The idea that governments have always tried to suppress sex work is mostly a myth. For most of recorded history, the opposite was true: authorities from Athens to Edo Japan registered the workers, licensed the buildings, and taxed the trade as if it were any other public utility. The most famous story about ancient prostitution is likely Greek gossip. The historian Herodotus claimed that every Babylonian woman was once required to sit in a temple and have sex with a stranger for money.
Scholarship, including Stephanie Budin’s 2008 book *The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity*, concludes this institution probably never existed anywhere in the ancient Near East. Herodotus never visited Babylon and did not speak the language. Babylonian records show a clear distinction between the *harimtu*, an ordinary secular sex worker, and the *naditu*, cloistered temple priestesses who were usually celibate and managed property. Babylon still regulated the trade.
The Code of Hammurabi, carved around 1754 BC, set rules for women-run taverns where much of this activity occurred, including honest pricing and a duty to report criminals. The law was harsh about boundaries: if a celibate priestess entered a tavern for a drink, she could be burned. The Greeks are credited with inventing the state-run brothel. Legend says the Athenian lawgiver Solon established the first ones around 594 BC, stocked with enslaved workers, and used the profits to build a temple to Aphrodite.
The story mostly survives through the comic playwright Philemon, writing roughly 300 years after Solon’s death, so historians suspect later Athenians projected their own system onto their founding father. What is documented is the *pornikon telos*, a real levy on the trade collected by contractors who bid for the right to gather it. Greek society had a strict hierarchy. At the bottom were the enslaved women of the brothels near the city gates.
Above them were the flute girls who entertained at drinking parties. At the top sat the *hetairai*, educated companions prized for wit and conversation. Some, like Aspasia, the partner of Pericles, were so respected that Socrates reportedly came to hear her speak. Others, like the model Phryne, were said to have won a trial by baring her body to the jury—a tale found only in sources written centuries later.
The trade-off was total. A *hetaira* could own property and manage money, a door to independence closed to respectable women who were kept indoors and silent. But that independence came with a complete loss of respectability, and for the enslaved women at the bottom, it was merely ownership. One popular internet claim, that Greek workers wore sandals stamping “Follow me” into the dirt, is false.
No such sandal has ever been found. Rome offers the best-preserved evidence. The Lupanar in Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, survives with stone beds, erotic paintings, and more than 120 pieces of graffiti recording prices, boasts, and complaints. The charges were roughly two *asses*, about the price of a loaf of bread.
The Romans required sex workers to register with the *aediles*, the officials who managed markets and public order. The register was real enough that a noblewoman named Vistilia once registered in 19 AD specifically to dodge Rome’s adultery laws, causing a public scandal. Another popular claim, that small bronze coins called *spintriae* were brothel tokens, is likely wrong. Modern researchers mostly think they were gaming pieces or bath tokens, since matching scenes with numbers appear painted on the walls of bathhouse changing rooms in Pompeii.
Nobody actually knows what they were for. Rome did tax the trade directly. The emperor Caligula imposed a tax equal to the price of a single act per day, and it became a permanent revenue stream collected across the empire. The Romans even joked about their own origins.
They called a prostitute a *lupa*, a she-wolf, and a brothel a *lupanar*, a wolf den. Their founding legend says Romulus and Remus were raised by a she-wolf, and Roman writers suggested the famous wolf might have been a woman of the trade. Ancient India was the most bureaucratic of all. The *Arthashastra*, a Mauryan text from around the 3rd century BC, describes an official whose title translates to superintendent of prostitutes.
It was a government department. The state salaried the top courtesans, taxed their income, regulated their property, and laid out rules for when they aged or fell ill. These women were also used as spies, entertaining foreign visitors and officials and reporting back on what they said. The text sets fines for clients who cheated courtesans and for courtesans who cheated clients, and even specifies that a courtesan had to name a successor or hand over part of her property to the crown.
India also produced the *devadasi* system, which has been badly distorted. These were girls dedicated to temples, married to a god, who performed sacred dances and often held land and status. British colonial officials in the 1800s lumped them together with ordinary sex workers under the label “temple prostitutes,” a misrepresentation partly responsible for the system’s later degradation. China drew a sharp line between ordinary brothels and the elite courtesan, a cultural superstar trained in poetry, music, and calligraphy.
During the Tang Dynasty, the pleasure quarter sat next to the district where men took the imperial examinations. The state ran the system through registered music households, a hereditary class that supplied official entertainment and lasted over a thousand years until it was abolished in 1723. The glamour had a brutal side. The so-called thin horses of Yangzhou were poor girls bought young and trained specifically to be sold as concubines and courtesans, the phrase describing the practice of fattening up a cheap animal for resale.
Some courtesans became famous artists whose work survived the men who paid for it. Japan made zoning literal. In 1617, the Tokugawa government licensed a single walled district in Edo, named Yoshiwara, rebuilt after a fire as a moated compound with controlled gates so authorities could watch who entered and left. At the top were the *oiran*, elite courtesans who commanded staggering fees and walked on towering wooden clogs in elaborate processions.
One correction stands out: geisha were not prostitutes. They were entertainers trained in music, dance, and conversation, and the authorities specifically regulated them to keep them out of the sex trade. Under the silk was a system of indentured servitude. The women were overwhelmingly sold into the district as children by desperately poor families and then trapped by debts that grew faster than they could ever be paid.
Leaving was nearly impossible unless a wealthy client bought out the balance. A Japanese emancipation edict in 1872, issued partly under pressure from an international incident involving a Peruvian ship, released the women from those debts on paper, but the trade quietly reorganized because the poverty feeding it remained. Medieval Europe offers the strangest chapter. Many cities owned and licensed brothels as ordinary municipal businesses.
In London, the stews of Southwark operated under license from the Bishop of Winchester, who profited directly. The women became known as Winchester geese, and to be bitten by a Winchester goose meant catching a disease. The church justified this with a cynical logic attributed to Saint Augustine, who wrote that if you remove prostitutes from society, you will throw everything into chaos through unchecked lust. In southern France and parts of Germany and Italy, town councils ran municipal brothels alongside the public baths and the marketplace, with the brothel listed in municipal accounts next to bridge tolls and the salt tax.
Women were required to wear identifying marks, demeaning but a form of official recognition. A popular tale claims a queen of Naples personally chartered the brothel of Avignon in the 1300s, but this appears to be a complete fabrication. The Aztecs had their own version. The Florentine Codex, compiled by a Spanish friar in the 16th century, describes the *ahuiianime*, the pleasure women, skilled and adorned figures connected to the goddess of flowers and love who wore their hair loose and played a public role at festivals.
The account is filtered through a Spanish priest with strong opinions. Two forces ended the licensed brothel in Europe at nearly the same time. Syphilis swept across the continent in the 1490s, turning the tolerated brothel into a public health catastrophe. The Protestant Reformation then replaced the old logic of vice as a necessary evil with a harsher moral line.
In England, King Henry VIII closed the Southwark stews for good in 1546. The pattern across thousands of years and miles is consistent: don’t ban it, because that never works. Contain it, license it, register the workers, zone the buildings, and tax it. The Empress Theodora of Byzantium reportedly came from this world and later funded a refuge for women trying to leave the trade, though the juiciest stories about her past come from a writer who openly hated her.
Behind every register and licensed house were real people, most of them poor, many of them enslaved, navigating a world that found them useful and disposable in equal measure.
