Admit it: you've had that amazing moment where a primary source makes you burst out laughing, only to realize you can't share the joke with anyone because either it's not actually funny in context, or because explaining the proper context would take too long and you are a responsible historian who only ever explains things in-depth, comprehensive, and supported by current academic research.
TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY.
Ground rules:
You must provide the quote and its source
You must NOT explain the context beyond speaker, date-ish, text
Limit two per customer
Next week: Betrayals, the more personal and bitter, the better!
I will stop you fucking my sea.
-- Kallikratidas, Spartan admiral (Xenophon, Hellenika 1.6.15)
"'...he was the most unlucky of monks,' said I; `I have heard before now of a monk throwing himself upon a boy, but always, when the monk got up, the boy promptly got up too.' The abbot went very red, and a lot of people left the room to have a good laugh.'"
And please send us the larger volume of the holy father Augustine which almost at the beginning contains his letters to St-Jerome, and those of St Jerome to him. For a large part of ours when it was in one of our obediences was eaten by a bear.
"Verona is one of the most important cities of Italy, and can be likened to a door used to keep the barbarians locked out."
"A man who has his feet hacked off cannot scurry far."
"I regret the bag trousers and the harem, but 'twas ever thus from childhood's hour, as you may have been told beforehand and perhaps, after all, the little annoyances of Egypt, such as sand-flies and crocodiles, which I am told are very troublesome, might render life there, after all, no more blissful than it may be made here with fewer wives, tight pants, and a beaver hat."
Edward Porter Alexander, letter to George
The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by an stretch of the imagination be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pethecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth's corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They—or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed—seem'd to ooze, seep and trickle thro' the gaping cracks in the horrible houses...and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and wholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay...a yellow leering mask with foul, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point...
"Angered at her sister she stripped the girl before the women of the court and pierced the lips of the girl’s mons veneris and placed therein a small lock of native manufacture, which procedure effectually put a stop to copulation, as the queen kept the key and only gave it to her sister when she was married to a neighboring chief. On one occasion, one of the women of her court having given her some impertinence, she ran her hand under her skirt between her legs, and thrust her thumb up the offender’s vaginal opening with such brutal force that the wretched woman was lifted off her feet and held in mid-air, while she clung to her torturer’s arm and screamed with pain.
“Capturing the daughter of King Namba, her most powerful enemy, she plucked out most of her pubic hair with her own hands, and then had her raped. Her privates being almost unbearably sore from the hair-plucking, the pain she felt at intercourse can be imagined. The queen sat by watching, and laughed heartily at her evident discomfort.
“But this she-demon, while inflicting pain on others was her favorite pastime, was not immune from the natural masochistic leanings of other women. She indulged in incredible bacchanals, in which men and women turned to ravening beasts under the influence of native ale, dancing and sex-freedom. At the heights of these revels, torturing others failed to give her the sensations she wished and she turned upon her own body. She frequently stripped herself and had her slaves lash her until she fell prone and panting on the earth. While these whippings were going on, she screamed and writhed and cavorted as if in intolerable agony, yet if the lashers faltered before her extreme height of fury was reached, she hurled terrible anathemas and threats at them. During one of these nightmares of licentiousness, a drink crazed giant pinned her down to the earth and ran a skewer through the fleshy part of her buttocks. At this painful piece of sportiveness, she went into absolute frenzies of ecstasies which far outdid all her previous transports. She danced with the skewer still in her buttocks, until she fell exhausted, when she allowed it to be withdrawn, and showered all sorts of kisses and caresses on the man who was responsible for her new thrill. However, next day she was too sore to sit on her teak-wood throne and in a moment of irritation she hung her lover of the night up by his wrists, and removed his testicles with a skill born of long usage.”
And on and on, ad infinitum.
myself in my aunt's cunt, which incest stimulated uncle to a stand, and he took to his wife's arse while her nephew incestuously fucked her cunt. The Count took to the delicious and most exciting tight cunt of the Dale, while her son shoved his prick into his mother's arse, to her unspeakable satisfaction. Ellen and the Frankland amused themselves with tribadic extravagances
-- Walter, 1888
"A soldier who has been disciplined in the past was appointed as a watchman. Before he took his post, he drank wine, and took his post in an intoxicated state. The controlling patrol took notice of this soldier's behaviour, as he was loudly asking horses for the password."
I like to imagine that this picture was attached to the report.
Should the Government's Financial Committee decide to sell the [Outokumpu copper] mine to foreign speculators, I shall personally gather all the dynamite from the mine, hide it in the basement [of the Financial Committee's office] and blow the Committee sky high.
