“Mercury’s form has the power to please.
And Apollo’s body sticks out especially.
Lyaeus in pictures has a shapely line,
And Cupid is still finest of the fine.
My body lacks a certain beauty, I confess
But, look, my dick’s a jewel beyond the rest.
Any girl should prefer it to the gods I named,
And if she doesn’t, then a greedy pussy’s to blame.”
Forma Mercurius potest placere,
forma conspiciendus est Apollo,
formosus quoque pingitur Lyaeus,
formosissimus omnium est Cupido.
me pulchra fateor carere forma,
verum mentula luculenta nostra est:
hanc mavult sibi quam deos priores,
si qua est non fatui puella cunni.
Woman painting a statue of Priapus, from a fresco at Pompeii
“Later, Nicomedes the king wanted to buy the statue from the Knidians, promising to unburden the state of its public debt, which was immense. They preferred to live with this and not without good reason—for Praxiteles ennobled Knidos with this sculpture. Its temple is open all around so that it is possible to see the goddess’ image from every direction. The goddess favors this herself, as the story goes. There is no less sense of wonder from any direction. They report that a certain man was taken with love for it and, once he had hidden himself for the night, he let himself loose upon the image, and there is a stain to show his desire.”
voluit eam a Cnidiis postea mercari rex Nicomedes, totum aes alienum, quod erat ingens, civitatis dissoluturum se promittens. omnia perpeti maluere, nec inmerito; illo enim signo Praxiteles nobilitavit Cnidum. aedicula eius tot aperitur, ut conspici possit undique effigies deae, favente ipsa, ut creditur, facta. nec minor ex quacumque parte admiratio est. ferunt amore captum quendam, cum delituisset noctu, simulacro cohaesisse, eiusque cupiditatis esse indicem maculam.
Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings 8.2 ext 3
“Praxiteles centered the wife of Vulcan in marble in the Knidians’ temple as if she were breathing—and she was barely safe from a lustful embrace because of the beauty of the work. In this, a mistake is rather excusable for a horse who, when he sees the picture of a mare is compelled to utter a neigh; or when a dog is excited by the sight of a painted dog to bark; or the bull in Syracuse who was compelled to lust after and mount a bronze cow that was just too close to real. Why, then, should we be amazed that animals who lack reason are deceived by art, when we see a man’s sacrilegious desire elicited by the shape of silent stone?”
Cuius coniugem Praxiteles in marmore quasi spirantem in templo Cnidiorum collocavit, propter pulchritudinem operis a libidinoso cuiusdam complexu parum tutam. quo excusabilior est error equi, qui visa pictura equae hinnitum edere coactus est, et canum latratus aspectu picti canis incitatus, taurusque ad amorem et concubitum aeneae vaccae Syracusis nimiae similitudinis irritamento compulsus: quid enim vacua rationis animalia arte decepta miremur, cum hominis sacrilegam cupiditatem muti lapidis liniamentis excitatam videamus?
“Paphian Aphrodite once came across the sea to Knidos, hoping to see a statue of herself. After gazing at it in a spot seen from all sides , she said, ‘When did Praxiteles see me naked?’ Praxiteles never saw what it was not right to see – his tool carved out an Aphrodite that Ares would like.”
“You always swear you will come to me, Lygdus, when I ask
And you promise a time and a place.
When I stretch out tense with prolonged excitement,
Often my left hand rushes in to replace you.
Liar! What should I beg for these deeds, these habits?
Lygdus—may you bear the umbrella of a one-eyed lady.”
Venturum iuras semper mihi, Lygde, roganti
constituisque horam constituisque locum.
cum frustra iacui longa prurigine tentus,
succurrit pro te saepe sinistra mihi.
5quid precer, o fallax, meritis et moribus istis?
umbellam luscae, Lygde, feras dominae.
And, to make this all a little more acceptable, here’s Martial on his choice of dicktion:
Epigrams, 3.69
“Because you write all your verses with nice words
There’s never a cock in your songs.
I admire this, I praise this. Nothing is holier than you alone.
But no page of mine lacks, well, lubrication.
Let nasty boys and easy girls read these poems then;
Let the old man who has a girlfriend to taunt him read them.
But, Cosconius, your holy and venerable words
Ought to be read by young boys and virgins.”
Omnia quod scribis castis epigrammata verbis
inque tuis nulla est mentula carminibus,
admiror, laudo; nihil est te sanctius uno:
at mea luxuria pagina nulla vacat.
haec igitur nequam iuvenes facilesque puellae,
haec senior, sed quem torquet amica, legat.
at tua, Cosconi, venerandaque sanctaque verba
a pueris debent virginibusque legi.
This poem reminds me of another where Martial defends himself by explaining that it is hard to write a poem without a penis. Harvesting from the garden of the Muses….
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 25526 (Roman de la Rose, France 14th century), fol. 160r.
Hadrian, fr. II [A minor Latin Poet and a Major Roman Emperor]
“You were wanton in verse, but pure of thought”
Lascivus versu, mente pudicus eras.
