HOUSES OF ILL REPUTE: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF BROTHELS, HOUSES, AND TAVERNS IN THE GREEK WORLD

HOUSES OF ILL REPUTE: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF BROTHELS, HOUSES, AND TAVERNS IN THE GREEK WORLD. Edited by Allison Glazebrook and Barbara Tsakirgis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Pp. viii, 256.

For those of us working on Greco-Roman prostitution, this is the book we have been waiting for. As Allison Glazebrook's third edited volume on ancient prostitution,1 this volume, со-edited with Barbara Tsakirgis, re-assesses the finds and architecture of the most famous candidates for Greek brothels, including building Z in the Athenian Kerameikos, the South Stoa at Corinth, and the House of the Lake on Delos, and asks whether we can identify places of prostitution in the Greek archaeological record. If the answer-"maybe sometimes"-is not the definitive one we had hoped for, it is due to the remarkable methodological rigor of the contributors. What the volume shows is that the Greeks did not have purpose-built brothels similar to the one found in Pompeii; instead, places where prostitution might have taken place overlap in significant ways with domestic and commercial structures.

Glazebrook and Tsakirgis's Introduction sets the stage by, among other things, pointing out the growing scholarship on the integration of commercial and domestic spaces and activities in the Greek world. Tsakirgis expands on this theme in Chapter One ("What Is a House? Conceptualizing the Greek House"), discussing examples of residential structures with domestic or even industrial-scale production (e.g., the House of Mikion and Menon in Athens) as well as the difficulty in differentiating between public and private structures. For example, she mentions a structure on Morgantina's agora that is classified as a public building, while a structure with a similar plan farther away has been identified as a house. She advocates caution in using literary sources to understand Greek houses, noting that although comic playwrights often depict action taking place in a kitchen, no designated kitchens in actual houses have been found. She observes that "The playwright must be suggesting a traipse through the pots and pans and stove, rather than through a room set aside for cooking" (21). By the end of the volume, we learn that a porneion, too, rather than indicating a specific architectural form, was any place prostitutes were found.

The next two chapters examine whether material assemblages can help...