The History of Prostitution

omen.-Conversion of Prostitutes.-The Gnostics.-The Ascetics.-Conventual Life.-Opinion of the F

ostles exacted it as a moral and religious duty. They preached against lewdness as fervently as against heathenism. Not one of the epistles contained in the New Testament but inveighs, in the strongest language, against the vices

enied that the chastity of the Roman virgins was, at best, but partial, the purest among them being accustomed to unchaste language and unchaste sights. The Christian congregations, on the contrary, contained numbers of virgins who had devoted themselves to celibacy for the love of Christ. They were modest in their dress, decorous in their manners, chaste in their speech.[145] They refused to attend the theatres; lived frugally and temperately; allowed no dancers at their banquets; u

The piety of the early Christians prompted the belief that on many conspicuous occasions the Almighty had interfered to protect his chosen children in this dire calamity.[150] St. Agnes, having refused to sacrifice to Vesta, was said to have been stripped naked by the order of the prefect; but, no sooner had her garments fallen, than her hair grew miraculously, and enveloped her as in a shroud. Dragged to the brothel, a wonderful light shone from her body, and the by-standers, appalled at the sight, instead of offering her violence, fell at her knees, till, at last, the prefect's son, bolder and more reckless than the others, advanced to consummate her sentence, and was struck dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.[151] Theodora, a noble lady of Alexandria, was equally undau

ended naked by one foot, and tortured in other savage and infernal ways. The practice led to the clear enunciation of the important doctrine of moral chastity, already stated by Christ himself in the Gospel. The Romans could not conceive a chaste soul in a body that had endured pollution, and hence for Lucretia there was no resource but the ponia

class. She confessed to Zosimus that she had spent seventeen years in the practice of prostitution at Alexandria. Her heart being opened, she took ship for Jerusalem, paid her passage by exercising her calling on board, and expiated her sins by a life of penitence in the woods of Jud?a. S

he third and fourth centuries, when sectarian rivalries menaced the destruction of the Church, similar accusations were freely bandied. That they were wholly unfounded in every case seems difficult to believe, in the face of the clear statements of such writers as Epiphanes. What the precise doctrines of the various sects called Adamites, Cainites, Nicolaites, and some subdivisions of Gnostics, may have been, it were perhaps superfluous now to inquire; but it seems not unreasonable to suppose that, in some instances, men of depraved instincts may have availed themselves of the cloak of Christianity to conceal the gratification of sensual habits; or, on the other hand, that minds in a state of religious exaltation m

ould naturally revive the system of religious prostitution in a more or less modified shape. On the other hand, in many parts of Europe, Christian churches thought it not unsafe to accept the legacies of the heathen religions in the shapes of idols, forms, and ceremonies. Saints succeeded to the honors of gods; dances in honor of Venus became dances in honor of the Virgin; statues which were originally intended to represent heathen deities were saved from destruction by being adopted as fair representations of Christian saints. Until very recent times there existed, in various parts of Europe, statues of Priapus, under the name of some saint, retaining the indecency of the idol, and associated with the belie

s edicts in France and elsewhere leaves no room to doubt that, in several instances, immoral persons had assumed the

s it threw in its way. Independently of the effect produced by the moral teaching of St. Paul and the Apostles, the rising power of th

atem spectat.[162] The same principle is asserted in various passages of the work; wine being denounced as a provocation to impurity, and the faithful are warned against the society of lewd persons (scortatores). The Council of Elvira pronounced the penalty of excommunication against bawds and prostitutes, but it expressly commanded priests to receive at the communion-table prostitutes who had married Christians.[163] St. Augustin conceived that no church should admit prostitutes to the altar till they had abandoned the calling.[164] A similar doctrine was expressed by the Council of Toledo. At a later period, as we advance in med

e imperial agents hunting for prostitutes in taverns and houses of prostitution, and forcing them to purchase, by payment of the tax, the right of pursuing their calling.[167] At length, in the fifth century, prostitution and the tax on prostitutes, or chrysarguron, were formally abolished by the Emperor Anastasius I., and the records and rolls of the collectors burned. It is said that some time afterward, the emperor gave out that he had repented of what he had done, and desired to see the chrysarguron re-established. The announcement gave great joy to the

f citizens with prostitutes, and encouraged it by his example. His own wife, the Empress Theodora, had been a ballet-dancer and a prostitute. When she attained the imperial dignity, her first thought was of her old companions. She built a magnificent palace-prison on the south shore of the Bosphorus, and in one night

o be expelled from the city where he lived, and any person harboring him was to be fined one hundred gold pieces. Whatever legislation could effect to uproot the system of procurers and public prostitution, Justinian did;[170] but