Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz Read Free Book Online Page B

must have come up with some regularity, as female slaves were often used as surrogate mothers. When a freeman’s wife was unable to have children, she was permitted to find a slave woman to do the job. The slave was then given certain additional rights, though not enough to challenge the wife’s position in the household. The laws of Lipit-Ishtar required that the slave mother not live in the house of her masters. The Babylonians went one step further, explicitly allowing the wife to continue treating the slave-mother as a piece of property.
    The rape of a married woman incurred the death penalty only when it took place on the open road, and only if the woman had vigorously fought back. The fact that the sex occurred outdoors, and that she did her best to stop it, helped show that she was taken by surprise and was not looking to have an affair. If she was at home when the sex occurred, the suspicion of bad intentions on her part was almost impossible to shake. The Hittites, in fact, resolved cases of home rape against the wife even before it occurred:
If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), it is the man’s offense, but if he seizes her in her house, it is the woman’s offense: the woman shall die. If the woman’s husband discovers them in the act, he may kill them without committing a crime. 9
     

PROSTITUTION, SACRED AND PROFANE
     
    The rules changed when sex was for sale. Prostitution was a legal transaction like any other, so long as it was carried out according to custom and respectable women were not involved. An Assyrian man who had sex with a married woman in a tavern or brothel (which were often one and the same) could be put to death for taking another man’s wife, but his knowledge of the fact that she was married would first have to be proven—which could be difficult, given the circumstances. If he could show that he had believed he was paying a single woman for her company, then no one could lay a hand on him, even if she had been married to an aristocrat.
    In Egypt, religion and prostitution were closely associated. The Egyptian goddess Isis was, among her many other incarnations, a whore. At first, prostitution was barred from religious precincts. However, by the time the geographer Strabo traveled in Egypt in 25 BC, customs had changed. In the temple of Zeus, prepubescent girls were being served up for men’s pleasure:
To Zeus they consecrate one of the most beautiful girls of the most illustrious family . . . She becomes a prostitute and has intercourse with whomever she wishes, until the . . . purification of her body [by menstruation] takes place. After her purification, she is given in marriage to a man, but before the marriage and after her time as a prostitute, a . . . ceremony of mourning is celebrated in her honor.
     
    Herodotus wrote of another girl who had got into the trade: the daughter of the pharaoh Khufu (or Cheops, 2589–2566 BC). Her life was decidedly unglamorous, however. She was put to work on her back to pay for her father’s death monument:
When [Khufu] was short of money, he sent his daughter to a bawdy house with instructions to charge a certain sum—they did not tell me how much. This she actually did, adding to it a further transaction of her own; for with the intention of leaving something to be remembered by after her death, she asked each of her customers to give her a block of stone, and of these stones (the story goes) was built the middle pyramid of the three which stand in front of the great pyramid. It is a hundred and fifty feet square.
     
    That’s a lot of stones, and a lot of clients.
    Another story from Herodotus told of the Thracian prostitute Rhodipus, a beauty whose hard work in Egypt brought her great fame and wealth, some of which she used to dedicate temples at Delphi. Rhodipus worked with the opportunities she had: Selling sex, sacred or otherwise, was one of the few ways unmarried women could get ahead. In Egypt, women were nearly