Prostitution played an important role in ancient politics, and also strongly influenced the activities of sailors, pirates, soldiers and merchants, according to Rauh, who has been working in Southern Turkey to study how economies, trade and commerce worked in the Greco-Roman world.
From 80 BCE to the fall of the Roman Republic, political conspiracies often included "pimps, prostitutes and muggers," Rauh said. Many remaining accounts of sexual practices at the time are written by the adversaries of conspirators, however, which presents a biased viewpoint.
Scholars have dismissed the information because of the dubious nature of available data, according to Rauh. Literary skepticism, historical reasoning and generalization all tend to throw ancient evidence into doubt, he said.
In an effort to address how modern readers think about prostitution, Rauh explored how ancient perceptions of prostitution may have differed from today's practices, he said.
"I think the ancients were a lot more frank about sexuality," Rauh said.
Ancient sexual behavior is often compared to modern sexual behavior, which often leads to confusion and disagreement because today's sexual practices are not uniform across cultures, according to Rauh.
In Turkey, much of Rauh's focus was a case study of the Sacred Lake District on the island of Delos, where he and his team found many reliefs depicting phalluses, men's clubs and symbols of shields, according to Rauh. These images are convincing indicators that this was an area with a "dominant unattached male population," Rauh said.
The high frequency of street traffic in the Sacred Lake District made the neighborhood a "merchant-collection center," he said. The area was possibly a red-light district where many merchants, sailors and pirates stopped, and even commissioned Greek artists to make statues of them, according to Rauh.
Rauh said it was difficult to determine whether the overwhelming appearance of phalluses signaled the existence of a site of prostitution in the Sacred Lake District because phallic symbols also had other meanings at the time.
"There's a long tradition that phalluses like these were apotropaic devices used to ward off evil spirits, to threaten people who meant ill," Rauh said.
Rauh said he was also concerned about the lack of information available regarding the lower class of society, which made up the great majority of the people visiting brothels.
"I'm always hesitant by the textual basis [of books written on the histories of the great courtesans] because they're written by aristocrats for aristocrats," he said. "What about what's really going on at the bottom 5 percent of society?"
Rauh said he was also hesitant to draw any definite conclusions about the information he gathered in Delos because of how differently modern viewers perceive sexual practices. Ancient integration of courtesans into the larger community has a "post-modern feel" that resembles New York after the Victorian era, Rauh said.
When working in Antalya, a city Rauh called the "center of prostitution in modern Turkey," he was required to apply for a residence permit at the provincial police quarters, Rauh said.
"There are always two types of people lining up for these permits, and they are archeologists and prostitutes," he said.
