Herodotus’ narrative on Lydia takes up almost one half of Book I of his Histories and the section dealing with King Croesus is among the best-known and often anthologized. The last section, in which he discusses Lydian women as prostitutes, is not as well-known but continues a criticism of the region earlier reserved only for its king.
Herodotus (l. c. 484-425/413 BCE) visited Lydia in the course of his travels and provides an account in I.6-I.94 of Histories. In the last two chapters, he describes the women of Lydia as prostitutes who sell themselves to build up a dowry for marriage and then discusses how this relates to the famous Tomb of Alyattes before moving on to a discussion of how the Lydians reacted to famine by playing distracting games and some of them relocating and changing their names.
A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Penguin Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; from ‘A Descent into the Maelström’
