I'd want to be in capitals at the high water marks of their civilizations. That would mean participating in periods of extraordinary innovation, when new ideas were transforming the world, and when the best that a culture could produce had reached full ripeness.
England: London during the Edwardian Era (1901-1910), the peak of the British Empire.
England: London during the Georgian Era (1714-1830), flowering of British culture.
England: London during the Elizabethan Era (1558-1603), flowering of British literature, exploration, commerce.
France: Paris during the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774), with England, the citadel of the Age of Enlightenment.
Holland: Antwerp during the Golden Age (1600s), during which much of modern bourgeois civilization was born - one of the great cultural revolutions.
Italy: Florence in the late 15th century under the Medicis, the flower of Renaissance art and culture.
Italy: Rome under the "five good emperors," (96 A.D.-180 A.D.), the Roman Empire at its height.
Greece: Athens in the 3rd and 4th centuries, B.C., the height of classical Greek civilization.
There are probably comparable times and places in the histories of China and India, but I know less about these.
This will do to start. Of course, there was Coney Island in the summer of 1967, but that was after WW1.
Now, now, let's stay on topic. The rules say nothing after WW1. We all know that our lives are so splendid that nothing could be better, but if you had to pick something old, when and where would it be?
There are no times where life is good for everybody. The life of a free citizen of Athens was vastly different from that of a slave in the salt mines.
That being said I have a particular job at a particular time in history, that is my great dream. I would like to be at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia around 1775. She was probably the most enlightened of the great European monarchs of the time, corresponding with Voltaire and other great minds of the time. She felt that, without a good sex life for the ruler, a country would likely suffer. (intelligent woman) Therefore in her government was a department, staffed by the loveliest of her ladies-in-waiting, whose job was to check out the most handsome and dashing of the young Royal Guardsmen for the imperial bed. I always wondered if they had forms they had to fill out. "You must be this big to apply for this position, (pun intended)" What a job, making love to the finest specimens if manhood for the good of your country. The inevitable happened of course and one of the testers fell in love with one of the guardsmen, a ancestor of the composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Catherine was merciful and allowed them to marry, but dispatched them to a sinecure in the far corners of the empire.
No times are good for everyone. But Moi said we could assume we'd be middle class, so no slaves, serfs, etc.
Catherine was quite something. She had a coach decorated with gold penises, still on display in Russia. Her bedroom (still on display) was decorated with pornographic art. Rumor has it (don't know if this is true), she died when a bull with which she was having sex broke from its tethers and fell on her. All this, and she was a great modernizer, who improved Russian government and oversaw a resurgence of Russian wealth and power. She also increased the hold of the nobility over their serfs, and strengthened the Russian autocracy. She was German, and became Empress by marriage. Her husband, Czar Peter III, was deemed mentally unfit, and she took the throne by joining a conspiracy of nobles against him. The base of her rule was defending the interests of the nobles. It was a real "marriage of state."
bobover3 (imported) wrote: Mon Jun 21, 2010 4:55 pm
. Rumor has it (don't know if this is true), she died when a bull with which she was having sex broke from its tethers and fell on her.
Several stories about the circumstances of her death at the age of 67 probably originated soon after. A common story states that she died as a result of her voracious sexual appetite while attempting sexual intercourse with a stallionthe story holds that the harness holding the horse above her broke, and she was crushed. In reality, Catherine died of a stroke.
...
Rumors of her private life had a large basis in the fact that she took many young lovers, even while in old age. (Lord Byron's Don Juan, around the age of twenty-two, becomes her lover after the siege of Ismail (1790), in a fiction written only about twenty-five years after Catherine's death.) This practice was not unusual by the court standards of the day, nor was it unusual to use rumor and innuendo of sexual excess politically.
There are some times during the Greek and Roman empires that would have suited my certain aspects of my temperment. It's a man on man thing.
However, About a month ago, I saw Alan Ayckborn's play "Time of My Life" and that changed my mind over a lot of things like this. Perhaps like the song says - the best of times is now, and perhaps like Ayckborn says - we don't know until many years later that THIS was the time of our lives, the best time we ever had.
