The title, along with the fact that it is set in the era of Ancient Rome, should pretty much explain it… I love the expression of the bearded “salesman” in the middle.

Speaking of Ancient Rome… in an otherwise totally un-related way…

Dan Carlin, whose libertarian Common Sense podcast is linked on the right side of this here esteemed porn blog, has finally finished the last episode in his epic series on the fall of the Roman Republic.

It’s the sixth episode in the series. While the previous ones have clocked in at about 90 minutes, as is typical for Hardcore History episodes, this one is five-and-a-half hours long!!!

It’s a massive undertaking. I imagine that history fans everywhere have been eagerly anticipating it. I haven’t listened to it yet, since it just came out a few hours ago and I need to get a little high first… but I fully expect it to be the best episode of what is IMHO the best podcast ever. The summary is tantalizing:

In a massive finish to the “Dan Carlin version” of the fall of the Roman Republic, conspiracies, civil wars, beatniks of antiquity and a guy named Caesar figure prominently. Virtually everyone dies.

That’s Jupiter there on the throne… or “Zeus” to all you Percy Jackson fanboiz… but if you are a Percy Jackson fanboi then you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog and should head over to 4chan or someplace like that where they cater to young fanboiz and perverted old men.

But I digress. Check out Jupiter’s huge chest… Wow! That’s a cocaine-chest right there. And notice how Jupiter’s look and posture communicate the utmost mental and physical strength. You piss him off or mistake his wife for Ellen Page and he’ll coolly hurl a deadly thunderbolt at you… there ain’t gonna be no messin’ with Jupiter in THIS universe.

Dude-God is even leaning his left arm on a fucking cloud! How awesome is that?!

Most of all, though, Jupiter is unfazed by the young nymph supplicating herself, half-naked, in front of him. He’s the God, ya’ know, and the fate of the world and all the people and creatures in it is in his hands. Thetis can stroke his beard all she wants, but that ain’t gonna alter his inner fortitude one bit.

J.-A.-D. Ingres, who liked Da Chubbies

Of course, this image itself does not actually come from the Ancient World. It was painted in 1811 by the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

Ingres lived a long and prolific life. His work reflects a romantic view of classical antiquity and eroticism. For instance, there’s this painting called The Source. It leads you to wonder what exactly he means with the title “the source”. The source… for what, exactly? For water? Or for something else?

Like his contemporary Peter Fendi, Ingres lusted for chubby girls too. In fact, one of his most well-known and carefully-made works is this one:

It’s called Le Bain Turc– The Turkish Bath. He completed it at the age of 82 and put his age in Roman numerals next to his signature to let the world know that he still had his mojo. A whole harem of chubby girls and a declaration of sexual prowess is fucking impressive for an octogenarian. Ingres don’t need no Viagra, beyatch!!!

If you are really crazy about this painting, you can download this 79MB version of it. You might want to download it to a file and then view it in an image viewer rather than your browser, tho’… some browsers can’t handle that many chubbies at that high of a resolution.

Well, it was very simple. You just went to the wife market!

Here’s how British painter Edwin Long depicted it in his 1875 work:

Long took great pains to make his representation as accurate as possible. He provided “a meticulous reconstruction of the customs, architecture, decor and costume of a past civilization”, according to the current owners of the work.

Note the obvious enthusiasm of the auctioneer on the left. And take a look at his cohort who is showing off the woman’s “assets” so that she’ll fetch the best possible price.

The competing bidders certainly look smitten, don’t they? Dude with the long black beard is looking all like “hand me my checkbook man, I’ve gotta buy this bitch and bring her back to my hut so I can fuck her while she calls me Sargon”… or something like that.

The women should cheer up. Why so gloomy, girls? They’re probably just bitter that they weren’t the first girl chosen to be put on the block– the auctioneer started with the most beautiful and worked his way down from there. Women can be petty like that.

Long based his depiction on the writing of the Greek dude Herodotus, who is generally regarded as the “Father of History”. Herodotus wrote his magnum opus The Histories back in the 5th Century B.C.

Parts of The Histories give an accounting of the customs of the various societies in Herodotus’s world. In particular, Herodotus explains how the Babylonian marriage market worked:

Of their customs, whereof I shall now proceed to give an account, the following (which I understand belongs to them in common with the Illyrian tribe of the Eneti) is the wisest in my judgment.

Once a year in each village the maidens of age to marry were collected all together into one place; while the men stood round them in a circle. Then the auctioneer called up the damsels one by one, and offered them for sale. He began with the most beautiful. When she was sold for no small sum of money, he offered for sale the one who came next to her in beauty.

All of them were sold to be wives.The richest of the Babylonians who wished to wed bid against each other for the loveliest maidens.

But what about the ugly chics? Herodotus explains that the system was built to handle them too:

But the humbler wife-seekers, who were indifferent about beauty, took the more homely damsels with marriage payments. For the custom was that when the auctioneer had gone through the whole number of the beautiful damsels, he should then call up the ugliest- a cripple, if there chanced to be one- and offer her to the men, asking who would agree to take her for the smallest marriage payment. And the man who offered to take the smallest sum had her assigned to him. The marriage payments were furnished by the money paid for the beautiful damsels, and thus the fairer maidens ended up paying for the uglier ones to be married.

