For you, Lycisca... for all of you.

"Valeria Messalina, a descendant of Caesar Augustus, was born twenty years after the birth of Christ and raised in the court of Emperor Caligula, who - as a practical joke - forced her to marry her second cousin, Claudius (...). Three years later, Caligula was assassinated, ant Claudius ascended to the throne. 
Once she became empress, according to the historian Tacitus, Messalina f*cked gladiators, dancers, soldiers - and anyone who refused her, she had them executed for treason. Slaves or senators, married or single, if Messalina said you were hot - you had to put out.


Talk about giving someone performance anxiety.


To cleanse her palate between studs and hunks and beauties, Messalina was famous for seeking out the ougliest man in the empire. F*cking him as a sort-of sexual sorbet.
At the time, the most famous prostitute in Rome was named Scylla, and Messalina challenged her to a competition to see who could couple with the greatest number of men in one night. Tacitus records that Scylla stopped after her twenty-fifth partner, but Messalina kept going and won by a wide margin.
The historian Juvenal records that Messalina would go slumming, sneaking into brothels, where she worked under the name of Lycisca, gilding her royal nipples with gold dust and selling access to the aristocratic vagina that had borthed her son, Britannicus, the next likely emperor. There she'd work until well after her fellow whores had quit for the night.
At the age of twenty-eight, Messalina hooked up with Gaius Silius and conspired to murder her husband; however, her plot was revealed to Claudius and he ordered her execution. Messalina refused to kill herself, even as her mother begged her to commit suicide, the only honorable way to end her life. Roman soldiers forced their way into her palace, found her waiting in her garden, and killed her on the spot.
(...)
I asked: How is this any different from the Olympics?
I asked: Why shouldn't a woman use her body any way she wants?
I asked: Why are we still fighting this same battle two thousand years later?"

Chuck Palahniuk (2008) Snuff. New York, Anchor Books, pp.94-96