One of the strengths of this book is its emphasis on the ambiguity of prostitution for the Romans. Laws such as the Augustan prescriptions on marriage and adultery allocated prostitutes a conspicuously lowly place in society. Prostitutes were treated as despicable yet necessary, if legitimate marriage was to be protected. He stresses instead the ad hoc responses of lawmakers to divergent, sometimes contradictory trends in Roman society. 2 McGinn's mastery of Roman legal scholarship is most impressive.
Individual chapters offer some enlightening discussions of specific areas of the law.
Chapter three, for example, treats the Augustan marriage laws with great clarity, while chapter five's discussion of the Augustan adultery law is particularly helpful in its treatment of the prescriptions governing husbands' pimping of their wives, as well as the other strategies by which the law assimilated adulteresses to prostitutes. As McGinn emphasizes, this law reflected and reinforced the role of the prostitute as symbol of sexual shame in Roman society. Later chapters examine, among other topics, the laws governing the taxation of prostitutes and those restricting the use of slaves as prostitutes. In his opening chapters, McGinn tackles the problematic question of defining the prostitute. For Roman jurists, he suggests, the key issue was promiscuity, rather than, as one might expect, payment.