Dressing up as a concentration camp guard and being checked for lice might be far from most people's idea of a good time but the practices reportedly enjoyed by Formula One chief Max Mosley at a Nazi style orgy are not unusual. Here's our top ten guide to orgies through the ages.

The Greek Orgy

The orgy has been with us since the ancient Greeks convened the first “orgion” as a secret religious rite to worship fertility God Dionysus. Participants worked themselves into a frenzy: crashing cymbals, dancing and tearing live animals apart with their hands and teeth.

Tiberius

The crazy king of the orgy. The Roman Emperor whose 23-year rule was characterised by wild parties on the island of Capri that involved making young boys swim through his thighs and nibble his legs. Tiberius was allegedly so aroused by one sacrifice he assaulted the victim, his brother and a nearby musician. When one complained Tiberius had his legs broken.

The Lithuanian Orgy

A northern European variation. In the late 13th century Grand Duke Vytenis of Lithuania ordered his three wives to strip and be pleasured by hill-goats while he and his court watched.

Papal Orgies

Despite promoting general sexual repression, Burgo Partridge claims in his History of Orgies that early Popes also indulged in group sex parties. Pope Leo I was described as a sadistic torturer, child Pope Benedict IX was alleged to throw wild bisexual orgies and was described as a “Demon from hell in the guise of a priest” and Pope John XII was such a womaniser it was said monks believed he had introduced sins “Unknown since the beginning of the world”.

The Hellfire Club

The Hellfire Club was an English group of 18th-Century aristocratic hedonists. Describing themselves as “monks” the members ferried prostitutes dressed as masked nuns down the Thames in barges. They also reportedly celebrated Black Mass over the naked bodies of aristocratic ladies. Suspected members of the club included the Earl of Sandwich and William Hogarth.

The Wig Club

Scotland in the 18th century was also a land of swinging upper class sex. One notorious club The Beggar's Benison encouraged members to keep their pleasures to themselves so to speak, while the The Wig Club gave the Scottish Tory elite a place to gamble and relax — in the company of a wig supposedly made of the pubic hairs of the mistresses of Charles II.

Casanova

Giacomo Casanova, the bodice ripping Italian womaniser whose name is synonymous with seduction. A man of many talents, apart from claiming to have more than two hundred lovers he introduced the lottery to France, translated Homer's Iliad into Italian and wrote what might be the world's first science fiction novel. But that wasn't what gave him the greatest pleasure: "It is precisely by virtue of my coarse tastes that I am happier than other men, since I am convinced that my tastes make me capable of more pleasure," he wrote.

The Marquis de Sade

The exploits of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, led to him spending long periods of time in a French prison and have entered our vocabulary for cruelty and punishment. In one well known incident he debased a local prostitute with a communion chalice and then demanded she whip him with a cat o nine tails.

Aleister Crowley

Englishman, accomplished mountaineer and founder of various mystical sects promoting “magical” sexual practices. Crowley has been credited for introducing tantric sex — a means of controlling physical impulses by thought. In the late 19th century he retreated to Amsterdam to write various volumes of erotic poetry which were seized and destroyed by British customs.

The Clivedon Set

1963. The orgy that brought down a government. John Profumo, the Conservative Minister for War, the call girl Christine Keeler, and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval officer. The Profumo Affair shocked Sixties Britain with its accounts of upper class gentlemen and good time girls frolicking in the swimming pool of Clivedon House, Lord Astor's Buckinghamshire mansion. Though their exploits were comparatively tame, without it we never would have heard Mandy Rice-Davies reply in court to David Astor's denial that he knew what was going on at his house: “Well he would say that wouldn't he?"

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