Of all the foreign customs Herodotus recorded in his Histories — and he recorded hundreds, some of them frankly deranged — there is only one he openly called the most shameful. He didn't say that about the Massagetae, who ate their own elders. He didn't say it about the Scythians, who smoked hemp inside sealed tents. He didn't say it about the Egyptians, who kneaded dough with their feet and clay with their hands. He said it about Babylon, the richest city in the known world. And I'll warn you now, dear readers: by the end of this piece we'll have to ask whether any of it actually happened, because there's a century and a half of scholarly argument behind that question.
The law
Herodotus tells it in chapter 199 of my book, The Book of the Muse Clio – Vol. I, the section devoted to Babylonian customs, and he opens it with a sentence that leaves no room for ambiguity: this, he says, is the most shameful of their laws.
Every woman born in the country was required, once in her life, to sit in the precinct of the temple of the goddess he calls Aphrodite and the Babylonians called Mylitta, and to give herself there, without argument, to the first strange man who threw her a coin.
Women, it seems, arrived at the temple with a braided cord tied around their heads. They sat within the sacred precinct, and there was such a crowd of male "visitors" that roped, guarded corridors had to be set up, through which men walked back and forth picking a woman from the hundreds of candidates.
The price that wasn't a price
The procedure had one rule that, to me, is the key to the whole affair.
A man would approach, toss a coin — usually rendered as silver — into the lap of the woman he'd chosen, and speak a sacred formula: I call upon the goddess Mylitta on your behalf. From that moment on, she could not refuse. She couldn't reject the man, haggle over the amount, or wait to see if someone younger, better-looking, or better came along.
And here's the detail that matters: the sum a man paid, eager to make love to one of the candidates, was irrelevant. It could be one or several coins of pure, extravagantly valuable gold, if he happened to be rich and wanted to look good in front of the goddess Mylitta, the priests, and the onlookers — since the higher the offer, the higher the social status and prestige it bought him in the eyes of the crowd — or it could be a ridiculous, near-worthless copper coin. It made no difference, because the money went straight into the temple's coffers, consecrated to the goddess. It wasn't payment: it was an offering that simply passed through the hands of the woman who sold herself, on its way to the temple.
Once the formality was completed and her debt to the goddess settled, the woman went home to her family, and from then on — Herodotus says — no gift or bribe, however large, could buy her carnally again.
The cruelty of the system
And now comes the paragraph this passage is actually remembered for, the one that shows Herodotus understood exactly what he was describing.
Well-born women, he writes — the young, the tall, the beautiful — fulfilled their duty quickly, in under 24 hours, and went home soon after. The plain ones, the disfigured, the ones with any deformity or mental disability, stayed there for a very long time, unable to satisfy the law because — God, how unfair life can be — nobody chose them or paid for them. Partly because, in antiquity, anyone carrying such marks was thought to be cursed by the gods. Some women, in fact, waited three or even four years, until some horny foreigner with similar physical or mental "flaws," entirely indifferent to those local superstitions, finally freed them by paying for a little sex.
Let's pause on that for a moment, because it's worth understanding what that sentence actually means. This isn't an uncomfortable ritual we're talking about. We're talking about women sitting for years inside a temple precinct, in full view of the entire city, waiting for a stranger to find them attractive or appealing enough to finally let them go home. The humiliation wasn't the sexual act itself: the humiliation was the public waiting, in front of everyone.
Herodotus adds that a similar custom existed in parts of Cyprus, and moves on to the next chapter without further comment.
The other law: the time Babylon actually knew how to marry off its women
Herodotus doesn't spend all his outrage on Mylitta. Three chapters earlier, in 196, he describes another Babylonian custom — and this one, he says explicitly, is the wisest he knows of, comparable only to one he'd heard the Eneti of Illyria practiced.
Once a year, in every village in the kingdom, all the marriageable young women were gathered in one place, surrounded by a ring of men. A herald brought them forward one by one, always starting with the most beautiful, and auctioned her off to the highest bidder. Once she was sold, he brought out the next most beautiful, and so on until the pretty ones ran out. The rich men bid against each other with something close to gambling fever for the most attractive women, and the money raised didn't stay in the herald's pocket: it funded the ones at the back of the line.
Because when it was the turn of the plain ones, the disabled, the ones nobody would have taken even for free, the whole system flipped: instead of selling, the herald asked who would accept the least money to marry them, and awarded her to whoever asked for the smallest sum. The gold from the pretty ones became the dowry of the plain ones. By the end of the day, Herodotus insists, not a single unmarried woman was left in the village.
And here comes the detail that, honestly, moves me more than the auction itself: Herodotus adds that by the time he was writing, the custom no longer existed. Babylon had fallen to the Persians, the city had grown poor, and that system — imperfect, yes, but one that guaranteed a dowry even to the plainest woman in the village — had simply been replaced by naked misery: fathers with no means, he says, prostituted their own daughters outright to survive. The orderly auction died with the conquest. What was left, according to him, looked a good deal more like what he describes later, in chapter 199.
