Ithyphallic Imagery and Sex in Ancient Athens

In the last century, when apoplexy claimed portly Victorian gentlemen of untarnished reputation, and their mourning widows got around to sorting through the effects with the children, it was not uncommon to find fine collections of Greek antiquities kept secretly under lock and key. 

"Why look, Mummy, what on earth are they doing in the picture on this vase?"  Impossible!  What had at first glance seemed fine classical pieces, on closer inspection revealed forms and decorations of unspeakable obscenity.  Genuine Attic black or red kraters could surely never have depicted men who… vile naked men in a state of… nevertheless, 10 minutes with a hammer could reduce such embarrassments to rubble, leaving the family reputation intact. 

And yet, despite much virtuous vandalism through the ages, a handsome body of classical artifacts survives to celebrate the erect penis and its cute little accompanying balls.  Classical Greeks clearly didn't mind showing open public appreciation for the "male generative member in its aroused state," technically, a "stiffie." 

In fact, well-known divinities such as Hermes, Pan and the satyrs of Dionysus were commonly represented in an ithyphallic state (sporting a hard-on).  A herm, for example, is a nude statue of Hermes in which only the head, the balls, and the erect cock are carved in detail [Figure 1].  In classical times, herms decorated many homes and most crossroads, pointing the way for weary travelers.  Depictions of herms also showed up in vase paintings; one such painting shows a bird who has lit on an unusually exaggerated herm, apparently with amorous intent [Figure 2]. 

Even more impressive are the monumental marble hard-ons that decorate the temple of Dionysos on Delos [Figure 3].  The tiny island of Delos, birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, was an ancient sanctuary and spiritual center that came under Athenian domination. 

Today, people's reactions to ithyphallic imagery range from vicarious arousal to affectionate amusement, embarrassed laughter, moral outrage and even horror.  In our own culture, it has long been considered less obscene to show a cunt than an erection, presumably because an unclothed woman could be an innocent victim of nakedness whereas an erect cock unambiguously implies arousal. 

What was the significance of the ithyphallic gods and archetypes of the ancient world?  Were the Greeks more civilized than we, less hung up?  What did they think of such images?  Such questions have been the subject of much research and debate in recent years, and the results have changed our view of the Greeks considerably. 

The notorious French historian Michel Foucault deserves much credit for throwing open this discourse with The Use of Pleasure (Paris 1984, New York 1985), the second volume of his History of Sexuality.  Classicists are still taking issue with his views, but at least they are seriously discussing sex in antiquity. 

It took a feminist perspective, however, to change the way we look at classical Athens.  Eva C. Keuls, in her magnificent book, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (1985, University of California 1993), lays bare the very ugly sex-role limitations that underlay that much-idealized culture. 

Keuls details how Athenian men divided woman into two categories: breeders, who could not be seen in public, and worker women.  Both categories were essentially slaves by our standards, male property.  Even the supposedly respectable breeders (wives) possessed no public names.  No record of a wife's name comes down to us from classical Athens — in public documents, they were always identified as so-and-so's daughter or so-and-so's wife. 

Keuls also does not flinch from stressing the ugliness of the institution of slavery on which Athenian men's much-vaunted leisure depended. 

The lascivious sex scenes that we still enjoy [Figures 4 and 5] were invariably depictions of men with slaves and prostitutes.  Sex with wives was not shown.  The prices of common whores were fixed by Draco, Solon and succeeding lawgivers at artificially low ceilings.  The elegant intellectual symposia of which the philosophers wrote turn out to have been male gatherings that generally began with eating and fine conversation, then went on to drinking of wine from the elegant crockery that comes down to us and to fucking slaves, courtesans and adolescent boys. 

So tense and unsatisfactory does the Athenian institution of marriage seem to have been that secular prostitution became an essential sexual outlet and a big business.  An appreciation for the sanctity of sex seems to have largely disappeared — even at the famous temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, what went on could better be described as the sexual exploitation of slaves than the kind of sacred rites practiced in Sumer. 

As a result, money seems to have become intimately linked to sex in the male Athenian mind.  This is reflected in the vase paintings by the scrotal money purse that frequently appears, either in a man's hand looking very much like his genitals, or hanging on the wall behind a purchased encounter [Figure 6].  The equation of purses with balls is also reflected in the unappealing pecuniary ejaculate that Zeus shot down on Danae in her chthonic/uterine prison. 

6.  Hetaera and customer
(cup by the wedding painter)

One of the most important insights resulting from Keuls' work is how difficult it must have been in ancient Athens to imagine a relationship of equals sharing mutual pleasure.  Anger and violence seem instead to have been a norm.  As Keuls points out, no other known mythology is as obsessed with rape as the Greek.  In this sense, it must have been a dreadful society to live in, where the rift between the sexes was so wide and the war between them so ingrained and merciless. 

