The Apotropaic Priapos and Male Sexuality

     Priapos is a deity who rarely appeared in literature. A latecomer to the Greek pantheon, with his exaggerated phallus, his place in Hellenistic times is surely a concession to the archaic practices honoring the earth goddess and other forces of fertility and generation displaced by the Olympians. Imperfectly fitting into the new order, Priapos assumed a role on the sidelines, providing a rustic air and did comic turns, becoming an odd sort of scarecrow while continuing to offer himself as an intercessor generally friendly to human interests. Many later depictions of the god cast a stark light on the use of male sexuality in aggression, assault, and violence.
     Strabo notes that Hesiod did not mention Priapos. Doubtless an Eastern importation, like Dionysos, sometimes named as his father, the worship of Priapos was considered by the ancients to have arisen around Lampsakos in the area of the Hellespont where, according to Pausanias, he was “more revered than any other god.” [1] His significance in this era is clearly marked though broad. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, “the generative member, since it is the cause of the reproduction of human beings and of their continued existence through all time, became the object of immortal honour.” [2] People’s “continued existence” is dependent, of course, not only on human reproduction, but also the productive fertility of the soil and the flourishing of wild and domestic animals. Priapos’ figure is represented in a second century stature with an overflowing basket of produce at his crotch. [3]
     In the most remote rural areas Priapos maintained this function most fully. With an aristocrat’s romanticism reminiscent of Yeats’ longing for Innisfree Catullus sketches a “turf cottage” roofed with “osier-twigs” in which Priapus receives honors and in return brings prosperity to his poor devotees. [4] Priapos’ general beneficent associations take the form of patronage of fishermen for those living by the sea [5] to whom he ensured a good catch as well as protection from sudden death. For centuries sailors carried small phallic charms as amulets against shipwreck.
     With sexual power comes sexual anxiety. His originary myth itself is radically ambivalent. His prodigious penis is no gift but rather inconvenient and impotent, due to Hera’s jealous curse. [6] in spite of his imposing outsize member, Priapos had a poor reputation as a lover. He is generally described as ill-favored in appearance and many Priapic legends such as those in Ovid narrate tales of unsuccessful sexual assault. [7] In a number of the poems of the Priapeia the god complains of impotence. Tibullus has Priapos deliver an instructive lecture on the seduction of youths only to end by declaring that his own erotic desire has brought him nothing but suffering and failure, exposing him to ridicule as an absurd instructor in love. [8]
     Priapos’ sexuality, then, could be represented as a generative dynamo, an expression of the vitality of nature itself, but he also could self-reflectively doubt his virility. Yet this does not exhaust the modes of male sexuality he embodies. Classical eros, not to speak of modern, allowed another, and darker, form of desire. The Classical lover may be the stricken victim of passion one finds in in a good deal of Ovid, or he may be the pleasure-loving sybarite of many lyrics in the Anthology. In a third alternative, less commonly recognized, he is an aggressive delighter in sexual assault against those of lower status: slaves, prisoners, common prostitutes.
     We are by now familiar with the assertion that rape is a crime of power and domination rather than ordinary sexual pleasure, yet the role of a similar dynamic in many other relationships is often underestimated. In contemporary language such aggression is explicit in the common use of terms as “fuck you,” “up yours,” “you suck” and the like. They are the modern forms of the notorious opening line of Catullus Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō ("I will sodomize you and face-fuck you") [10]
     A phallus to assure fertility seems natural enough, but in what way does a man with an erection serve as an effective guardian? The poems of the Priapeia (and other similar poems) leave no doubt. Priapos’ prodigious member is frightening because he threatens to sexually attack the trespasser, male or female indifferently. Priapos’ role as guardian of gardens may have gained popularity because the deity seemed a quaint and semi-comic rustic to sophisticated urbanites, but it rests on the male member’s potential as a weapon capable of inflicting suffering. Indeed, many Priapic poems suggest that the statue’s huge member might be used as a club with which to beat intruders.
     While Priapos does epitomize male sexual desire with its impetuous mandates and at times identifies this drive with the fundamental motive power of nature visible in both wilderness and cultivated land, he also represents male vulnerability. With few exceptions, of which Priapos is the most prominent, the ancient Greeks and Romans preferred to minimize male genitals in statues and drawings of naked men. Though ithyphallic figures of Shiva and of the Egyptian god Min and other divinities are not unusual, to the Greeks and Romans there was something vulnerable, absurd, and comic about going around with an erection. Finally, the male member was also commonly used as an emblem of power. There could be no clearer sign of patriarchy than the penis associated not with love but with physical punishment.



