Whats the deal with the racy Roman coins?
By Cecil Adams Jan. 18 – 24, 2008 (Vol. 28, #3) In a Discovery Channel program I saw about the history of sex, there was a brief discussion of Roman brothel tokens, coins showing images of various sexual acts. Lustful Roman soldiers in far-flung corners of the empire apparently used them to overcome the problem of expressing their specific desires in the local dialect. This all sounded very interesting if true, but what’s the straight dope? —hoarj, via e-mail The use of tokens or other counters in various sex-for-pay setups—as advertising to prospective johns, to keep track of how many had been served and by whom, to keep cash out of the workers’ hands, etc.—wasn’t uncommon in the past; examples abound from the American frontier, Boer War-era South Africa, and turn-of-the-century Manhattan. In 1919, Upton Sinclair described learning in his youth of a system under which a brothel patron would pay a cashier up front and receive a so-called brass check, a token he could subsequently redee
