Honoria was born three years after her brother, in 422, the daughter of the gloomy Flavius Constantius and his chaste and upright wife the Princess Galla Placidia, so that in the year 437 she was just 15. She appeared to have only three interests in life: beautifying her body; attracting attention to herself, from both men and women; and sensual pleasure. No greater difference between mother and daughter could be imagined, so that palace wits said that surely Princess Galla must have borne her daughter not by the noble if taciturn Flavius, but rather following a visitation from one of the insatiable and lecherous gods of the pagan pantheon. Perhaps Zeus had visited Galla in the likeness of a shower of gold, as he did Danae; or a swan, as he did Leda. For the daughter of Galla, like the daughter of Leda, Helen of Troy, would prove irresistible to men, both because of her beauty and because of her evident lustfulness. And she would set off a train of events as calamitous and tragic as that caused by Helen, providing a similar feast of entertainment for the sardonically laughing gods above. For the sorrowful tale of Troy is known to those high gods as the Wrath of Achilles, but humanity remembers it as the Death of Hector.
If not Father Zeus, perhaps it was the great god Pan, or some ithyphallic satyr in his train, who fathered Honoria upon the chaste and haughty Galla as she slept in her icy composure and self-restraint. Certainly the disparity between mother and daughter was great, and often remarked.
Beauty alone in a woman is not enough to reduce men to love-struck foolishness. Such a woman must also make it clear, by the fluttering of her eyelashes, and by the glittering steadiness with which she returns a man’s gaze, with the dark kohl-rimmed drowning-pools of her eyes, and by the pretty pouting of her carmine lips, and by the gentle touch of her fingertips upon his arm, and by bending forward to retrieve, shall we say, her napkin from the floor, giving him a heady glimpse of her sweet and fruitlike breasts with their erect and roseate nipples – such a woman conquers men, as I say, both by her beauty and by her explicit sensuality. For which reason, as St Augustine has warned us, ‘women are the greatest snare that the devil has set for men’; and as the Bible itself reminds us, ‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’
All these tricks and harlotries Princess Honoria understood very well from her earliest years; and no sooner had she begun to show the first outward signs of womanhood, if palace gossip is to be believed, than she was demanding sexual pleasure from her slaves. No Agrippina, no Messalina, was ever so debauched as she. And in the morally dubious palace of Ravenna, with its slaves numbering some twenty thousand, each one bound to do the bidding of master or mistress, there was no scarcity of potential servants for her lust.
More shocking still was the princess’s indifference to whether her companion in the pleasures of the flesh were male or female; for, like Sappho of Lesbos, whose works are largely lost to posterity, Decency be thanked, she took her pleasures where she found them: her love being not only towards men but, with rather too much generosity, towards all humanity.
It was said that one person was particularly responsible for the first awakening in Princess Honoria of her desire for pleasure. One day a new slave-girl came into her private chambers from the slave-markets of Alexandria. Her name was Sosostris, which means simply ‘Sister’ in the old Egyptian, and is a typical term of affection for a slave. Other slave-names, signifying even more than mere affection, and reminding the bearer of the name that they existed to pleasure their owners on demand, included Desire, Kiss, Pleasure, Beloved, and even Sexy. Sosostris herself might well have borne any of these alternative names, as it turned out, such was her hot temperament. ‘Sister’ was a more ambiguous term, perhaps; but many was the slave-master who took perverse pleasure in calling his ‘sister’ to his bed at night.
Sosostris was some eighteen or nineteen years of age, an Egyptian, slim and dark-skinned and very beautiful. Now, you know of the reputation of the Egyptians, both men and women; for in ancient times, before the coming of Christ, the utmost lubricity was common in Egypt, and women went not only bare-legged but even bare-breasted throughout the day. At evening they sat at table with their husbands and their husbands’ friends, boldly conversing as if they were men’s intellectual equals! Their full round breasts were on proud and wanton display, the allure of their dusky nipples even augmented by subtle applications of cosmetics and rouge!
But I digress.
Regarding Sosostris and Princess Honoria, I heard it from another scribe in the court of Ravenna, who heard it from the Egyptian herself, whom he later took to his own bed, deriving much lewd and revolting pleasure from hearing her recount her youthful adventures in the arms of men and women alike; such are the corruptions of the times. And although it is true that Rumour is never so speedy on her feet, nor so wholly unreliable, as when she hastens to report in the market-place on matters which belong in the bedroom, I feel that there may be some lamentable truth in the scenes that were laid before my shocked imagination by the luridly detailed description of this shameless scribe. They are scenes that I have turned over and over in my mind many times since, in my pure desire to know whether they could be true or not; so that it is now almost as if I witnessed such appalling scenes for myself.
It was Princess Honoria’s habit to take a bath in the evening as well as the morning, and thereafter to lie sleepily upon her couch and have her slaves anoint and massage her with warm oil perfumed with the petals of roses. Soon it was noticed that this task was reserved exclusively for Sosostris, while the other slaves were dismissed from the royal presence. Furthermore, by day, the looks and glances exchanged by the princess and the slave-girl seemed to betoken more than the merely affectionate relations that might obtain between a mistress and a loyal slave. It was as though their looks communicated some illicit and secretive passion, only augmented by their subtle smiles exchanged in public, as they silently remembered together the pleasures of the night before, and anticipated the pleasures of the night ahead. Sometimes, it was said, cries were heard coming from the Princess Honoria’s private chambers after dark, which sounded very strange to the ears of those who had always assumed that such cries in a woman could only be provoked by the presence and the dutiful attentions of a husband.
Indeed, if Rumour is to be believed, the worst fears of the palace were well founded. For on her very first night in Honoria’s service Sosostris began to administer those seductive oils to her mistress, murmuring gently that she had great skill in this art. The other slave-girls helped the young princess from her bath, wrapped her in soft cloths, carried her over to her wide, cushioned couch, laid her down on her stomach and carefully dried her.
Then the Egyptian took her bowl of perfumed unguents, and poured them into the hollow of Honoria’s back, and with her slim and delicate brown hands she began to rub and knead the oils into the princess’s shoulders and neck, her back and flanks. To looks of some surprise from the other slave-girls, she began to run her hands beneath the soft white cloths that covered the princess’s modesty, and also to massage her smooth white buttocks.
After a few moments, the cloths slipped aside altogether and fell silently to the floor, leaving the princess naked and exposed, but she seemed to mind not a whit. And then, to the great astonishment of the attendant slave-girls, who not being Egyptian would never have dreamed of taking such a liberty with the royal person, Sosostris took up the bowl again and poured a thin golden trickle down between the princess’s thighs, which were still at this point held tightly and chastely together. And the impudent Egyptian, a knowing smile playing upon her lips, actually sat down beside her mistress on the couch, rather than kneeling subserviently beside it, as was the usual custom. She was wearing a long white tunic, loosely belted about the waist with a red sash. Now, to make it easier to sit on the royal couch, albeit uninvited, she shamelessly drew up her dress almost to her knees, baring her long, smooth legs for all the world to see, and exhibiting her fine leather sandals, saucily high-laced in the brazen manner of a common harlot of the Suburra.