Provincial campfollower (prostitute) kit

[Carlton Bach]

Well, if soldiers left bequests to prostitutes often enough for someone to see the need to forbid it, there must have been some personal attachments. And we are obviously not talking about 'common-law wives' as these relationships were treated by the law as very similar to legitimate marriages. And that prostitutes travelled witrh their units is likely because the demand that a military unit represented could not always be catered for locally, and its absence would make the local sex economy at the old base collapse. Work follows jobs. The complaints by some ancient authors how Rome was 'full of prostitutes' when the severan frontier armies entered the city probably reflects that (though the mind boggles trying to imagine how ancient Rome could be more full of prostitutes than it would have been ordinarily)