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.