more from the lessons of those ancient times. They have so much to teach us about society and what it means to be human. Our own government is formed from those lessons. And it’s arguably the most efficient and powerful government in the world because of that. Now we need to learn a few of those all too human behaviors that will never be stopped, only made into a burden with a phony morality.

  9. From @1’s link: “Not so fast, say other researchers — for one, Geoffrey Fishburn of the University of New South Wales, whose 2007 paper “Is That a Spintria in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?” is well worth perusal by anyone interested in the topic. Such skeptics note that (1) the same sex act sometimes appears on coins bearing different numbers, which hurts the number-equals-price theory; (2) unambiguous references to such tokens are strangely absent from Roman writings (the purported examples that do get cited are notably iffy); (3) identical scenes show up in Pompeiian murals, suggesting these may have been commonly depicted artistic themes; (4) spintriae have been found in excavated bathhouses but never (points out Anise Strong of Northwestern U.) in the ruins of actual brothels; (5) the correlation between modern prostitutes’ rates and the tokens’ numbering system isn’t as neat as the Polish study would have it; and so forth. “

    When I see a handjob going for X but full intercourse for III, I’m guessing something else is going on here.

  11. @9 I know there were bordellos for different classes. Some, the one’s that catered to the wealthy, were considered clean. So it stands to reason the prices were diferent depending which side of town you were on.

  16. @8: “They have so much to teach us about society and what it means to be human”.

    Did you miss this part?

    most of the prostitutes were slaves captured from other places

  18. @17: Hawt! Okay…but the scene of two goats fucking (lower right-hand corner of the bottom picture) might be a bit harder to explain…

  19. @11, except that that negates the function of the coin, which is supposedly a fixed rate for people who don’t speak the language. There’s nothing on the coin that says “good in this neighborhood or brothel only”. The system only makes sense if there is a correlation between pictured act and price.

    It’s possible that the coins could be exchanged for sex based on the value, and the pictures were just part of a series, not depictions of what you could get for that price — sort of like how this “Hawaii” quarter in my pocket is good for 25 cents in every state, not just Hawaii.

    But I’m still skeptical without better evidence. @1’s link suggests there isn’t any. For all we know, they could be souvenirs, like those fake “10¢ lookie, 25¢ feelie, 50¢ dooie” tokens you can still buy in tourist shops in places like Virginia City, Nevada (and probably Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe as well).

  20. What I love best about all this is the part in #1’s link where we learn that spintrian is another word for kinky.

    From the OED:

    1656 T. Blount Glossographia, Spintrian, pertaining to those that seek out, or invent new and monstruous actions of lust.

    a1678 A. Marvell State Poems in Wks. (1726) II. 46 The poor Priapus King,‥in the Mimics of the Spinstrian [sic] Sport, Outdoes Tiberius, and his goatish Court.

    1887 L. C. Smithers tr. F. C. Forberg Man. Classical Erotol. viii. 166 More than three may enjoy themselves together; this is what we call after Tiberius, the spintrian kind.

    Okay, so “goatish court” suggests that the image of goat-fucking might simply have been a symbol of all-around debauchery, the province of satyrs.

    Er, I vote “spintrian” over “goatish”.

    Spintry is also defined as “A species of male prostitute” or “A place used for unnatural practices”.

  23. @20, I think you’ll love this, then. In his wonderful bio of the professor/tattoo artist/Kinsey confidant Samuel Steward “Secret Historian” last year, Justin Spring wrote:

    In early March, Steward wrote to Kinsey again, this time about a new undertaking: “I’ve arranged a small spintriae of six for tomorrow evening: those things need a kind of Emily Post to be run successfully. I think that perhaps just for the hell of it I’ll write one up for you, and tell you what has been my experience in arranging and conducting them.” The word spintriae was both concealing and revealing, for it was Steward’s code word for the all-male group sex parties he had been hosting regularly in his home starting in September 1949.
    […]
    Steward’s use of spintriae located him as a man with both a classical education and a sense of humor, for it is based on the first declension masculine noun sp(h)intria, the nominative plural of which is spintriae, or literally translated, “sphincters”. Tacitus had been first to note the Latin word, which had been borrowed from the Greek under the reign of Emperor Tiberius, who had enjoyed having sex with young men. The word spintria had thus entered Latin usage as a word describing a particular kind of male who had sex with other males; Steward’s spintriae, by extension, meant a group of men who had sex with other men.

    http://books.google.com/books?id=cl9kgQm…

  26. @23, very nice!

    Speaking of sphincters, here’s a gem of a home remedy for a weak one:

    1740–1 Berkeley in Fraser Life (1871) viii. 263, I have also known tow [flax or hemp], dipped in brandy and thrust into the fundament, to be effectual in strengthening that sphincter.

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