Sacred Prostitutes: a jaw-dropping story
“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 prostitution in the name of a goddess? Could you imagine living with a “sentence” like that on your shoulders?
Intrigued, I started a small research and quickly found more evidence. Justinus and Valerius Maximus, Roman writers of the early centuries, described the custom of sending brides to prostitute in the temples of Venus (equivalent to Aphrodite in the Roman pantheon) in Cyprus and in Sicca (present-day Tunisian territory) to collect dowry money. Paid sex with priestesses was also a thing, just a regular habit in the ancient world, according to the Anchor Bible Dictionary. The money would go to the temple, of course.
On the report of the Greek historian Strabo (I A.C), the Aphrodite temple in Corinth (Greece) had once had more than a thousand sacred prostitutes at the same time; the one in Eryx (Sicily) had sex slaves to serve travelers in practically uninhabited region.
