GREECE.
At Corinth, a great commercial city and seaport, business shrewdness was linked with sensuality and profanation, and a great temple of Venus was built, where one thousand priestesses were required to lead a life of religious infamy to make money for their despicable masters. There were constant importations of new girls from Lesbos and the other Grecian isles. Then as now the devices of the white slave trader were assiduously employed to keep up and increase the number of profitable European and Asiatic girls.
It is pastime as well as business to these traffickers to drug, to make drunken, to deceive, to ensnare or to debauch by force the innocent, the confiding, the thoughtless, the weak. Whether for the ancient temple of Venus at Corinth or for the dens of shame in the white slave market of Chicago or Paris, beautiful victims who will earn much money for their masters and captors must be hunted and trapped.
At Athens the lawgiver Solon established houses of shame by statute, and filled them with slave girls for whom there was no possible escape. But whoever, man or woman, caused a freeborn Athenian girl to enter one of the houses incurred the penalty of death. It might be well if freeborn American girls were as thoroughly protected. An Athenian forfeited his citizenship on opening a house of shame. American citizenship in our large cities allows the white slave traders an astounding amount of political influence.
ROME.
In Rome immoral women were enrolled by the police in a public register, and this public record of their evil life always remained to bar their way to repentance and respectability. Modern European cities, on the Continent, follow this hurtful custom, and it has been introduced without authority of law in some American cities.
Many bakers, barbers and keepers of taverns, baths and drug stores were also traders in women. These depraved traffickers were regarded with the greatest loathing by the Roman people. The white slave traders of ancient Rome probably differed little from the Italian traders to be found in so many parts of the world today, notably New York and Chicago. The poet Milton tells how his love of purity kept him in his youth from the evils practised at Bordello's, presumably an Italian resort in London. Persons desiring to know the trader's boasting over a young and beautiful girl who had come into his devilish power, will find it described in the old English play commonly attributed to Shakespeare, called "Pericles, Prince of Tyre."
An exceedingly bad example was set by some of the Roman emperors. Augustus even in his old age sent out men to bring him women and girls. The beautiful Mallonia stabbed herself rather than yield to the emperor Tiberius.
The emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was very virtuous and religious and wise according to Roman ideals, persecuted Christians to the extent of legally condemning Christian girls to the houses of infamy. Young women were seized and required to sacrifice to idols. Upon refusing they were dragged through the streets and given to a white slaver.
Some beautiful legends have been preserved which tell of miraculous deliverance of Christian girls from this most Satanic cruelty. St. Agnes, the story runs, was seized and stripped, but immediately her hair grew quickly and covered her like a garment. Dragged to a den of shame, she appeared transfigured, a wonderful light shining from her body, and no one dared to harm her. At length one bold ruffian came near her, but was struck dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.