Martial, 12.97
“Even though your wife is a girl of a kind
A man would scarcely seek with inappropriate prayers
(rich, noble, erudite, chase, what a find!)
You bust your nut, Bassus, but on the hair
Of the the men you buy with your wife’s money.
And when to its mistress your dick is returned
Though it was for so many thousands bought
It is so limp that its full size cannot be earned
Even if by sweet whispers or soft strokings sought.
For once, have some shame or let’s go to court.
Bassus, you sold it—your dick ain’t yours.”
Uxor cum tibi sit puella qualem
votis vix petat improbis maritus,
dives, nobilis, erudita, casta,
rumpis, Basse, latus, sed in comatis,
uxoris tibi dote quos parasti.
et sic ad dominam reversa languet
multis mentula milibus redempta
ut nec vocibus excitata blandis
molli pollice nec rogata surgat.
sit tandem pudor aut eamus in ius.
non est haec tua, Basse: vendidisti.
Wall-painting: Priapus weighing his phallus (Pompeii)
“I often yearn to take you at night, Thaleia,
And fill my heart with your warm lust-madness.
But now when you are naked next to me with sweet limbs,
I am spent, and my limb is worn with sleepy exhaustion.
Cowardly heart, what have you suffered? Rise up, don’t be weary!
Someday you will seek such excessive good luck again.”
We are happy to have new contributions from the Fabulous Dr. Amy Coker. She shares a certain scatalogical interest, but brings considerable expertise to the matter.
This latest word is not to do with sex, but rather with another bodily action which is often a source of taboo words, excretion. More specifically, this post is about words I have been affectionately characterising as denoting ‘solid waste’ (or ‘poo’, ‘faeces’, etc.). One of the words in ancient Greek for the noun ‘poo’ is κόπρος (ko-pross), the word which gives us English scientific words beginning with ‘copro-‘ such as ‘coprolite’ – fossilised faeces – coined in the early nineteenth century.
Despite the unpleasantness of the substance κόπρος indicates, the word itself is not really ‘taboo’ or offensive, and is found in a range of Classical works from Homer’s epics to medical works in the Hippocratic corpus: κόπρος is milder in tone than the English four-letter word, ‘sh*t’. What sparked this post is an example in our ancient texts of a word similar to κόπρος – κόπριον (ko-pree-on). In technical parlance, this word is the stem κοπρ- plus the diminutive suffix -ιον (-ee-on): this last part is a segment which makes a word meaning the same thing as the stem, or a smaller version of it, or indicates affection from the speaker to the object (a bit like English ‘toe’, diminutive ‘toe-sie’).
The example of κόπριον we are interested in comes from a papyrus letter written in Egypt in the late 2nd or 3rd century AD, known as P.Oxy. 1761. Greek was the dominant language of Egypt for around a thousand years from the conquest of Alexander the Greek to the Arab conquest in the mid 7th century AD, so that fact that this letter is written in Greek in Egypt is not unusual. This letter is in other respects too typical of those written in vast numbers by individuals about everyday matters; these people are otherwise lost to history, but their correspondence by chance survives. (See picture for an example of what a papyrus letter looks like).
P.Oxy. 1672 Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, AD 37-41. Image courtesy of The Garstang Museum, University of Liverpool. The first two lines read: Δημήτριος καὶ Παυσανίας Παυσαν[ί]αι | τῶι πατρὶ πλεῖστα χαίρειν καὶ ὑγι(αίνειν)- ‘Demetrius and Pausanias to their father Pausanias very many greetings and wishes for good health.’It is lines 6-7 of P.Oxy. 1761 where the surprise lies: as Grenfell and Hunt put it in their edition in the early twentieth century, here ‘A very singular symptom of regret for an absent friend is specified’. Here is a full translation of the letter, as given by Montserrat’s Sex & Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1996, 8); the bold words are the ones which concerns us:
Callirhoë to her dear Sarapis, greetings. I say a prayer for you every day in the presence of the lord Sarapis. Since you have been away I go on the trail of your shit in my desire to see you. Greet Thermouthis and Helias and Ploution and Aphrodite and Nemesianus. Carabus and Harpocration greet you, and everyone at home. I pray for your health.
The Greek text which lies behind this ‘singular symptom of regret’ is: ἐπιζῃητοῦμέν σου τὰ κόπρια, literally, ‘I/we look for (or miss?) your κόπριον-s’ (κόπρια is the plural of κόπριον). There is no wandering about here, despite the impression the translation might give. A slightly more recent translation by Bagnall & Cribiore in their collection of women’s letters (2006, 392) renders these words as the striking ‘we are searching for your turds’.
Is Callirhoë really looking through the dunghill because she misses her friend? Even when we accept that ancient peoples did things differently, this seems a stretch. We could be tempted to think that this is an idiom peculiar to Egypt, perhaps stemming from a native expression, but there seems to be no obvious parallel (suggestions are welcome). I think rather the best explanation comes back to what κόπρος/κόπριον means.
