e whole, while among savages sexual relationships are sometimes free
before marriage, as well as on the occasion of special festivals, they are
rarely truly promiscuous and still more rarely venal. When savage women
nowadays sell themselves, or are sold by their husbands, it has usually
been found that we are concerned with the contamination of European
civilization.

The definite ways in which professional prostitution may arise are no
doubt many.[131] We may assent to the general principle, laid down by
Schurtz, that whenever the free union of young people is impeded under
conditions in which early marriage is also difficult prostitution must
certainly arise. There are, however, different ways in which this
principle may take shape. So far as our western civilization is
concerned--the civilization, that is to say, which has its cradle in the
Mediterranean basin--it would seem that the origin of prostitution is to
be found primarily in a religious custom, religion, the great conserver of
social traditions, preserving in a transformed shape a primitive freedom
that was passing out of general social life.[132] The typical example is
that recorded by Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, at the
temple of Mylitta, the Babylonian Venus, where every woman once in her
life had to come and give herself to the first stranger who threw a coin
in her lap, in worship of the goddess. The money could not be refused,
however small the amount, but it was given as an offertory to the temple,
and the woman, having followed the man and thus made oblation to Mylitta,
returned home and lived chastely ever afterwards.[133] Very similar
customs existed in other parts of Western Asia, in North Africa, in Cyprus
and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and also in Greece, where
the Temple of Aphrodite on the fort at Corinth possessed over a thousand
hierodules, dedicated to the service of the goddess, from time to time, as
Strabo states, by those who desired to make thank-offering for mercies
vouchsafed to them. Pindar refers to the hospitable young Corinthian women
ministrants whose thoughts often turn towards Ourania Aphrodite[134] in
whose temple they burned incense; and Athenaeus mentions the importance
that was attached to the prayers of the Corinthian prostitutes in any
national calamity.[135]

We seem here to be in the presence, not merely of a religiously preserved
survival of a greater sexual freedom formerly existing,