In or recent book chat about the novel Winter Quarters by Alfred Duggan, the question came up whether there was really a temple prostitution, as is so often implied.
Now, thanks to a comment elsewhere by Judith Weingarten, "… we may finally (finally!) be able to put the myth of sacred prostitution to bed: see the BMCR review of Stephanie Budin’s new book, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity."
The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity
by Stephanie Budin
Hardcover, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
From the review by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge:
In a contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Greek Religion edited in 2007 by Daniel Ogden, I complained that the question of "sacred prostitution" was still hindering studies on "the religion of women" in ancient Greece, such as was the case in Matthew Dillon's book on the subject. I confess that my lament was rather self-centered, insofar as I had addressed this topic in my own PhD on "L'Aphrodite grecque", which was published in 1994. In the chapter on Corinth, I refuted what I called then "the historiographic myth of sacred prostitution", building my argument on a close assessment of the literary and epigraphic evidence. In 2007, I took up the case again, summarizing the argument from 1994, which had been rarely addressed till then. I concluded that other controversial occurrences, such as the sanctuary attributed to Aphrodite at Gravisca in Etruria or the sanctuary of Eryx in Sicily should be seriously studied too. These preliminary reflections are intended to show how welcome a book entitled "The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity" can be, extensively broadening the focus that I had limited to Corinth. Stephanie Lynn Budin has taken the opportunity to challenge this old problem in a synthesis that is not the first to consider "sacred prostitution" as a "mythe historiographique" (as D. Arnaud had already called Babylonian prostitution in 1973, but she conveniently provides almost every piece of evidence and confronts this complex dossier as a whole. read on
As usual with academic publications, the price is somewhat stiff and out of the range for most of us. One may hope for a less expensive paperback edition in the future.
