Price of Sex — Prostitution Across Eras

Imagine walking into the only surviving purpose-built brothel in the ancient world. You are in Pompeii, sometime before the morning of October 24, 79 CE — the day Vesuvius buries the city and freezes it like a fly in amber. The structure on the corner of Vicolo del Lupanare measures barely 58 square meters. Five stone cubicles, each fitted with a raised masonry bed, line the ground floor. Above each doorway is a painted fresco showing the available act.

You hand over two asses — two copper coins, roughly the price of a loaf of bread, or about one-fifth of a day laborer's daily wage — and the transaction is complete.

Two thousand years later, someone hands over two thousand Thai baht — the same functional exchange: a fixed fee, a private room, an agreed encounter. But the economics behind those two moments are radically different. The Pompeii customer spent the equivalent of roughly $5 to $8 in 2025 purchasing-power terms, measured against what unskilled labor could buy.

The Bangkok customer in 2025 might spend the equivalent of five full days of minimum-wage labor for the exact same "short-time" encounter at a mid-tier go-go bar.

Sex is sometimes called the world's oldest profession. But the price of sex — normalized against what ordinary workers earned — has swung wildly across time and culture. Sometimes it was cheaper than a bowl of soup. Sometimes it consumed a samurai's annual stipend. The difference reveals everything: legal regimes, debt bondage, labor scarcity, racial caste, wartime desperation, and the presence or absence of trafficking networks.

This episode traces six economies across roughly 2,000 years, puts each price in an apples-to-apples table, and asks: what does the variance actually mean?

Comparing the "price of sex" across eras is genuinely difficult. There are at least three distinct methodological traps.

Trap 1: Nominal currency conversion. Converting 2 Roman asses to dollars via silver content is seductive but misleading. The silver in 2 asses was worth roughly $0.08 at 2025 spot prices. That tells you almost nothing economically useful.

Trap 2: CPI inflation backward extrapolation. The US Consumer Price Index only reaches back to 1913 reliably. Applying it to 79 CE Pompeii or 1700s Edo is methodologically incoherent.

Trap 3: GDP-per-capita proxy. Comparing ancient per-capita GDP to modern GDP is partially useful but obscures massive internal inequality.

The most defensible cross-era comparison uses "hours of unskilled labor" as the unit of account — specifically, how many hours of the lowest-tier manual labor (a ditch-digger, a porter, a day laborer) did the price of a standard sexual transaction represent? This methodology is endorsed by economic historians including Walter Scheidel at Stanford and the MeasuringWorth framework for pre-modern societies.

For the 2025 USD column, we use the "labor equivalent" conversion: take the modern US federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour (or the Bangkok minimum wage of ฿400/day ≈ $11.25/day) as the baseline, then multiply by the number of unskilled labor-hours the historical transaction cost in its own era. This is not the only valid method, but it is the most intuitively meaningful for a podcast audience.

Secondary conversion methodology: For eras where robust GDP-per-capita estimates exist (Roman Empire, Edo Japan), we cross-check using published estimates in 2025 international dollars from the Roman Economy Wikipedia article drawing on Scheidel/Friesen 2009 and Maddison 2007.

Each era also defines the transaction differently. For comparability, we try to isolate a single standard short encounter — the most basic, lowest-overhead service at a mid-tier establishment. We note premium services where documented.