fluence in all
departments of life which she has never been able to exercise since,
except perhaps occasionally, in a much slighter degree, in France. The
course, vigorous, practical Roman was quite ready to tolerate the
prostitute, but he was not prepared to carry that toleration to its
logical results; he never felt bound to harmonize inconsistent facts of
life. Cicero, a moralist of no mean order, without expressing approval of
prostitution, yet could not understand how anyone should wish to prohibit
youths from commerce with prostitutes, such severity being out of harmony
with all the customs of the past or the present.[142] But the superior
class of Roman prostitutes, the _bonae mulieres_, had no such dignified
position as the Greek _hetairae_. Their influence was indeed immense, but
it was confined, as it is in the case of their European successors to-day,
to fashions, customs, and arts. There was always a certain moral rigidity
in the Roman which prevented him from yielding far in this direction. He
encouraged brothels, but he only entered them with covered head and face
concealed in his cloak. In the same way, while he tolerated the
prostitute, beyond a certain point he sharply curtailed her privileges.
Not only was she deprived of all influence in the higher concerns of life,
but she might not even wear the _vitta_ or the _stola_; she could indeed
go almost naked if she pleased, but she must not ape the emblems of the
respectable Roman matron.[143]

The rise of Christianity to political power produced on the whole less
change of policy than might have been anticipated. The Christian rulers
had to deal practically as best they might with a very mixed, turbulent,
and semi-pagan world. The leading fathers of the Church were inclined to
tolerate prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils, and Christian
emperors, like their pagan predecessors, were willing to derive a tax from
prostitution. The right of prostitution to exist was, however, no longer
so unquestionably recognized as in pagan days, and from time to time some
vigorous ruler sought to repress prostitution by severe enactments. The
younger Theodosius and Valentinian definitely ordained that there should
be no more brothels and that anyone giving shelter to a prostitute should
be punished. Justinian confirmed that measure and ordered that all panders
were to be exiled on pain of death. These enactments were quite vain. But
during a thousand years they w