The Babylonian
woman had gone to the temple of Mylitta to fulfil a personal religious
duty; the Corinthian priestess had begun to act as an avowed minister to
the sexual needs of men in strange cities.

The custom which Herodotus noted in Lydia of young girls prostituting
themselves in order to acquire a marriage portion which they may dispose
of as they think fit (Bk. I, Ch. 93) may very well have developed (as
Frazer also believes) out of religious prostitution; we can indeed trace
its evolution in Cyprus where eventually, at the period when Justinian
visited the island, the money given by strangers to the women was no
longer placed on the altar but put into a chest to form marriage-portions
for them. It is a custom to be found in Japan and various other parts of
the world, notably among the Ouled-Nail of Algeria,[138] and is not
necessarily always based on religious prostitution; but it obviously
cannot exist except among peoples who see nothing very derogatory in free
sexual intercourse for the purpose of obtaining money, so that the custom
of Mylitta furnished a natural basis for it.[139]

As a more spiritual conception of religion developed, and as the growth of
civilization tended to deprive sexual intercourse of its sacred halo,
religious prostitution in Greece was slowly abolished, though on the
coasts of Asia Minor both religious prostitution and prostitution for the
purpose of obtaining a marriage portion persisted to the time of
Constantine, who put an end to these ancient customs.[140] Superstition
was on the side of the old religious prostitution; it was believed that
women who had never sacrificed to Aphrodite became consumed by lust, and
according to the legend recorded by Ovid--a legend which seems to point to
a certain antagonism between sacred and secular prostitution--this was the
case with the women who first became public prostitutes. The decay of
religious prostitution, doubtless combined with the cravings always born
of the growth of civilization, led up to the first establishment,
attributed by legend to Solon, of a public brothel, a purely secular
establishment for a purely secular end: the safeguarding of the virtue of
the general population and the increase of the public revenue. With that
institution the evolution of prostitution, and of the modern marriage
system of which it forms part, was completed. The Athenian _dikterion_ is
the modern brothel; the _dikteriade_ is the modern state-regu