Let us begin the way a good guide does: with the wink, then the truth. The wink is the footprint carved into Marble Street — foot, woman, heart, purse — pointing, the story goes, across to a two-storey house where love could be purchased. The truth is more tangled, and honestly more interesting.
The building at the corner of Curetes and Marble Street had two floors originally, its own small bath, mosaic floors, and — the find that settled its popular name forever — a terracotta figure of Priapus, the god of exaggerated fertility, now grinning in the Ephesus Museum. An inscription elsewhere in the city mentions a house of pleasure; the identification of this building with it was quick, delighted and, scholars grumble, far from proven.
What the sceptics say
The counter-case: the "brothel" looks suspiciously like a normal wealthy townhouse — the baths, mosaics and marble match domestic luxury across the street in the Terrace Houses; the Priapus could be a garden ornament (Romans found him hilarious and lucky, and put him everywhere); and the footprint may be a guild mark or idle graffiti. On this reading, one of antiquity’s most visited "brothels" is an innocent villa with the century’s worst luck in real-estate branding.
What is certainly true: prostitution existed openly in every Roman city, Ephesus included — legal, taxed and unromantic, its workers overwhelmingly enslaved. If the joke stops being funny at that sentence, that is the correct response; our page on the slaves of Ephesus carries the fuller account.
