Sunday Salon: 1 2 3...meme!

Having just welcomed the 123rd member to the Sunday Salon (A Comfy Chair and a Book), it seems only appropriate that I now take up the challenge issued by Kerrie over at MYSTERIES in PARADISE. That is, I was tagged for the 123 Meme. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Easily done! As it happens, the book nearest to hand is David Grene's translation of Herodotus, page 123 of which is a section from the first book on the peculiarities of Babylonian life (1.196).

In the passage required by the meme Herodotus is describing the Babylonian practice of annually auctioning off marriageable girls. The auction would start with the best-looking girls, who would go for the highest prices. Once the pretty girls were disposed of, however, the rules of the auction changed. Now, they'd start with the least ugly girl, and auction her off to whoever would take the least money to have her. And it would go on from there, the girls getting uglier and uglier, so that the worst of the lot presumably brought the highest dowry. Thus the poorer men (or just cheap guys who weren't into appearances) were paid money to take the ugly girls, and the money funding this came from the auctioning off of the pretty girls:

"This money came from the sale of the good-looking girls, so those who were handsome portioned off the ill-favored girls and the cripples. But no man might give away his daughters to whom he pleased, nor might any man take any girls by buying her without a guarantor; he must produce his guarantor for a solemn promise to live with her in his home and only so be allowed to take her away. If the couple could not agree, the law was that the money must be returned."

It's worth telling you how the section ends. Herodotus, who much approves this system, laments that it has not continued into the present day: "Lately they have discovered something new. Since the conquest of Babylon and the general ruin, everyone of the common sort who is destitute of a livelihood prostitutes his female children."

And now, for the tagging. I'm going to keep it in the Salon and tag, hmmm, Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf, Doreen at Shep Nachas, Jacob at Jacob Russell's Barking Dog, JoeB at Fiction Views, and Susan at In Over My Head.