In Abyssinia (according to Fiaschi, British Medical Journal, March 13, 1897), where prostitution has always been held in high esteem, the prostitutes, who are now subject to medical examination twice a week, still attach no disgrace to their profession, and easily find husbands afterwards. Potter (Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 168 et seq.) gives references as regards peoples, widely dispersed in the Old World and the New, among whom the young women have practiced prostitution to obtain a dowry.
At Tralles, in Lydia, even in the second century A.D., as Sir W. M. Ramsay notes (Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, pp. 94, 115), sacred prostitution was still an honorable practice for women of good birth who "felt themselves called upon to live the divine life under the influence of divine inspiration."
The gradual secularization of prostitution from its earlier religious form has been traced by various writers (see, e.g., Dupouey, La Prostitution dans l'Antiquité). The earliest complimentary reference to the Hetaira in literature is to be found, according to Benecke (Antimachus of Colophon, p. 36), in Bacchylides.