The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution

This is a remarkably comprehensive history of the oldest profession. It begins with the pagan sex market of ancient Greece, and stresses the close connection of prostitution to everyday life in all countries at all times.

The author focuses on aspects often ignored by conventional historians; the relations not only between harlots and ordinary citizens, but among diplomats, artists, and prosperous courtesans - with the resulting ramifications in national and international affairs.

The Oldest Profession is a scholarly, fully detailed history that includes a wealth of remarkable anecdotes and presents a clear picture of the vicissitudes of prostitution; the efforts of early Romans to spy on the erotic Mysteries celebrated by women; Charlemagne's strict laws against prostitutes and procurers; twelfth-century England's regulated bawdy houses, which led to the establishment of official brothels in France and Italy and "women's quarters" in Germany; the sever punishment, both corporal and financial, of brothelkeepers in seventeenth-century France; the organized protest by prostitutes against the "brutal methods and language" of Paris police in the eighteenth-century; the twentieth-century abolition of the registration of prostitutes in Sweden, where there have never been brothels; and sex legislation in the Soviet Union, where prostitution is outlawed because it is "a means to live without working".