It was one big free and open market. And participation was mandatory:

No one was allowed to give his daughter in marriage to the man of his choice, nor might any one carry away the damsel whom he had purchased without the intent to truly to make her his wife; if, however, it turned out that they did not get along, the money might be paid back. All who wished to could come even from distant villages and bid for the women.

So did Herodotus think the marriage market was a good idea?

This was the best of all their customs, but it has now fallen into disuse.

“The best of all their customs”? It seems that the father of history knew a good thing when he saw it!

And if you think about it, it’s not too different from the way the marriage market works now. The Babylonians were just more honest about it.

Going once, going twice… SOLD!

A digression: I’m running this blog now and you should know that I’m a bit of a history nut. My co-blogger Sherman McCoy isn’t so current with what happened in the past. In fact, Sherman seems to think that “ancient history” is the archive section at ATK Galleria. But Sherman is dead now. He himself is part of the wind of the history, blowing blowing away in gusts of Tomorrow.

The best history topic of all is Ancient Rome. Gawd, you’ve gotta love the Romans… they were ruthless, bureaucratic, and highly sexual just like everyone was in the Ancient world, and they were the bosses of bosses for a very long time. Most importantly, they documented all their adventures in writing more than anyone else did, with the possible exception of the Greeks. But the Greeks didn’t really do much after the Macedonian Wars except for obediently paying their taxes to Rome. The Greeks just spent their time pondering philosophy, eating olives, and fucking.

If you are interested in learning more about Ancient Rome, the finest presentation that I’ve ever seen– or heard– is going on right now. It’s a podcast called The History of Rome. A dude named Mike does the podcast. He’s more laid back than the hardcore historian Dan Carlin, but he is also dealing with a story that is so action-packed that he doesn’t need to inject additional excitement of his own.

Anyway, back to the image…

That’s Brennus on the left. He just sacked the impenetrable city of Rome in 390 BC.

The Romans would remember the sacking of their city with a grudge for the next eight or nine centuries. They would go all neocon on the whole world to try to ensure that it never happened again, eventually dominating everyone from Britain to Egypt. Veni, vidi, vici became the Roman attitude. Of course, the overrun of Rome did end up happening again, but that’s a different story…

You need to understand what “sacking” a city meant. It meant that the city is completely conquered; there are no limits to what happens next.

Brennus and his cohorts are entitled to take everything. Gold. Women. More gold. More women. They can go and kill all the men they want. And then take their women. Those that they don’t kill can be made into slaves, and an important aspect of slavery in the ancient world was the sexual servitude it entailed.

Actually, there were a few traditional limits on the taking and the killing that would come into play if the occupants surrendered immediately without fighting, but even these limits were sometimes ignored, resulting in the total slaughter of whole cities that never raised any arms in defense. Nontheless, the Romans were fighting back in self-defense here, and they lost.

So Brennus, as leader of the conquerors, arrives to gather his spoils. Does he want gold? Well, there’s very little gold in the painting. Women, though… now that’s another story! The four naked women, two of whom are already bound, as well as the extra half-naked one, are all his spoils… probably about to become his slaves… his sexual slaves… for the rest of their lives.

If that’s not B.D.S.M. then I don’t know what is!

The remaining Roman survivors, holed up on the Capitoline Hill for an eventual period of seven months, negotiated for Brennus to leave them alone. Their city was devastated and all they wanted was for the sacker and his thugs to depart. So they offered to pay him. They offered to pay him one thousand pounds of gold.

The offer accepted, Brennus and his men packed up their new-found slaves and gathered their new possessions and watched as the defeated Romans piled up even more gold in front of them. There was a dispute about the weights; the Romans, ever bureaucratic sticklers, objected that Brennus had brought his own weights for measuring, and those weights were heavier than the usual Roman pound.

Brennus brushed off their complaints.

Then he took his heavy sword and threw it on the scale, thus demanding that additional gold be provided.

“Vae victis!”, he exclaimed.

Woe to the vanquished!

This is from the HBO series Rome. It came out a few years ago but I just got it on DVD recently. It was visually spectacular and totally engrossing. Not so historically accurate, though.

Bet you didn’t know this about Lincoln: He was a real scrounger for the chubbies! Man, he loved his fat girls! At one point he was so infatuated with this Chicago whoregirl, and she had these gigantic G-size tits, and he was fucking her in secret while states were seceding left and right… and he looked at her chest just as he was getting close to cumming… and this incredible super-lusty feeling came over him like the breath of the Sex God… and suddenly he exclaimed “There it is! The lamp of liberty burning there in your bosom! Now there… OH! OH! shall no longer be… OH! OH!… any doubt that… OH! GOD!… I’m going to… all men are created free and… EQUAL! OOHHHH GODDDD!”