The Illustrated Book of Orgies

The perfect orgy is a strangely elusive affair. The orgy is always at another house, another party, the next town, the neighbouring county, last year, next month. Orgies are fashioned in the imagination, anticipated and recalled, narcotic in their pleasures, balletic in their athleticism but in reality have some of the characteristics of the mirage, hovering tantalisingly out of reach of the traveller.

The Fictional Orgy

The fictional orgy is consummated with gusto, there being no technical or logistic hitch to every possible sexual and physiological permutation and consummation. From the first to the twenty-first century, through the witty depravity of Rochester to the romantic eroticism of John Cleland, literature has sweated over the exponential possibility of multiple body parts.

The Historical Orgy

Say the word orgy, let your mind reflect on its serpentine possibilities and, almost inevitably, your imagination finds itself in the palaces of the Roman Emperors. Orgies seem to have emerged in antiquity and one glance - and one glance is usually enough - at Greek pottery shows orgies in, as it were, full swing. Why crockery should have seemed the obvious place to depict orgies is at first mysterious, except that, given that Greeks tended to orgy at the dining table, they may have enjoyed recalling symposia gone by, summoning up the energy for another bout of wine, women, boys and more wine, by reference to the very dishes they were currently enjoying. Perhaps they were merely pre-figuring the home sex video. But actually a plate turns out to be a rather neat way of tidying up the composition. There they go, in a vigorous sexual conga all around the border. As befits a democracy, everyone seems to know their place, yet despite the considerable competence in coupling, there is little sense of abandon.