Unlike Mylitta, this auction barely stirs debate among Assyriologists: no one has found the tablet that confirms it word for word, but there's also none of the documentary silence that surrounds the goddess's temple, and the mechanism — dowering the plain women with the money raised by the pretty ones — fits with what we do know of Mesopotamian marriage practices. What leaves no room for doubt is the reading available to us today: in barely four chapters, 196 through 199, Herodotus paints a portrait of the same city moving from arranging the marriage of its plainest woman to handing over all its women, pretty and plain alike, to the first man who showed up with a simple coin.
And now the uncomfortable part: did any of this actually happen?
Time for the house specialty, and today it hits hard.
For two thousand years this was accepted as plain fact. Since the late 20th century, a significant part of Assyriology has cast serious doubt on it, with arguments worth taking seriously.
The main one is devastating precisely because it's so simple: not a single Mesopotamian source mentions it. And from Mesopotamia we have tens of thousands of inscribed clay tablets — contracts, receipts, legal codes, private letters, temple inventories, inheritance disputes, marriage records. A universal religious obligation affecting every woman in the country would have left an administrative trace somewhere. It didn't.
The second argument is about context. Herodotus wrote about Babylon probably without ever having visited it — there's an open debate over whether he set foot there in person — and above all he was writing for a Greek audience that devoured tales of barbarian oddity, "barbarian" being what the Greeks called anyone who wasn't Greek. The passage fits suspiciously well into a pattern that recurs throughout his work: the richer and more powerful a foreign city is, the more depraved its secret custom turns out to be.
And the third: Mesopotamian temples did have female religious staff, with well-documented categories of priestesses — naditu, qadishtu, entu — whose roles were ritual, economic, and sometimes of very high social status. It's entirely possible that Herodotus, or his informant, saw something real, misunderstood it, and generalized it to every woman in the country.
Against this, defenders point out that Strabo repeats the claim centuries later, and that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's an honest, plausible argument — but a weak one: Strabo, writing four hundred years later in the 1st century BC, could simply have been copying Herodotus, which is what half of Antiquity did and all of modernity still does. This humble writer included.
My own position, since this piece carries my byline: I think Herodotus recorded in good faith something his local sources told him — something that may well have had a real basis in the sacred female staff of the temples, who perhaps, on certain days of the year, performed ritual sexual acts to honor the goddess Mylitta — and that somewhere on the journey from a Babylonian mouth to a Greek scroll, that turned into a universal law that most likely never existed. As for the rest, one only has to look at how fiercely jealous men across the Middle East remain over their women today to find it hard to believe that back then, in Babylon — sitting right where Iraq is now — they would have handed them over to any random passer-by for a worthless copper coin. It's exactly the same mechanism as "those Spartans told me," "my Lebanese friend Abibaal heard," "my cousins told me" — the very thing that led Herodotus to fuse two different pharaohs into a single Sesostris, and that may well have given birth to this story too.
Or it could all be one hundred percent true, like most of what the Master has told us, and someone, after the Persian or Islamic conquest of those lands, simply wanted to destroy all the visual or written record of it because they found it too scandalous and shameful. Who knows.
Why it's worth reading anyway
You might ask me why bother telling a custom that probably never existed. And my answer is always the same.
Because the passage is a historical document — just of something else. It doesn't document what Babylonian women actually did. It documents what an educated 5th-century-BC Greek was willing to believe about the women of the richest city in the world. It documents that the formula "the richer and more opulent the city, the more corrupt its women" was already working twenty-five centuries ago, exactly as it does today.
And it documents something else, something that disarms me a little: that Herodotus, in the middle of all this, noticed the ones who waited four years. Nobody made him include that detail. The scandal didn't need it. He put it in because he saw it, or because someone told him about it, and because he was the kind of man who noticed who was still sitting there after everyone else had gone home.
That's the Herodotus I translated and rewrote in full in The Book of the Muse Clio: the one who tells the scandal, yes, but who also keeps his eyes on the person nobody else is looking at.
Sources and references
- Herodotus, Histories, Book I (Clio), 196 — the annual marriage auction and its disappearance after the Persian conquest.
- Herodotus, Histories, Book I (Clio), 199 — the Babylonian custom; and 196-200 for the full set of Babylonian laws.
- Strabo, Geography, XVI — the claim repeated in the Roman period.
- Stephanie Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (2008) — the standard modern refutation.
- Cuneiform documentation on categories of female temple staff: naditu, qadishtu, entu.
There is NO fiction in this article
This account faithfully reproduces Herodotus I.199: the once-in-a-lifetime obligation, the corded headband, the roped-off corridors, the coin tossed into her lap — conventionally translated as "silver," though Herodotus himself says the metal made no difference — the invocation formula to Mylitta, the impossibility of refusing the first man to pay, the consecration of the money to the goddess, and the women who waited three or four years. The description of it as "the most shameful of their laws" is literally his, not mine. That said: the real existence of this custom is seriously disputed by modern Assyriology, and the summary of that debate offered here reflects the current state of scholarly disagreement, not a certainty. My personal conclusion — that a misunderstanding arose from the temples' sacred female staff — is a reasoned hypothesis of the author, not an established fact. It equally reproduces Herodotus I.196: the herald, the auction starting with the most beautiful, the dowry paid with the gold from the beautiful women to marry off the plain ones, and Herodotus's own statement that this custom — the one he calls the wisest — no longer existed in his time, replaced by the prostitution of daughters after the violent, destructive Persian conquest of the city. The literary voice is David S. Matrecano's.