1. Pausanias 9.31.2 The earliest systematic study of Priapos, Richard Payne Knight’s fascinating Discourse on the Worship of Priapus A discourse on the worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients, focuses on this aspect of the god. As an eighteenth century rationalist to Payne the phallus was “a very natural symbol of a very natural and philosophical system of religion.” He wrote that the ancient “mystics” using such imagery promulgated a religion free from “vulgar superstition,” an accusation he is too restrained to make explicitly against his Established Church. In spite of this discretion he suppressed the book and it was not publicly published for decades.

2. Diodorus Siculus 4.6.1-4 “laughter and sport”

3. In the Cortile de Belvedere, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums.

4. Carmina 19.

5. The Greek Anthology contains four dedications to Priapos of gardens and six for Priapos of the beach.

6. The curse is said to be in revenge for Paris’ preference of Aphrodite. I have found no earlier authority for this that the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes 1.932, and Kerenyi sniffs at the story as "a cheap theme, and certainly not an ancient one" in The Mythology of the Greeks, vol. 1 Gods of the Greeks.

7. For instance in 75 his penis is “exanimis” and “inutile.”

6. Fasti 1.6 and 1.9. Some of the finest English poems on impotence are from more or less libertine writers such as Rochester and Carew.

9. Elegies 1.4.

10. Carmina 16. The poet directs his invective at his friends Furius and Aurelius who had apparently called his lyrics -- with likely particular reference to Carmina 5 -- molliculi (“soft” or perhaps “effeminate”). In turn he accuses them of passive “feminine” sexual roles. His threat to sexually penetrate them is to him evidence not of homosexuality but of masculine power.

The Role of Wine in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca

I have here used the same forms of Greek names as Rouse’s Loeb Library edition of the Dionysiaca (thus Nonnus. Dionysus, etc., but Ampelos).


