the sacred prostitution that may never have happened
Everyone knows the temples of the love goddess ran ritual prostitution. It is in the textbooks, the documentaries, the novels. In 2008 a Cambridge monograph asked for the receipts and found almost none.
Documented
The three witnesses
Herodotus 1.199 reports a Babylonian custom: every woman must once in her life sit in the precinct of Aphrodite and lie with a stranger for a silver coin. Strabo 8.6.20 claims the temple at Corinth owned a thousand hierodules, temple slaves who entertained worshippers. And Pindar, fragment 122, addresses the hospitable girls of Corinth, handmaids of Persuasion, in a poem for a wealthy patron who vowed fifty of them to the goddess. These three passages, plus a few late Christian writers with axes to grind, carry nearly the entire dossier.
Assessment: The texts are real, but none of the three authors is an eyewitness to an operating institution. Herodotus describes foreign custom at a distance, Strabo wrote centuries after Corinth's destruction and refounding, and Pindar wrote a commissioned party song. A chain of hearsay has been cited as a fact for two thousand years.
Stories
Frazer made it canon
The story became load-bearing in 1906 when Frazer's Golden Bough volume Adonis Attis Osiris built the dying-god thesis on fertility religion, with temple prostitution as the presumed ritual engine. A generation of classicists, novelists, and filmmakers inherited the scene, the incense, the veils, the temple courtesans, as settled antiquity. It fit too well, confirming everything the Victorian imagination already believed about the decadent, sensual Orient.
Assessment: A narrative this useful to scholars, storytellers, and moralists alike stopped being checked. The claim survived on repetition, each citation pointing back to the same three ancient passages.
Interesting claims
The debunk
Daniel Arnaud called Babylonian sacred prostitution a historiographical myth as early as 1973. Beard and Henderson dismantled the semantic chain in 1997. Stephanie Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008) went passage by passage through every alleged case, Babylon, Corinth, Cyprus, Eryx, and found mistranslations, circular citation, and polemic: words for temple staff read as prostitutes, enemies' accusations read as descriptions, Frazer's framework read back into the evidence. The rebuttal, from Avaren Ipsen and others, is that the debunk itself is driven by modern discomfort with religion and sex mixing.
Assessment: Neither side can produce the missing institution. What the fight actually proves is how little we know about what happened inside those temples, and how much of ancient religion is a mirror held up by whoever is writing.
Sources and further reading
Herodotus, Histories 1.199, the Babylonian custom, the silver coin, the precinct of Aphrodite
Strabo, Geography 8.6.20, the thousand hierodules of Corinth
Pindar, fragment 122 Snell, the girls of Corinth vowed to the goddess
Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis Attis Osiris (1906), the fertility-religion framework
Arnaud (1973), sacred prostitution as historiographical myth
Beard and Henderson, With This Body I Thee Worship, Gender & History 9 (1997)
Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008)
Ipsen, Sex Working and the Bible (2009), the case against the debunk
Worth asking
If the evidence is this thin, why did the story outlive every attempt to kill it, and whose idea of the ancient world does it serve?