Penises of the ancient world:

phallus found in Roman toilet was

far from the first
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

Jonathan Jones

Wed 14 Nov 2018 12.14 GMTLast modified on Wed 14 Nov 2018 12.30 GMT

In luck? A Roman winged-lion phallus tintinabulum, the chains supporting small bells
to function as a wind chime and intended to bring good fortune. Photograph: The
Trustees of the British Museum

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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The frontispiece to Richard Payne Knight’s An Account of the Remains of the
Worship of Priapus showing waxwork votive offerings.

Reports on this intimate uncovering show that for all our modern sophistication
we can still be as amazed as 18th-century dilettanti were by ancient erotic
art. One article even asks: “Is this the first historical dick pic?”The short (or
long) answer is no. The art found at Pompeii, buried about a century earlier,
includes a fresco of Priapus, god of gardens and willies, weighing his enormous
member in a set of scales. Doorways and gardens all over Pompeii were
decorated with bronze phalluses hung with bells. These erotic wind chimes,
called tintinabula, have been discovered throughout the Roman Empire.

Before concluding that all these massive penises on street signs, doors, in
gardens and now, we know, public toilets embody the phallocratic arrogance of
Roman imperialism, hold on to yourself a minute. Rome’s phallic art was
preceded by that of ancient Greece. Greek vases are covered in “dick pics”. On a
red figure vessel signed by the artist Douris in about 480 BC, satyrs are having a
wild party. One of them rests his hands on the ground behind himwhile arching
his body backwards so he can balance a cup on his erect penis. It’s amazingly
lifelike – did any Greeks actually do this?
It’s not only satyrs whose genitalia are fully depicted. Statues of athletes and
gods also sport their tackle. A famous bronze statue of Zeus or Poseidon shows
his cock and balls to be as perfect as the rest of his powerful body.

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In hand … a large hole where the penis was in the ancient Egyptian statue of the
god Min, from 3300 BC. Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy

By comparison, Egyptian art can seem coy, but that is an illusion. Later
vandalism was to emasculate many Egyptian statues. In fact one of the earliest
Egyptian deities, Min, was an “ithyphallic” being like Priapus who was
portrayed with a huge erect member which he holds in his hand. Two of the
oldest free-standing statues in the world, dating from about 3,300 BC, portray
Min. They are in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. You can see the hole where his
phallus was originally affixed.

Still further back in time, in the Neolithic era, an 11,000-year-old sculpture in

the British Museum portrays two lovers entwined. Carved from the same stone,
their tubular bodies and rounded heads are unmistakably phallic. Are they both
men? Today, the museum includes this beautiful object on its LGBTQ tours.

The real question iswhat do all these willies mean? The toilet mosaic in Turkey
shows that the Greeks and Romans could mock their own myths. It could also
suggest a homoerotic atmosphere in this public convenience: another mosaic
there depicts Ganymede, the boy loved by Jupiter, getting his body washed.
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.