Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

briefly by Galba, whose two main characteristics, according to Suetonius, were cruelty and greed. He was a heavy eater and a homosexual with a penchant for ‘mature and very sturdy men’. Galba died after less than seven months as emperor, to be succeeded by Otho, whose reign was even briefer. Next in line came Vitellius, who had spent his adolescence among Tiberius’s male prostitutes on Capri. As emperor, Vitellius became notorious for every sort of self-indulgence. He banqueted three or four times a day, often making himself vomit to create space for more. For one feast, he commissioned a dish containing ingredients from every corner of the empire, including pike livers, peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. Suetonius describes Vitellius as unusually tall, with an alcoholic flush, a huge paunch and a crippled thigh. He was succeeded by Vespasian, who was a model of virtue by comparison. Vespasian liked to nap, which makes him a big favourite of mine. (We will return to the joys of napping in the final chapter.) His successor was Titus.

      Suetonius describes Titus as profligate and cruel. He held riotous parties far into the night and owned a troupe of homosexual prostitutes and eunuchs. Titus was succeeded by Domitian, whose lustfulness was of a high order, even by the standards of the day. Domitian referred to sex as ‘bed-wrestling’ and treated it like a competitive sport. He enjoyed swimming with prostitutes, shaving his concubines’ pubic hair and having sex with married women.

      The behaviour of the Caesars and subsequent emperors did little to improve the tawdry image of hedonism. Nonetheless, hedonism has had its principled defenders. One of its most vociferous advocates was the Greek philosopher Aristippus, who died in 366 BC. He contended that pleasure (hedone) could be equated with good and that every person should live their life so as to maximise pleasurable experiences.¹ Aristippus vigorously practised what he preached, acquiring a reputation as a man who really knew how to have a good time. When he was not mounting a defence of hedonism he could usually be found mounting someone else.

      Around the same period as Aristippus, the Chinese philosopher Yang Chu was also championing the idea that we have only one life and should enjoy it as much as we can. Yang Chu espoused a simple – some would say simplistic – philosophy of hedonism. Life is short, he argued, and the only truly good things in it are the sensual pleasures of music, sex, fine clothes and tasty food. His ideas were later absorbed into the Taoist philosophical tradition. Several hundred years after he died, his ideas resurfaced in the Taoist Book of Lieh-tzu. In one passage, Yang Chu’s starkly hedonistic worldview is expressed in an argument that goes like this. The longest any of us can hope to live is a hundred years. Even if we are lucky enough to live that long, half our useful life is lost in unconscious infancy and old age. Of the remaining years, a further half is either wasted or spent asleep. Pain, sickness, sorrow and fear use up at least half the rest. That leaves us only about ten years for enjoyment. Even then, every hour is plagued with anxiety because we are driven by social pressures to conform and achieve. Our anxieties prevent us from enjoying ourselves, leaving us no better off than chained criminals. Instead, we should spend our time seeking pleasure from sex, good living, beauty and music. Yang Chu was exhorting us in clear and simple terms to grab pleasure while we can – or, as others have variously put it, to eat, drink and be merry, seize the day, and gather rosebuds while ye may.

      In the post-Enlightenment England of the eighteenth century, there was much gathering of rosebuds, reflecting a widespread view that humans were built to pursue pleasure and that doing so was good for society as a whole. Growing affluence made this aspiration a reality for many. The pleasure industry boomed – not just for the enjoyment of the rich and powerful, but for the masses. Whole towns became devoted to enjoyment. The Prince Regent chose Brighton as the site for his pleasure palace and millions of fun-seekers followed him there. Resorts such as Bath, Cheltenham and Buxton made their wealth from visitors seeking health and pleasure. Predictably, the quest for pleasure often trumped the quest for health, prompting much sniping from moralisers. The Methodist preacher Charles Wesley described Bath as ‘Hell on earth’.

      Georgian London was known for its two hundred or so pleasure gardens. Among the most famous was Vauxhall Gardens, which was renowned for its erotic ambience. Men and women of all backgrounds could stroll, dance, eat, drink and enjoy themselves to the sound of music. Anyone who could afford the modest entrance fee had the prospect of an erotic encounter. Ranelagh in Chelsea was said to be favoured by the greatest beauties and was described by one contemporary writer as the finest market in England.

      Sexual activity was widely regarded at this time as a legitimate source of pleasure rather than a sin. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin and an eminent scholar himself, described sex as ‘the purest felicity in the otherwise vapid cup of life’. Sex was easily obtained on a commercial basis. As many as 30,000 streetwalkers plied their wares in the streets of Georgian London. Any punter interested in ‘country matters’ could buy publications such as Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies or The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, which listed the local prostitutes and detailed their erotic specialities. James Boswell wrote in his diary that it was impossible to stroll in St James’s Park or walk down the Strand without being propositioned by scores of harlots – something he found hard to resist.

      A prominent figure of this period was Teresa Cornelys, otherwise known as the Empress of Pleasure. She created London’s first exclusive nightclub. The Society in Soho-Square, as it was called, was based in her Soho mansion and opened for business in 1760. It was a glittering pleasure palace for the rich, which helped establish Soho’s abiding association with hedonism. A typical night there would start with a concert performed by top musicians in sumptuous surroundings. Then the real fun would begin, as the guests ate, drank, danced and gambled until dawn, some slipping away to discreet bedrooms for more intimate pleasures. The English were as obsessed with celebrities then as they are now: crowds of onlookers would swarm around Soho Square, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rich and famous, including younger members of the royal family.

      All this bawdy revelry upset the Church, which tried hard to have The Society in Soho-Square shut down. In 1770 the bishop of London begged the king to ban a huge masked ball that Cornelys was arranging, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Salt was later rubbed in the ecclesiastical wound when it transpired that the guests included the bishop’s own wife and the wives of three other senior clerics. Religious and secular attempts to constrain pleasure-seeking is an eternal theme that we shall return to later.

      Teresa Cornelys’s genius at creating pleasure for others was a natural reflection of her background. She came originally from Venice, a city where the pursuit of pleasure had become an art form. She travelled to London with her child, whose father was none other than Giacomo Casanova. Teresa Cornelys was born close to Casanova’s family home in Venice and they met in their teens. Their mutual love of pleasure made them kindred spirits.

      Casanova managed to pack more sensual experience into his life than most of us could dream of. Born in 1725, he died seventy-three years later, having variously been a novelist, poet, gambler, soldier, musician, spy, adventurer, free-thinker and prolific lover. He travelled widely, forged relationships with many famous people and enjoyed everything that life had to offer. When Casanova came to write his memoirs, shortly before his death, he looked back with evident enjoyment. ‘What pleasure’, he wrote, ‘in remembering one’s pleasures!’ He felt little regret at how he had chosen to live his life:

      Cultivating the pleasures of the senses was my principal concern throughout my life; none, indeed, was ever more important to me. Feeling as though I was born for the fair sex, I have always loved it and let it love me as much as I could. I have also passionately loved good food and all things made to arouse curiosity.… As a great libertine, a bold talker, a man who thought only of pleasure in life, I could not find myself guilty of anything.

      Back in Georgian England, the pleasure-seekers were receiving heavyweight support from a number of prominent thinkers. Foremost among these was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Like Aristippus before him, Bentham regarded pleasure as the ultimate aim in life. He famously argued that behaviour, morals and laws should be judged according to how much they fostered ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. As far as Bentham and like-minded Utilitarians were concerned, humans were intended by nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain. In 1785