(Nothing can well be more corrupt than the manners of this City, nothing more artfully adapted to excite the passions and allure to voluptuous excesses. Strangers are permitted by parents and husbands, provided the price of shame is forthcoming, to have lustful intercourse with their children and their wives.... At their first entrance to the banquet-room the women’s dress is modest, presently they remove their outer robes one by one, and little by little violate all modesty, ... at the last stripping off the innermost coverings of their persons. And this is no mere abomination of harlots, but the habit of matrons and maids, who consider that in thus making themselves cheap and exposing their bodies they are showing courtesy). This custom we find again carried still further amongst the Armenians, who _Strabo_[26][27] says consecrate their daughters for some considerable length of time to Anaitis, and only after this suffer them to marry. _Herodotus_[28] relates the same custom of the Lydians, degenerated in the same way as had been the case in later times at Babylon, for here too the lower classes used to abandon their daughters to prostitution for a livelihood. Still in its original purity the usage reached the Phoenicians[29], but with them also would seem to have early degenerated, although in particular towns of Phoenicia the practice appears to have been followed only under certain circumstances. _Lucian_[30] relates that the women, of Byblus, where was a Temple of Ἀφροδίτη βυβλίη (Venus of Byblos), _if_ they would not allow their hair to be cut off at the Funeral-feast of Adonis, were bound in honour of Venus for one whole day to abandon their bodies to strangers. Among the Carthaginians[31] also, as in Cyprus[32], maidens had to earn their dowry, and the Tyrant Dionysius introduced the same custom, no doubt with a secondary design of a profit for himself, amongst the people of Locri.[33] § 4.