The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus

Started this research project after reading about Georgina Weldon. She’s notorious for having a litigation addiction but I’m obsessed with the time Gounod asked for his sheet music back after their divorce and she sent it with her name written across every page. When he attempted to have her committed, she escaped and

There may also have been some higher principles driving the plot and more widespread support for it among soldiers and senators. Or so the many stories told of Gaius’ villainies suggest. His incest with his sisters and his mad plans to make his horse a consul have become notorious.

Cesare Borgia was the son of the Spanish-Italian cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to become Pope Alexander VI, who vies for the hotly contested title of most libertine Renaissance pope. “He had in the fullest measure all the vices of the flesh and of the spirit,” the pope’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini wrote. He was the first pope to recognize

This second board of decemviri – the Ten Tarquins, as they were sometimes known – started to ape the behaviour of tyrants, right down to sexual violence. In what was almost a replay of the rape of Lucretia, which had led to the foundation of the Republic, one of their number, the patrician Appius Claudius (a great-great-grandfather of the road buil