The "father of history", the Greek scholar Herodotus, was the first classical writer to investigate, rather than merely record, the cultural and social practices of his ancestors and the world around him. In The Histories , he charts the ancient traditions of the Greek world and the Persian empire, comparing cultural differences and contradictions.
Women appear in The Histories in a variety of guises. In some regions, men and women have equal authority. In others, matrilineality prevails. Herodotus finds evidence of tribes of warrior women who must kill in battle to be allowed to marry, and others who are auctioned off as wives like slaves.
One of the most unusual practices Herodotus details is the that of sacred prostitution, which he observes in the ancient city of Babylon. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple.
It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. After their intercourse, having discharged her sacred duty to the goddess, she goes away to her home. Historians have traced evidence of the horae , as the women involved in these practices of sexual worship were called, in various guises throughout the ancient world, as far back as BC.
Actor Susie Lamb first came across them as an archaeological student at University College Dublin, and she was fascinated by the way in which the status of women and the representation of the female role in sex had changed over the millennia.
