Because the sexual lives of prostitutes and enslaved persons overlapped in many important ways, any discussion devoted to sexual labor in ancient Rome cannot be purely confined to those who sold their wares as prostitutes.
Even if some individuals living in slavery never worked in a brothel, Roman authors make it clear that slaves’ sexual lives were often employed to serve the needs and desires of the free. The fate of many women and children captured in a war with Rome was enslavement and prostitution.
