Anthropology

JHan

(10,173 posts) Wed Nov 14, 2018, 10:17 PM Nov 2018

Penises of the Ancient World

A mosaic of a young man holding his erect penis has been found in a Roman toilet in Turkey. But portraying the male member is a tradition that stretches much further back in human history

When excavations began at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in the 18th century, the place turned out to be full of penises. The ancient art preserved under ash from the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was so rich in willies that the English antiquarian Richard Payne Knight argued for the existence of an ancient fertility cult there. After all, there was one still alive in southern Italy at the time. His 1786 book An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus has an engraved frontispiece showing an array of contemporary wax phalluses made as votive offerings.

More than 200 years later, the priapism of the ancient world can still astound us. Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman public toilet in southern Turkey with some filthy and funny floor decorations. As they hitched up their togas or reached for sponge on a stick, users of this men’s loo could look down at a mosaic of a young man holding his cock. He is labelled in the mosaic as Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it. Here, his attention is more focused: he’s obsessed with his own erection. As he plays with it, he looks sideways to reveal a ludicrous phallic nose. “Narcissus, what are you doing in that latrina?” his mater might be demanding from outside the door, in a gag that anticipates Portnoy’s Complaint by around 1,800 years.

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Or, just maybe, Payne Knight’s idea of a religious cult of the dick is less nutty than it seems. Narcissus in the mosaic holds his penis in his left hand, just like representations of the Egyptian god Min. In fact, the figure of the penile lovers in the British Museum was made in the Middle East when agriculture was evolving there. Perhaps all these priapic objects and images celebrate the seeding of the Earth.

One such relief in Pompeii was displayed outside a bakery. It is hard to think of Greggs using a cock and balls as its logo. The ancient world not only saw willies everywhere, but in a way that is hard for us to grasp. It’s tempting to identify the mosaics found in Turkey with graffiti in a modern toilet – but that equation is dead wrong. These are not furtive scrawlings but works of art provided by whoever built and ran the latrine. Imagine if today’s railway station toilets had photos by Robert Mapplethorpe on the floor and you might be getting warmer. Nothing makes us see the otherness of the past with greater sharpness than its most intimate images. Erotic art is history with knobs on.

more on apotropaic genitals..

Flying Boners:

Amateur archaeologists have been using metal detectors to uncover a trove of ancient Roman artifacts in Britain. Among the centuries-old goodies discovered in 2011 were a pornographic knife handle and a couple of winged penises. Their purpose? To protect the possessor from evil, especially evil wielding a penis of its own.

The winged penises came as little surprise to the ancient artifacts researchers. The fascinus is the divine embodiment of the phallus, and is a common motif in Roman art. According to the British Museum (if you're concerned about NSFW images, that link has a particularly masturbatory fascinus), these images are associated with the god Priapus, who was often depicted with an absurdly erect penis, and were often found on the walls of buildings and at street corners. Wikipedia cites Martin Henig's Religion in Roman Britain, which adds that the fascinus was used particularly to ward off evil from children (especially male children) and conquering generals. Oh, and ready your puns: the winged penis was carved, quite appropriately, from bone.