Sacred Prostitutes: a jaw-dropping story

Barbie Aphrodite

“The most shameful of the customs among the Babylonians is this: It is necessary for every local woman to sit in the sanctuary of Aphrodite once in life to “mingle” with a foreign man.”

The sentence above, from Herodotus, leaped out to my eyes in the middle of a reading in a way that it was impossible to move on without thinking about it. Is Herodotus saying that women were forced into…