Sly. Very sly.
Oct. 6th, 2004 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoFrom the Wikipedia article on Empress Theodora:
"Critics of Procopius have dismissed his work as vitriolic and pornograpic, but have been unable to discredit his facts. For example, the sources do not dispute Theodora emerged as a comic actress in burlesque theater, and that her talents tended toward what we might call physical comedy. She was renowned for her animal acts. While her advancement in Byzantine society was up and down, she made use of every opening."
{this is Hal's suppressed laughter while reading at work...}
*^*^*^*
UPDATE: Why the above is a sly joke (for those not fully up on Byzantine history).
From the Project Gutenberg e-text of Procopius:
"(Theodora) often went to a
supper at which each one paid his share, with ten or more young men,
in the full vigour of their age and practised in debauchery, and would
pass the whole night with all of them. When they were all exhausted,
she would go to their servants, thirty in number, it may be, and
fornicate with each one of them; and yet not even so did she quench
her lust. Once she went to the house of some great man, and while the
guests were drinking pulled up her clothes on the edge of the couch
and did not blush to exhibit her wantonness without reserve. Though
she received the male in three orifices she nevertheless complained of
Nature for not having made the passage of her breasts wider, that she
might contrive a new form of coition in that part of her person also."
"Critics of Procopius have dismissed his work as vitriolic and pornograpic, but have been unable to discredit his facts. For example, the sources do not dispute Theodora emerged as a comic actress in burlesque theater, and that her talents tended toward what we might call physical comedy. She was renowned for her animal acts. While her advancement in Byzantine society was up and down, she made use of every opening."
{this is Hal's suppressed laughter while reading at work...}
*^*^*^*
UPDATE: Why the above is a sly joke (for those not fully up on Byzantine history).
From the Project Gutenberg e-text of Procopius:
"(Theodora) often went to a
supper at which each one paid his share, with ten or more young men,
in the full vigour of their age and practised in debauchery, and would
pass the whole night with all of them. When they were all exhausted,
she would go to their servants, thirty in number, it may be, and
fornicate with each one of them; and yet not even so did she quench
her lust. Once she went to the house of some great man, and while the
guests were drinking pulled up her clothes on the edge of the couch
and did not blush to exhibit her wantonness without reserve. Though
she received the male in three orifices she nevertheless complained of
Nature for not having made the passage of her breasts wider, that she
might contrive a new form of coition in that part of her person also."
