CLASSICAL CORNER
Essential literary foreplay: Thomas Hickman, God’s Doodle: The Life
and Times of the Penis (2013) and Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing (1978).
‘Doodle’ was a regular term for ‘cock’ in such Victorian erotica as My Secret Life (author still a mystery) and The Pearl (shortlived porno magazine, of equally obscure parentage).
Common website quotation: “To have a penis is to be chained to a madman.” A sentiment answered in verse by (again) Amis, a notorious cocksman in his prime, apparently paraphrased from Sophocles (noted pæderast) as reported in Plato, Republic, bk1 para329.
When Madame de Gaulle (see various websites) was asked by a British reporter what she most looked forward to in the General’s retirement, she innocently replied “A penis” – it was gently pointed out to her that the word was pronounced ‘Happiness’.
In these days of ‘Size Does Matter’ and your in-boxes crammed with promises of immediate organic extension – are we all in a state of penile servitude? – it’s a pleasant surprise to find that gods and heroes in classical art (and, later, Michelangelo’s David) are very modestly endowed.
This was eagerly seized upon by Ernest Hemingway (himself miniscule) as a consolation for himself and equally under-hung F Scott Fitzgerald; no doubt also by Montgomery Cliff, dubbed by film-maker Kenneth Anger ‘Princess Tiny Meat’.
Haven’t checked with Mat Coward, but it seems the claim that John Dillinger’s 19-incher is somewhere in the Smithsonian Museum is an urban legend; so probably the cognate yarn that J Edgar Hoover kept it preserved in a jar on his desk.
No surprise that porno stars’ appendages weigh in amongst the giants, for example Arthur Mead and John Holmes (‘Johnny Wad’), respectively 14in (35.5cm) and 13in (33cm). Ex-wife Ava Gardener said of Frank Sinatra – otherwise a little prick – that “Frank only weighed 120 pounds [54kg] but 110 of those were cock.”
Big doodles were regarded as ugly and shameful, fit for Satyrs and comedy, from Aristophanes who laughs at giant fake ones – a phallusy? – with red tips designed to amuse the children – intriguing bit of evidence for kids at the Athenian theatre and their sexual sophistication – to Herodas describing (in his Mimes) women jostling to buy the latest dildos (nowadays, vibrators, one supposes) from Miletus, their place of invention, to the once-infamous paintings and statues at Pompeii – there’s a story that Prince Philip once shielded the royal missus from catching a glimpse…
The one god equipped with a giant organ was Priapus, essentially a Worzel Gummidge with attitude (see the scurrilous Latin Priapeia poems), associated with Lampsacus in Thrace (roughly modern Bulgaria).
Men liked to joke about women gratifying themselves on his capacious wooden willy. He is a central figure in (e.g.) Horace ( Satires 1. 8) and Petronius’s Satyricon, plus modern literary Nachleben in for instance TS Eliot (“Priapus in the Shrubbery”) and Nabokov’s Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading.
This deity old man was, though, equalled, indeed surpassed, by – if you believe Ctesias in Photius’s Library, ch72 para46b – the central Indian tribe whose men “had members long enough to reach the ground, and thick.”
Egyptian twist: Merneptah, once (wrongly) thought the Pharoah of the Exodus, cut off the penises of all uncircumcised males after a battle, making it piquant that tip and scrotum were found missing from his mummy.
Greek and Roman men were not circumcised, clearly deeming it the unkindest cut of all. Mercifully, no sign of female genital mutilation. Romans had a special word (verpa) for trimmed males, usually uncomplimentary, as were their references to the foreskin-less Jews.
Catullus (58. 5) describes his ex-girlfriend Clodia peeling back (special verb, glubit) the prepuces of casual pick-ups before fellating them. On this whole business, see Frederick M Hodges, ‘The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome,’ The Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 78 (2001), 375-405. Juvenal ( Satires 1. 41) moans that (in Peter Green’s Penguin translation): “Each lover will get his cut depending on the size of his – services rendered.” Given his excoriations of both homosexual and female lust ( Satires 2, 6, 9), perhaps a trans-gender aphorism. Emperor Commodus fits this bill, a devoted sister-shagger, possessor of a vast harem of women, equally devoted to a man nicknamed ‘Donkey’ because his “male member was larger than that of most animals” ( Historia Augusta, ch10 para9).
Juvenal (6. 374-5, 9. 32-6) and Martial ( Epigrams, 1.97, 2. 51, 9. 34) both ridicule ‘size queens’ (their British counterparts apotheosised in the novel
Queens by ‘Pickles’, 1984) slavering over inordinately hung men in the public baths. Top (or bottom) of this particular form was teenaged emperor Elagabalus who ( HA 5. 2) had scouts search throughout Rome for similar types “that he might enjoy their vigour”.
“Every time the emperor Heraclius urinated, he had to lay a board across his stomach to avoid spurting in his face” (Nicephorus, Histories, bk7 ch11). Such penile curvature is medically known as Peyronie’s Disease, another victim of which is Bill Clinton – did his bendy bit cause Monica any technical problems...?
As we’d say in the North of England, ‘tis nowt but a cock-stride’ from this to a perhaps more elevated topic in the next CC...