Topics (move over topic to see place in topic list)
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
12 Assyrian Identity
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
Keywords
Babylonia
sacred prostitution
Period
5th century BCE
Greek Classical Age
Channel
Greek philosophers and scholars
Text
Herodotus 1.199: The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to consort with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and there stand with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the stranger men pass and make their choice. When a woman has once taken her place there she goes not away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, “I demand you in the name of Mylitta” (that is the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). It matters not what be the sum of the money; the woman will never refuse, for that were a sin, the money being by this act sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects none. After their intercourse she has made herself holy in the goddess’s sight and goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the woman that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfil the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four. There is a custom like to this in some parts of Cyprus.
