(Nothing can well be more corrupt than the manners of this City, nothing more artfully adapted to excite the passions and allure to voluptuous excesses. Strangers are permitted by parents and husbands, provided the price of shame is forthcoming, to have lustful intercourse with their children and their wives.... At their first entrance to the banquet-room the women’s dress is modest, presently they remove their outer robes one by one, and little by little violate all modesty, ... at the last stripping off the innermost coverings of their persons. And this is no mere abomination of harlots, but the habit of matrons and maids, who consider that in thus making themselves cheap and exposing their bodies they are showing courtesy). This custom we find again carried still further amongst the Armenians, who _Strabo_[26][27] says consecrate their daughters for some considerable length of time to Anaitis, and only after this suffer them to marry. _Herodotus_[28] relates the same custom of the Lydians, degenerated in the same way as had been the case in later times at Babylon, for here too the lower classes used to abandon their daughters to prostitution for a livelihood. Still in its original purity the usage reached the Phoenicians[29], but with them also would seem to have early degenerated, although in particular towns of Phoenicia the practice appears to have been followed only under certain circumstances. _Lucian_[30] relates that the women, of Byblus, where was a Temple of Ἀφροδίτη βυβλίη (Venus of Byblos), _if_ they would not allow their hair to be cut off at the Funeral-feast of Adonis, were bound in honour of Venus for one whole day to abandon their bodies to strangers. Among the Carthaginians[31] also, as in Cyprus[32], maidens had to earn their dowry, and the Tyrant Dionysius introduced the same custom, no doubt with a secondary design of a profit for himself, amongst the people of Locri.[33]
As to the _reason_ for this custom, one might be found in the opinion that prevailed almost universally in Antiquity amongst the Asiatic peoples, that the first-fruits of everything were consecrate to the Deity, and accordingly the virgin’s hymen must be offered up to Venus. But this will not in any way explain why the self-surrender must nearly always take place with a _Stranger_ (ἀνδρὶ ξείνῳ) of all people in the world. _Heyne_[34] and _Fr. Jacobs_[35], who paid special attention to this custom, are it is true agreed in thinking that a religious motive lay at the bottom of it, though they differ in their conception of what it was; but neither of them hit on the right explanation. A careful distinction must be made between the _Ceremony_ and the _Act_ of the self-surrender. The first was a matter of religion, the second not; for the women were conveyed at Babylon outside the Temple-precincts, in Cyprus to the sea-shore, for the purpose of yielding their bodies to strangers[36]. Had the act been regarded at that period as a religious one, it would of necessity have been practised, as was the case before and again later, in the Temple or at least within its precincts, and of course with fellow-countrymen, strangers not being allowed to take part in any native religious practice.