Catherine the Great was empress of Russia from 1762 until she died in 1796. She was born in 1729 in Poland and in 1744 was taken to Russia to marry the young Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne and not of a sane mind. For seven years during their marriage Peter spent his time playing with toy soldiers and dogs and showed no interest in sex. In fact he had a physical disability, a very tight foreskin, which may have played an important part in that matter. Finally the empress Elizabeth gave Catherine the permission to take a lover, which she did and was soon pregnant. She convinced Peter it was his own child, as was the plan anyway. In the meantime he had been circumcised so that he could perform the sexual act. Catherine developed a taste for young soldiers. She had a special area built in her bedroom, which was curtained off and where she received her lovers. Gregory Orlov was her on and off lover for around thirteen years. He was said to possess excellent equipment, unbelievable ‘st...
In book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tackles the concept of happiness. Happiness, he says, is not a state because if it were then everyone would possess it, even someone who is asleep throughout his life (we might say someone who is in a coma). Happiness ought therefore to be referred to an activity, one which is chosen for itself and not for the sake of anything else as it does not require anything else, it is self-sufficient. According to Aristotle we choose almost everything in our lives for the sake of having something else. This is not the same though with happiness because happiness is the goal. He quotes Anacharsis , a Scythian philosopher who visited Greece in the early 6 th c. B.C. "Play to work harder" to emphasize his view that amusement is not happiness but a mere form of relaxation as we nobody can work non-stop and needs to relax. Because relaxation is taken for the sake of continuing with another activity (i.e. work) it is not an end in itsel...
When the emperor Caracalla was murdered in 217, the fourteen-year-old Elagabalus succeeded him. He only ruled for 4 years, but in that short period of time he commited a variety of grotesque and debauched acts, enough to make Caligula and Commodus seem rather plain. His real name was Bassianus but as he developed an intense interest in worshippng the Syrian god Elagabal, became High Priest of the cult and so had his name changed to Elagabalus. To honor his god, he demanded that hundereds of cattle were slaughtered daily on huge sacrificial altars. He had a temple built on the Palatine Hill and ordered the Romans to worship a statue of a giant phallus, which didn't go down very well at all... Eventually he decided he was the god embodied. He started to wear women's clothes and make-up, implored his surgeons to cut his penis off and make him a vagina and when they said tehy could not do this he settled for circumcision. His body is said to have been very effeminate and he had a m...
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