It should not surprise us, then, that pederasty flourished — homoeroticism was condoned primarily between men and boys, not between adults — since heterosexual intimacy was so compromised. 

Both Foucault (a sadomasochist) and Keuls regard sex most importantly as an expression of power.  For Keuls, the phallus stands as a symbol of male domination, an icon of the repression of Athenian women.  She suggests, plausibly, that it was women of Athens who stole through the streets on the eve of the doomed Sicilian expedition of 415 B.C. and systematically broke the prick off every herm in the city — a perfect expression of understandable frustration and rage. 

Of course, many scholars have been quick to point out the shortcomings of Foucault's and Keuls' revisionism.  On Foucault, for example, see Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by David Laramour et al.  (Princeton 1998).  As for Keuls, while male scholars such as Bruce S. Thornton have had little success in defending the pillars of our dead white male establishment against her Dianic debunking, some studies such as James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes (St. Martin's Press 1997) have succeeded in contributing nuances to the picture that she revealed. 

Thornton dismisses Keuls' feminist perspective somewhat contemptuously in Eros (Westview Press 1997, page 69 and elsewhere).  At the same time, in the course of his long and often obtuse study of the intense fears of sex, passion and women exhibited by ancient Greek men, he neither raises nor answers the question why the Greeks expressed such attitudes.  To him, apparently, such fear and misogyny is a natural response, not the product of patriarchal pathology. 

Davidson, on the other hand, accepts the essential pathology of the Athenian division of women as pointed out by Keuls, even if he finds her exposition of it oversimplified.  Courtesans and Fishcakes shows that there was an interesting middle ground between whores and wives, namely the hetaerae.  Where Keuls throws them in with whores — exploited and degraded by having to sell themselves, and don't you try to pretend otherwise — Davidson argues convincingly that the very essence of being a hetaera consisted in not being a whore in any legal sense, while not being a wife either. 

Yes, a hetaera sold herself, but not necessarily sexually.  She was an escort, paid to come to your parties, who might have sex with you... or might not.  Indeed, the "might not" must have made it all the more flattering that she pretty much always did.  And, at your parties, she would talk to you.  As Davidson observes:

The careful seclusion of respectable women in Athens ceded a huge territory of feminine intimacy to the hetaera.  [page 95]

Some of the details that Davidson provides illustrate how dangerous it is to apply our sexual iconography to the ancient Greeks.  For example, because sex from behind, with the woman bending over, was priced the cheapest, Keuls assumed that it was the most degrading, the most expressive of male domination and therefore presumably the most distasteful to women. 

It appears, however, that the dorsal position was simply more convenient for street whores, who had to have sex in tight quarters or out of doors.  By contrast, the most sought-after and expensive fuck, denied to all but the highest paying customers or pampered lovers, was the "racehorse" position, in which the woman was on top, riding the man.  According to Keuls' assumptions, this position should have expressed female dominance, but there is no evidence that the Greeks looked at it that way.  On the contrary, whores apparently charged more for it because it required more work, and men therefore considered it a special treat. 

Although the picture of Athenian sexuality that emerges from Courtesans and Fishcakes is more nuanced and believable than what Keuls depicted, it's still pretty depressing.  Neither men nor women seem to have had much basis for expecting or finding safe, loving, stable sexual partnerships with the opposite gender.  Economic and legal institutions undermined it too much — it was too easy for a man to abuse any woman, and there was too much incentive for a woman to sell out any man in a pinch. 

From this point of view, Attica's ithyphallic images can be seen as a mindless male expression not of dominance but of unsated horniness — unsated despite a riot of orgasms, because no truly satisfying relationship was possible.  In this sense, there is a kind of poignancy about them: The conquering patriarchy killed what it sought to guarantee, leaving cocks eternally pointing skyward and hearts empty. 

And yet, the human mating ritual is not so easily perverted, even by a patriarchy as repressive as the Athenian.  Tenderness, generosity and love must have existed and been valued, however hard they were to find. 

It is also worth remembering the rites of Dionysos, so popular with women, where a respectable wife under the influence of the sacred wine could turn into a wild maenad, tear apart bloody flesh with her bare hands to vent her rage, whack unwanted satyrs in the balls with her thyrsus (Figure 7) and perhaps fuck more appealing satyrs to her heart's content.  A great many of the ithyphallic images that have survived involve satyrs of Dionysos, who are depicted as conspicuously unsuccessful in their wooing of the maenads most of the time. 

7.  Maenad repels satyr
(red-figure cup by Makron c. 480 B.C.)

On balance, there is something rather sweet about all the erect penises of the ancient Greeks.  As I've heard it said, "A phallus can be cute, and useful too, if you're out of cucumbers." 

7.  Bronze Etruscan satyr

(originally published in 1999 in Widdershins volume 5, issue 1).