From the beginning to the present day

Where and how far should we go back in time to get a real picture of the form of prostitution we are studying now to get to the current state of the escort trade today? The famous saying that prostitution is one of the oldest professions in the world is no mistake. According to some researchers, putting up the female body for sale began at the time when money as a means of payment still did not exist. We cannot talk about prostitutes here - because even the word ‘prostitute’ itself was not in the public mind - but the provision of sexual service for food, clothing and certain things to maintain life might have existed. Although there are no written records from the prehistoric times to prove it - due to the late formation of writing, there are archaeological finds, for example: craved stone phallus (an ancestor of a vibrator), which suggest that sexuality was not just a part of instinctive procreation but also a great source of pleasure and enjoyment. On this basis, we can afford to make the conclusion that prostitution must have been present even in the ancient times.

But let's leave prehistoric times now and jump to the city states in the ancient Athens. Why exactly here? Since we’re going to find there what we’re studying, the origin of escort trade.

Before we begin, let's talk about what we mean by escorts. The first and most important thing to know about escorts (we will come back to the topic more detailed later) is that an escort is not a prostitute. An escort sells not her body, nor sexual services, but her time. Of course, within the time frame of escort time sexual attraction can develop between escort and client with the probability of having sexual intercourse. The emphasis, however, is that an escort girl working in the escort trade can choose to go or not to go to bed with the customer bought her time.

This is still the case today, with the difference that the change in technology has a great impact on escort trade, about which I’m going to talk about later.

Prostitution operated in Athens city state in similar pattern as it does today. There was a certain structure among sex-workers. In the first group of sex-workers cheap prostitutes operated to satisfy the desires of the working class people. They would hustle mainly in the outskirts of the city centre and in the neighbourhood of the working quarters. The other group included those prostitutes who were employed in brothels operating in city centres. The brothels at that time were very popular places because visiting brothels was a way of having social life. There were brothels for both the middle and the noble class. Escort girls belonged to the third group of prostitutes. Escort girls (hetaera) at that time did not differ from modern escort girls in terms of the work structure, however, in the judgment and in the social position there was a significant difference. An escort girl from the ancient times was a "plaything" of elite, and it was undeniably the luxury category.