…In which His Imperial Majesty attempts to bore you all to tears with his irreverent commentary about monumental historic events.
Such as Feb 14, 270 AD, when Claudius the Cruel (we’d kill for that nickname!) had a preacher beaten to death and beheaded, because he wanted to be absolutely sure, apparently, for running around marrying people like it was going out of style. Which it would have been, had Claudius the Cruel had his way, but some people just seem utterly unable to get a gentle hint.
Claudius had this silly notion that Romans getting married was keeping them from joining the legions, and boy did he need his legions, because they’d much rather stay at home and get nagged to death than go off on glorious crusades of conquest, adventure, rapine and pillage.
Clearly the historians who made this up were utterly full of bovine excrement. Or neutered. Or both.
Any gate, this preacher named Valentine disagreed and blatantly kept marrying people because he knew full well that the best way to get a Roman to drop his cock and grab his socks and join the legion, ANY legion, even the French Foreign one, had it been invented at the time, was to tie him to a nagging shrew bent on emasculating the ever loving Hades out of him. History proves that he was right. Claudius the Fool (real name Marcus Aurelius Valerius Claudius Augustus, but that was too long to fit on a check, which thankfully also hadn’t been invented yet) was having none of that so off with his head.
Interestingly, 270 was also the year that the same Claudius died of smallpox.
Valentine, as we all know, was since canonized (which is something they do in Rome that does, disappointingly, not involve any cannons of any sort) and, in a twist of true irony, became the genesis of a holiday in which males all over the empire spend hours spending money they don’t have on trinkets they don’t need to escape the wrath of their wives, should they fail to remember.
Perhaps we should all just join the legions instead.
Thatisall.