Both these words are also used more broadly of ‘rubbish’, or things which can be taken away to be used as fertiliser: remember that most ancient waste was organic. κόπριον is found in this kind of sense in the Magical Papyri, an ancient collection of spells, where it is something picked up from the ground where a corpse has lain (PGM 4.1395-8, 4.1441-2). Dieter Betz translates this as ‘polluted dirt’, but the pollution comes only from the context of the spell.
I think here and in our letter we should rather take κόπρια as indicating ‘useless remains’ or ‘traces’, akin to English ‘crap’: note how ‘crap’ has just this double meaning of ‘excrement’ and ‘rubbish’ in contemporary UK English (e.g. ‘there is so much crap in my house’). The result is that Callirhoë is not looking for any particular bodily waste produced by her dear Sarapis, but rather for indications that she has been around: a rather loose translation of this sentiment might therefore be ‘I go through your crap wanting to find you there’.
Amy Coker has over the last decade held positions in Classics and Ancient History at the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol in the UK. After undergraduate studies in Classics at Downing College, Cambridge, and an MA in Linguistics at the University of Manchester, she was awarded funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to support her doctoral work on gender variation in Ancient Greek (2007-2009, PhD Manchester 2010). She later secured a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2013-2016) for a project on Greek sexual and scatological vocabulary, and ancient offensive language. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies, University of London (2017-2018), and is now an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Bristol (2018-), and teacher of Classics at Cheltenham Ladies College (2018-).
She has published work in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics, and classics, and has pieces about to appear on the treatment of obscene language in the most well-known lexicon of Ancient Greek, Liddell and Scott, and on a filthy joke told by Cleopatra involving a ladle.
She is a keen supporter of outreach and public engagement, and has worked with the UK charity Classics for All running projects to bring Latin and Greek teaching to schools which have no tradition of teaching these subjects. She can be found on Twitter at @AECoker.
Content Warning: strong language, sexual content, prostitution, and castration threat
Greek Anthology 5.126 Philodemos
Mocking invective against a wasted lover still giving much to “girlfriends”
“The clever man gives a clever girl five talents for one round
And he shakes while fucking her, though, by god, she’s not even pretty.
I give Lusianissa twelve drachmas for twelve turns,
Both to fuck a better woman and do it openly.
Either I am completely senseless or what’s left to do
But chop of his balls with an ax.”
“I praise the dancer from Asia, the one who moves
From the tips of her fingernails with devious positions,
Not because she shows every passion or because she throws
Her delicate hands delicately this way and that,
But because she knows how to dance around a worn out stump
And doesn’t try to flee its aging wrinkles.
She tongues it, kneads it, throws her hands around it–
And if she throws her leg over me, she raises my staff back from hell.”
The following two passages are from the Mirabilia ofApollonius the Paradoxographer (usually dated to the 2nd Century BCE, making him one of the earliest extant paradoxographers).
This plant makes you bigger [=BNJ 81 F17]
“Phularkhos writes in the eighth book of his Histories that near the Arabian Gulf there is a spring of water from which if anyone ever anoints their feet what transpires miraculously is that their penis becomes enormously erect. For some it never contracts completely, while others are put back in shape with great suffering and medical attention.”
“Phularkhos in book 20 of the Histories says that there is a white root imported from India which when [people] cut it and smear it over their feet with water, those who are smeared with it experience forgetfulness of sex and become similar to eunuchs. For this reason still some apply it before they are fully adults and are not aroused for the rest of their life.”
“Phularkhos says that Sandrokottos, the king of the Indians, sent along with other gifts to Seleukos some drugs with erectile powers, the kind of which, when they are applied beneath feet of those who are going to have sex, give the urge like birds, while some people lose their ability [for sex].”
“To be able to fuck a lot: mix fifty [pine nuts] with two measures of honey and seeds of pepper and drink it. To have an erection whenever you want: mix pepper with honey and rub it on your thing.”
“Ponticus, do you think that it’s no big deal
That you never fuck but just use your left hand
As a whore, a friendly crew to serve your desire?
Believe me: it’s a crime and one large enough
That you can barely understand it with your mind.
Horatius, I guess, fucked once to make a trio
Mars did it once with blushing Ilia to make two.
The whole world would have collapsed if either jerked off
And entrusted foul delights to their own hands.
Just think, the nature of the universe says to you:
Ponticus, what you spend on your fingers is a person too.”
Pontice, quod numquam futuis, sed paelice laeva
uteris et Veneri servit amica manus,
hoc nihil esse putas? scelus est, mihi crede, sed ingens,
quantum vix animo concipis ipse tuo.
nempe semel futuit, generaret Horatius ut tres;
Mars semel, ut geminos Ilia casta daret.
omnia perdiderat, si masturbatus uterque
mandasset manibus gaudia foeda suis.
ipsam crede tibi naturam dicere rerum:
istud quod digitis, Pontice, perdis, homo est.
.jpg){kind=link}