Actors and prostitutes1 had a lot in common hundreds and
thousands of years ago.
In ancient Rome, actors, prostitutes, and gladiators belonged to the
“infamous professions.”
“Actors, gladiators, and prostitutes in ancient Rome were symbols of the
shameful. Their signal lack of
reputation was reflected and reinforced in the law” (Edwards 66).
Infames (plural of infamis) were people of disrepute. People who became infames legally could not
appear in the court of law to give testimony or to complain, could not hold
public office, and could be beaten like slaves.
Infamia (infamy) was the loss of legal or social standing. People convicted of crimes might become
infamous as punishment (so they lost their legal standing), but actors,
prostitutes, and gladiators were already considered infamous by their very
professions (so they did not have social and legal standing to begin with).
The verb prostitute means to sell one’s body or to exchange money
for sex. The infamous non-prostitutes did
not necessarily sell their body for sex.
Their stigma came from the fact that they served to pleasure others by
putting on a performance for the public to consume.
Not all public performers were so disparaged. The aurigae (plural of auriga,
charioteer or driver in modern language) were not always slaves or hired
professionals but the elite themselves. Also, the focus was on the horses,
mitigating the stigma of the body performing for the public.
If we apply infamia to the present day, drivers are above actors and other
performers. In particular, race car
drivers find prestige in race tracks like the 24 Hours of Le Mans.2 I have yet to see a cab driver tell a movie
star, “You’re just an entertainer. I’m a
driver.”
Some people in ancient Rome lost their elite status by avoiding
punishment for adultery through registering as a prostitute. Prostitution was legal, and prostitutes were
allowed multiple sexual partners.
The lowly status of actors, prostitutes, and gladiators did not prevent
the Roman elite to associate with them.
Actors and gladiators were celebrities, lowly but celebrities
nevertheless.
Emperor Commodus3 played as a gladiator in the games to the
dismay of the senators (for insulting the throne by becoming an infamis) and to
the delight of the commoners.
Sulla, the predecessor of Julius Caesar, had Metrobius (an actor) for a
lover. Sulla had wives and children, and
bisexuality4 was common in ancient Rome.
Politicians went on smear campaigns alleging their opponents were infamous
(common tactic even to this day). The acclaimed
orator Cicero alleged that Mark Antony, famous for being the lover of Cleopatra
and protégé of Julius Caesar, became a prostitute in a woman’s outfit when he
(Mark Antony) had become bankrupt (The Second Philippic 2.44-47).
The early modern period saw the rise of the kabuki theater in Japan in
the 1600s. Kabuki rose to fame quickly
but at some point was stigmatized because in its early days “many of the
actresses in this popular theater genre were also prostitutes” (Frederic 441
[Roth]).
Chinese actors in theaters and cinema likewise were associated with
prostitutes.
China is an older civilization than ancient Rome, and “for most of
Chinese history, the roles of performers and prostitutes were closely
associated, and the two were lumped together in a single legal category (and in
popular morality) right up to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)” (Wu 220).
“The lack of respect given movie stars was a major obstacle to the
development of Chinese cinema. It
deterred many talented people from entering a world looked upon as corrupt”
(Xiao 9).
The actors’ fame and money have uplifted them. Hollywood, I expect, has something to do with
this.
We love them actors, don’t we?
Regardless of their origins.
It takes time for people to change their views about, and ways of
dealing with, those who are different.
Writing for comic books was not considered prestigious decades ago. Except for a select few, writers were not
credited in the golden age (from the appearance of Superman in 1938 to the
mid-1950s) of comics. These days, comic
book writers are pursued by companies like DC and Marvel, and their names
always appear in comic book issues.
Prostitution is not always about exploitation, and prostitutes are not
necessarily villainous like thieves, so why the continued prejudice against
them?
Will prostitution, allegedly the oldest profession in the world, be able to cast off infamia? I hope for that to happen one day.
NOTES
1The politically correct term for prostitute is sex worker.
2The 24 Hours of Le Mans is an endurance race where drivers race for 24
hours. Each car is assigned more than
one driver. The drivers alternate in
driving their assigned car for the duration of the race.
3I talked about Commodus in my blog post “The Roman Empire and the United
States: Immigrants Make a Nation Great.”
4Sexuality as we understand it today is not the same in ancient
Rome. Roman men had no issue with
same-sex encounters provided certain rules were followed: (1) Roman citizens
could not have same-sex encounters with fellow Roman citizens. Prostitutes, slaves, and foreigners did not
have the privileges of a Roman citizen, so a Roman could have them. (2) A Roman man must be the insertor, the
penetrator, in the sex act. If a Roman
man allowed anal penetration, he is a pathicus or a cinaedus, and
would lose his social, not legal, standing and become an infamis (people looked
down on a pathicus, but a pathicus from the upper class remained an elite
legally – Emperor Commodus became an infamis socially when he fought as a
gladiator but he did not become an infamis legally because he remained the
emperor of Rome). These two rules of
same-sex engagement, I expect, were regularly broken secretly. Why the brouhaha over backdoor entry? Because for Roman men, being penetrated meant
playing the part of a woman, and the ancient Romans were anti-woman
nincompoops.
POSTSCRIPTS
For me, the most remarkable product of Le Mans is Carroll Shelby, the
man responsible for those odd-looking, but beautiful Cobra cars.
A poster of the Le Mans race appears in the gay film Call Me By Your
Name starring Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet.
The City of Manila in the Philippines had a movie house along Avenida called
Odeon. The Odeon endures but is now a
bazaar and is no longer a movie house.
The term odeon is Greek and is called odeum in Latin. Odeon is a small, roofed theater, also
referred to as theatrum tectum or covered theater (Oxford 1032).
REFERENCES
“Odeum.” The Oxford Classical
Dictionary. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 1032.
The 24 Hour War. Dir. Nate
Adams and Adam Carolla. 24 Hour War,
2016. Film.
Baytan, Robert. “The Roman Empire
and the United States: Immigrants Make a Nation Great.” 3 Jan. 2019.
Web. <https://robertbaytan.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-roman-empire-and-united-states.html>.
Call Me By Your Name. Screenplay
by James Ivory. Dir. Luca
Guadagnino. Perf. Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet. Frenesy, La Cinefacture, 2017. Film.
Cicero, The Second Philippic 2.44-47. [Available in Latin and English texts in
different formats including The Complete Works of Cicero. Delphi Classics, 2014. ePub.]
The Cobra Ferrari Wars. Dir.
Richard Symons. Narr. Robbie
Coltrane. BBC, 2002. Film.
[The narrator, Robbie Coltrane, plays Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry
Potter film series.]
Edwards, Catharine. “Unspeakable
Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome.” Roman Sexualities. Eds. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B.
Skinner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997. 66-95.
Frederic, Louis. “Kabuki.” Japan Encyclopedia. Trans. Kathe Roth. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002. 441-442.
Wu, Cuncun. “Imperial Chinese
Theater.” Encyclopedia of
Prostitution and Sex Work. Ed.
Melissa Hope Ditmore. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. 220-222.
Xiao, Zhuwei. “Chinese Cinema:
Early Film People.” Encyclopedia of
Chinese Film. Ed. Yingjin
Zhang. London: Routledge, 1998. 8-10.
