Horray! Ultra-smutty sex advice columnist Dan Savage finally has his own blog. You can read it by typing in the URL www.andrewsullivan.com.

So I'm thinking... if the wit of Dan Savage can pass for serious political discourse in the blogging world, there's no reason I can't post the following here.

Twice in the past week, while reading about totally non-smutty stuff (once here in an article about the IRA, and again in Norman Davies Europe, on page 242 to be precise), I came upon references to the fecund amorous proclivities of Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian.

I had never heard of Procopius's Secret History before, so I tried looking it up online and found very little, or at least nothing suitably titillating. Weird. You'd think Google would be all over this stuff.

Finally, however, I located the offending passage. Here goes.

If you're offended by good smut, or rather if you have no business reading it on my blog, please stop reading now. Come on, you know who you are. Proceed with another task.

On the field of pleasure [Theodora] was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries.

Theodora is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church.