Queer n There	Queer n There Archive

You see them, teenagers holding index finger and thumb one inch apart, looking and giggling to one another just below classic or Renaissance statues. Older folk smile, but pretend not to notice. In our time bigger is better, and porn gods sport 9-, 10-, or more-inch boners they casually pound into one another. What happened? What changed?

Aesthetics for one thing. The Greeks and Romans considered a more petite penis (always with foreskin enough to cover the glans) to be more attractive. Noble youths were almost always depicted so. Even erect, the foreskin would cover the glans, preserving modesty at sport or in the bathhouse.

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That's where the kynodesme came in, the little leather foreskin ties you can see on Greek vases (evidence that ancient youths were no less prone to inopportune hard-ons). With male nudity commonplace, it was showing the glans that signified immodest exposure. The Romans were hard-line on the question: for citizens, circumcision was a deportable or even a capital offense.

Slaves, barbarians, and Egyptians (despised as practitioners of circumcision) or people being ridiculed, were shown with big, pendulous penises and bare, bulbous glandes (that's the plural of glans!).

A golden mean?

You can forgive the Greeks for not getting around to appreciate size. They had a lot of other work to do. In particular, they were busy civilizing nudity.

Earlier rituals are what segued into the Greeks' practice of "civic" nudity. The Greeks prided themselves on this comfort with the undraped body that set them apart from neighboring barbarians. Greeks honed their sense of ideal physical proportions, and big dicks weren't part of the pretty picture.

But there was a place for size in other realms. Giant carved phalli can be seen at temples, such as that of Dionysus on Delos. Around the house, the herm (a plinth with a head and an erect phallus at the front) was a common protective charm. Springtime phallophoria festivals to honor Dionysus featured processions of satyr-costumed revelers endowed with giant members trading crude insults and jests, and singing praises to Phales, the satyr god. These songs were called komedia, from which came the "comedy" of the Greek stage. Huge cocks were the key comic stage prop -- the most "invariable accouterment of male charactors," notes classicist Stephen Halliwell, "a sign of comic masculinityƒ there to make the boys laugh." Thus was the threat of immodesty reduced to farce.

Depictions of sex in Roman art were considered in good taste so long as mores were observed. Anal penetration was okay -- just look at the British Museum's Warren Cup. But oral sex wasn't -- a "purity of the mouth" issue.

While large phalli weren't desirable on men, they were put to other symbolic uses: as good-luck charms, used near doorways and still seen today as the winged penises sold as trinkets outside Pompeii. Priapus, depicted with full erection, was more in service to agricultural rather than human fertility. Priapic figures watched over gardens, vineyards, and acted as a scarecrow in fields. He was also protection against theft -- with the implication that transgressors would suffer the consequences. As one Roman epigram put it: "If a woman, man, or boy thieve from me, she shall pay me with coynte, that with his mouth, this with arse."

Who's the barbarian?

"To those on whose genius we've built our civilizations, we, with our preoccupations on rock-hard massiveness, would likely be seen brutish and grotesque," contends Jaime Morrison on his blog Thenonist.com.

Still not moved by the diminutive member? At least a tiny bit of ancient evidence shares your bias. Morrison cites a Wikipedia entry on Priapus -- so we can, too -- discussing an incident in Petronius's Satyricon. "[W]hen the heroes arrive in Crotona, they come across a youth who is exposed and found to be very well endowed. As a result the townspeople (including women) hold him in reverence and literally trip over each other to touch his phallus for good luck" -- no sense of disgust implied.

Ancient art and sculpture may have hewn to one standard when it came to big cocks, but for the ancient man- (and woman-) on-the-street, maybe bigger was, at least, luckier.