The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity

Stephanie Lynn Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008, argues at length that sacred prostitution, the practice long attributed to various ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions on the strength of classical authors like Herodotus, never actually existed as those ancient authors described it, and that the claim rests on garbled testimony, moralizing rhetoric and later scholarly repetition rather than solid evidence. Budin's argument is built from close, source by source reexamination of every ancient testimony usually cited. Its strength is that direct return to the primary evidence rather than accepting inherited scholarly consensus. Its limit is that Budin's thesis is itself a contested position: other historians of ancient religion have pushed back, arguing some form of ritualized sexual practice likely did occur in specific contexts even if the sweeping ancient accounts exaggerated it, so the debate should be presented as live rather than settled by this one book.