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.Advertising is not permitted, nor public solicitation in any form.The prostitutes who work in such places are not strictly employeesof the brothels but independent contractors who are required to pay forweekly examinations to check for sexually transmitted diseases.Thebrothels themselves pay hefty registration and licensing fees to theirlocal communities.They prefer to call themselves ranches and mostretain the same 1970s decor that they opened with three decades ago.Infact, when a brothel owner in Pahrump, about sixty miles west of LasVegas, announced a plan to convert his ranch into a major resort facil-ity with a golf course, casino, and steakhouse, the proposal rocked theentire state s prostitution industry, for which publicity of any kind issomething akin to poison.17The paradoxical situation of Nevada s brothel business shows howdeeply rooted the assumption is in our culture that prostitution shouldbe, and often actually is, hidden away from public view.The barriers tothinking outside of this box are uncomfortably high.It also serves as anexample of the false promise held out by some of the comparative evi-dence available on the subject of prostitution. Zoning Shame in the Roman City 165Given the lack of ancient evidence for zoning, however, it is difficult,if not impossible, to raise the issue without resort to comparison withother cultures.A useful example lies in attempting to see a link betweenofficial approaches toward brothels on the one hand and sewers on theother.Wallace-Hadrill draws a connection between keeping the streetsand sewers clean and controlling prostitution that is reminiscent ofmuch nineteenth-century discourse on venal sex, above all that of thefamous Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet (Wallace-Hadrill 1995, 50 51).18The key question of course is whether such a connection exists inRoman policy on prostitution.This is not a simple matter of anachro-nism, but an issue of just what kind of comparative evidence is mostlikely to shed light on ancient Rome given that past cultures demon-strate a wide range of experience with respect to prostitution.Christian TopographyAs far as I am able to discover, a policy aiming at the segregation ofvenal sex from respectable elements of the population has every ap-pearance of being a phenomenon that postdated the rise of Christian-ity.19 It may be relevant that, despite a longstanding association betweenbrothels and filth, and a special relationship between the sewer andthe moral criticism of satire (a genre quite familiar with the brothel),20the first ancient to identify brothel with sewer appears to have beenprecisely Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who writes of a putative fol-lower of his opponent Novatian: having entered a brothel, the locationof the sewer and the slimy black hole of the rabble, he has befouled hisown sanctified body, God s temple, with hateful filth. 21 By itself, how-ever, this account cannot explain an inclination to zone brothels so thatthey were kept away from respectable establishments.Cyprian s con-cern with squalor and the horrors of class mixing are very old hat froma Roman elite perspective and, importantly, do not necessarily rangebeyond the walls of the brothel in their consequences.From what hewrites, it does not appear that he believes a person would be implicatedin the evils of the brothel without actually setting foot in one.As for segregation itself, the first well-attested example is a text thatattributes to Constantine the establishment, in his new city of Constan-tinople, of a large brothel in the Zeugma district, complete with a statueof Aphrodite outside on a stone pillar (a nice touch).This establishmentwas supposed to be the only brothel, indeed the only place where pros-titutes worked, in the entire city (Patria of Constantinople 2.65 [= Preger 166 thomas mcginn1975, 185 87]).22 One is inclined to distrust this report as representingyet another effort in the long campaign to make Constantine appearmore Christian than he ever was in actual fact.23 This particular in-stance appears to rely on wholesale invention or, more probably, rep-resents the recounting of a popular legend.At any rate, the notion thatthis pragmatist emperor attempted to limit prostitution in his new cap-ital to a single venue defies belief.Nevertheless, it must stand as an ex-ample of what some Christians thought a Christian emperor ought todo.This is where its true value as evidence lies.I hasten to point out that even a Christian might shrink from such anattribution.In establishing a brothel as an act of public policy, Constan-tine would seem to join the distinguished, if at the same time dubious,company of ruler-pimps such as Solon and Caligula.24 Some Christians,perhaps of a more fundamentalist stripe, might not be inclined to viewthe attempted paganification of the brothel site through the alleged in-stallation of the statue of Aphrodite as a saving grace.At all events let usnot saddle emperor Constantine with more credit or blame than thesources allow, as one scholar risks doing in stating, [i]t is characteristicof his pragmatic approach to prostitution that Constantine designated asection of his new capital city, Constantinople, as an official red-lightdistrict and required all of the city s harlots to remain within its con-fines (Brundage 1987, 105; no source cited).So one brothel morphs intoa red-light district in the tradition of scholarship.The legend lives on.A more likely candidate for the first Christian intervention of thiskind is perhaps seen, albeit indirectly, in the Historia Augusta, whichreports that the emperor Tacitus outlawed brothels in the capital, ameasure which, to be sure, could not hold for long ( meritoria intraurbem stare vetuit, quod quidem diu tenere non potuit [Historia Au-gusta Tacitus 10.2]).The author is almost certainly making fun of Chris-tian antiprostitution legislation rather than reporting an action that canbe reliably attributed to the third-century emperor, and my best guesswould be some initiative of the Theodosian dynasty lost to us at least inpart because of its swift and manifest failure.25 Even if one credits thereport about Constantine s Zeugma brothel, a similar conclusion is in-evitable, namely that the policy of zoning failed
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