That would probably be hunting and gathering , followed perhaps by subsistence farming. Prostitution has existed in nearly every civilization on earth, however, stretching back throughout all of recorded human history. Whenever there have been money, goods, or services available for barter, somebody most likely bartered them for sex.
Except for widows, this was the only category of women who had no male providers. The Code reads in part:. To the extent that we have records of the ancient world, prostitution appears to have been more or less ubiquitous. Hetaera were always female. Prostitution remained legal throughout the Greek and Roman periods, although Christian Roman emperors strongly discouraged it later. The newly-converted Reccared I, Visigoth King of Spain in the early first century, banned prostitution as part of an effort to bring his country into alignment with Christian ideology.
There was no punishment for men who hired or exploited prostitutes, but women found guilty of selling sexual favors were whipped times and exiled. In most cases, this would have been tantamount to a death sentence. By the medieval era, prostitution was accepted as a fact of life in major cities. King Henry II discouraged but permitted it, although he mandated that prostitutes must be single and ordered weekly inspections of London's infamous brothels to ensure that other laws were not being broken.
The Great Council of Venice declared prostitution to be "absolutely indispensable to the world" in Government-funded brothels were established in major Italian cities throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. Penalties for prostitution ranging from maiming to execution were technically in place in many European states by the s, but they generally went unenforced.
The newly-elected Pope Sixtus V grew frustrated and decided on a more direct approach, ordering that all women who participate in prostitution should be put to death. There is no evidence that his order was actually carried out on any large scale by Catholic nations of the period. Although Sixtus reigned for only five years, this was not his only claim to fame. Before he became Pope, the church taught that fetuses did not become human persons until quickening at about 20 weeks gestation.