     The sprawling and ornately decorated hexameters of what is perhaps the greatest little-read book of antiquity, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, [1] detail the adventures of Dionysus with many narrations of sexuality and violence (sometimes violent sexuality) as well as ecstasy and intoxication. In the first third of the over 20,000 line poem one encounters monsters like Typhon and Ares’ dragon, murders such as Zagreus’ death, the derangement of Ino, Themisto, and Athamas, while numerous characters are bewitched by love. At the outset the author invokes not only the Muses but also Proteus of many turns (polytropon) to guide the poem’s composition as a manifold or richly-wrought song (poikilon hymnon). (I, 14) Some find it difficult to reconcile this massive and disorderly work which goes far to define “decadent” to the same author’s grave paraphrase of the gospel of John. [2] Their styles may differ widely, but there is little in the epic celebration of the unruly god that would ill-fit a Christian believer.
     Dizzyingly extravagant in content and style, Nonnus’ poem concerns the deity known in antiquity for his followers’ transports of enthusiasm and specifically identified with the grape, with wine, and drunkenness. It is true that the verse gains some stability with its quite regular clopping hexameters (written when quantitative verse was already being abandoned) and its archaic Homeric dialect (itself freshened with a great many neologisms), but the themes themselves are ultimately a safe distance from the transgressive.
     The role of wine itself is a case in point. Though used in small quantities ritually by many groups including ancient Chinese, Jews, and Christians and more generously in observances by groups including ancient Egyptians, old Norsemen, and, surprisingly, early Mormons, alcohol has proven a far poorer alternative than many other psychoactive drugs for religious inspiration. Even the Greek Dionysia is distinguished more by the dithyrambic (and later theatrical) contests and by the processions of phalluses than by drunkenness. (If one believes Livy, the Roman Bacchanalia was a far more licentious festival, in need of civic regulation since 186 C.E.)
     Surprisingly, wine appears in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca not as a gateway to altered consciousness but only as an amelioration of suffering, a simple anodyne. Indeed, the poem’s Book VII prophesies that Dionysus’ advent will ease the trials of human life as Semele is told “You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles.” (367) Her offspring will not cause their suffering to vanish nor will she grant a transcendental wisdom from the height of which suffering will seem trivial; rather, he will allow them to temporarily escape the woes inevitable in life.
     Dionysus, who was often depicted as a beardless youth and was ridiculed as effeminate by Pentheus, falls in love with “the rosy form of a young comrade” Ampelos (X, 175) and takes him as his “playmate” (homepsion). (X, 193) Like many Greek men the god delights in the boy’s dancing (X, 240) and fears rivals of his beloved’s own age. (X, 248) Indeed Ampelos inspires the love of a satyr (X, 278). Dionysus begs Zeus to be allowed to possess Ampelos’ love exclusively, saying that his favorite outshines even Zeus’ choice Ganymede. (X, 317) Ampelos and his divine lover enjoy each other’s company, joining, for instance, in “honey-sweet wrestling” (X, 345) and other athletic contests.
     Ate interferes then in their idyllic relationship, suggesting to Ampelos that he has received insufficient favors from his lover (XI, 113) and raising again the comparison to Ganymede: “The Trojan wine-pourer had the better of you -- he is at home in the court of Zeus.” (XI, 138) Ampelos allows himself to be persuaded to ride a bull, presumably to impress Dionysus, but he is thrown from the animal’s back, breaking his neck. (XI, 217)
     Thrown into uncharacteristic mourning, Dionysus hears Atropos telling him that Ampelos lives yet in the wine (XII, 142) in which form he will be worshiped with song and dance and the triumphant cries of the Muses. (XII, 152) Wine is called “the heavenly nectar, comfort of the human race.” (XII, 152) Wine is contrasted with war, its red juice a pleasure utterly unlike the blood of battle. (XII, 164) [3] Dionysus’ suffering is nearly Christ-like, though his wounds are those of the lovelorn rather than the victim of judicial torture: “Lord Bacchus has wept tears, that he may wipe away tears.” (XII, 171)
     The virtue of this ability of wine to overcome suffering is sufficient that the grape becomes the chief plant of all, receiving the homage of lesser greenery. [4] Its divine qualities betray the fact that it grew from ichor. (XII, 295) But is it not expecting very little of god to provide some temporary surcease of sorrow and grief? Drunkenness is a modest compensation for mortality, more like the psalmist noting that wine “gladdens men’s hearts,” Christ’s miracle at Cana, [5] or the wine promised in Paradise in the Koran [6 ] than like Jesus Christ, "the true vine" or the grapes borne on a staff later identified with the savior. [7]  On the Greek tragic stage Euripedes declared in The Bacchae “When we pour libations out, it is the god himself we pour out, and by this bring blessings on mankind.”
     If there is less of the tremendum of the Grail symbols, there is more of the usable in everyday life. In Nonnus wine is well represented in the repeated image of Ganymede offering a glass. (XII, 40; XII 105) That convivial drink promises no enlightenment or even transport, but it does provide a reliable anaesthetic, an insulation against the harsher of life’s blows as well as a positive source of pleasure in better times (though neither use would be sanctioned by modern psychologists). If one thinks with the Living Theatre that Dionysus should be in a more ambitious business, at least this more modest one possesses the convenience of remaining still within reach.



1. The 1940 Loeb Library edition was translated by W. H. D. Rouse. The entire text of Northrup Frye’s copy with his marginalia is conveniently available at archive.org.

2. Though some readers choose to think the apparently pagan work was written before the writer’s conversion, I prefer to think of Nonnus as a figure like Snorri Sturluson, a good Christian but an antiquarian as well who saw value in the old beliefs and the art to which they had given rise.

3. See also line 252 which again contrasts the blood offered to Ares to the grape juice which is Dionysus’.

4. XII, 273 ff.

5. See Psalm 104:15 and John II, 1-11.

6. Surah XLVII, 15 promises wine in paradise Quran, XVI, 67 recommends it.

7. See John 15:1 and Numbers 13:23.