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| Zeus throwing a thunderbolt, more than 2450 years old, fished out of Cape Artemisium in 1928, now an icon of Greece. |  | |
These pictures are intended for USAmerican women and others who may have never seen intact ("uncircumcised") penises before - or not known what they were looking at.
This entire sequence - the next five pages - has been turned into a slide show with music, off-site. |
1. Classical Antiquity
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| Zeus throwing a thunderbolt, more than 2450 years old, fished out of Cape Artemisium in 1928, now an icon of Greece. | | |
bronze, 210cm
Athens, Archeological Museum
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| This bronze satyr killing a snake, 44 cm high and 2350 years old, is from the mysterious civilisation of Etruria in northwestern Italy. He originally supported a large vase. |  | Unlike most satyrs, his penis is neither outsized nor erect. |
Wittelsbacher Ausgleichfonds, Munich
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| On this bronze Etruscan pot from Pareneste (Palestrina), wing-heeled Hermes brings three goddesses to Paris (seated) for his judgement. | |
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 | The 63cm high pot is finely detailed |
late 4th C BCE,
Rome, Villa
Giulia
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| This terracotta vase was made in eastern Greece (probably on the island of Rhodes) 2500 to 2550 years ago. Phallus vases are a rare and distinctive kind of archaic Greek pottery. They were used to store perfumed oils, presumably for erotic or medicinal purposes. Archaic Greek potters sculpted vases in a wide variety of shapes, including human heads, legs, and animals. These "peniform" vases reflect a playfulness and unselfconsciousness about eroticism that recurs throughout Greek Art, but regardless of what this represents, it is a gloriously harmonious shape.
Metropolitan Musum of Art, New York |
Depictions of erections follow.
 | This 2500-year-old Greek satyr's penis is comically large, his foreskin still covering most of his glans. |  Nymphs beware! |
National Archaeological Museum, Athens
"Thou foster-child of silence and slow time...
- Keats |
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| This amphora, painted by Euthymides, son of Polias, over 2500 years ago, was found in Vulci in Etruria. | |
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 | The reveller's small penis is typical. |
Staatiche Antikensammlungen, Munich
Why so small?
We should never assume that the Greeks, Romans and Etruscans considered images of penises as we do. They used them on amulets to ward off the evil eye, with no more thought for sexuality than we consider crossed fingers to be a Christian symbol. The faces of people on bowls are almost invariably in profile, but we do not suppose that full-face was considered "aesthetically displeasing". So the small penises shown on ordinary mortals may have been no more than a convention, to distinguish them from fertility figures such as satyrs and Priapus - which were much more significant in an age when the fertility of plants, beasts and people could not be taken for granted or brought under human control by material means. |
 Roman gold amulet, 1st century CE, about 1 cm across London, British Museum |
 |  "Herms" were common in ancient Greece, protecting the area if paid due reverence. |
Why always covered?
The Greeks considered only the glans, not the whole penis, to be obscene. In the gymnasium, men kept their glanses out of sight by tying a thong (kynodesme) around their foreskins, and Hellenised Jews sought foreskin restoration to make that possible. The "red-tipped" phallus that the Chorus of The Clouds disdained would have belonged to a circumcised Egyptian (leather intact phalluses were part of the costume in all comedies, including The Clouds). The glans was only shown on purely phallic images, such as those used in religious festivals. On those, the artists showed wrinkling to indicate the foreskin. |
 |  Even on the point of penetration, erotic images showed the foreskin as fully forward. |
A red-figure jug by the Shuvalov painter, 2400 years old.
Berlin
Antikenmuseum
Next (Pompeii)
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