To reduce men’s sexual disadvantage, the ancient Greek lawmaker Solon wisely established in Athens public brothels with affordable rates. Over the subsequent century and a half, public-spirited persons erected in Athens numerous herms — pillars featuring the face and erect penis of the messenger god Hermes. These actions in support of men’s sexuality and gender equality weren’t sufficient.[1] In 415 BGC, the penises and faces of all the Athenian herms were mutilated. That symbolic violence against men’s genitals and faces, like the death of Adonis, exemplifies deeply entrenched castration culture. In ancient Greek myth, goddesses harshly punished Actaeon and Tiresias merely because they gazed upon them bathing naked. Under such gender-oppressive circumstances, ordinary, hard-working men like the uncultured Greco-Roman garden god Priapus resorted to masturbation.
Men historically have been reluctant to speak about injustices against men as a gender, including symbolic violence against men. The eminent Athenian general and historian Thucydides lived during the time of the symbolic violence against the herms. Rather than recording his personal feelings about being a man in fifth-century BGC Athens, Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. In that history, men are merely actors and instruments of political developments. Thucydides described institutionalized violence against men in the Peloponnesian War as if nothing needed to be said about gender devaluing men’s lives and men’s sexuality.[2] Here’s how he recorded the symbolic violence against men’s penises and faces in Athens in 415 BGC:
In the city of Athens, many stone herms, the square-cut type, stand at private doors and at holy places in accordance with local custom. Most of their fronts were mutilated during one night.
{ ὅσοι Ἑρμαῖ ἦσαν λίθινοι ἐν τῇ πόλει τῇ Ἀθηναίων (εἰσὶ δὲ κατὰ τὸ ἐπιχώριον ἡ τετράγωνος ἐργασία πολλοὶ καὶ ἐν ἰδίοις προθύροις καὶ ἐν ἱεροῖς) μιᾷ νυκτὶ οἱ πλεῖστοι περιεκόπησαν τὰ πρόσωπα. }[3]
The ancient Greek verbal form translated here as “were mutilated {περιεκόπησαν}” comes from the verb περικόπτω. It literally means “to cut off all around.” The ancient Greek noun πρόσωπα is more commonly translated as “faces,” an alternate meaning of the Greek word. In any case, Thucydides, in accordance with his general practice of gender repression, didn’t specifically mention the mutilation of the herms’ penises. Like Thucydides’s history, other less prominent texts about this event similarly describe the symbolic violence against the herms with forms of “to mutilate {περικόπτω},” without specifying exactly what was mutilated.[4]
Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, performed in Athens in 411 BGC, tellingly offered an ancient sexual-assault “joke.” Lysistrata concerns the gender-exclusive exploitation of men in fighting wars. It specifically concerns the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Comically and ironically resisting the gender injustice that Thucydides’s history gender-obtusely records, Athenian women in Lysistrata refuse to have sex with Athenian men until the men stop participating in the violence against men of the Peloponnesian War. Athenian men are thus sexually frustrated. They are appearing in public with painfully enduring erections. The old man leading Lysistrata’s chorus of old men warns the Athenian men:
If you’re wise, you’ll cover yourself with your cloaks, so that
one of the herm-cutters won’t see you.{ εἰ σωφρονεῖτε, θαἰμάτια λήψεσθ᾿, ὅπως
τῶν ἑρμοκοπιδῶν μή τις ὑμᾶς ὄψεται. }[5]
In context, these verses clearly refer to violence against men’s genitals and similar symbolic violence against herms. Moreover, these verses plausibly refer obliquely to the well-known, widely discussed symbolic violence against the penises and faces of herms just four years earlier.[6]
Writing about 100 GC, Plutarch obliquely indicated that the mutilation of herms in Athens in 415 BGC involved violence against their penises. In his life of the Athenian politician and general Nicias, Plutarch described how Nicias had vainly argued against the Athenians’ disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Then Plutarch commented:
No signs could deter the people from the expedition, even though the signs had never been so obvious and clear. One such sign was the mutilation of the herms. All these statues, except for one, had their extremities cut off in a single night. The one unharmed herm was called the Hermes of Andocides. That one was dedicated by the Aegeïd tribe and stood in front of what was at that time the house of Andocides. There was also the affair of the altar of the Twelve Gods. An unknown man suddenly leaped upon the altar, straddled it, and then cut off his own genitals with a stone.
{ οὐδὲ γὰρ τὰ προὖπτα καὶ καταφανῆ τῶν σημείων ἀπέτρεπεν, ἥ τε τῶν Ἑρμῶν περικοπή, μιᾷ νυκτὶ πάντων ἀκρωτηριασθέντων πλὴν ἑνός, ὃν Ἀνδοκίδου καλοῦσιν, ἀνάθημα μὲν τῆς Αἰγηΐδος φυλῆς, κείμενον δὲ πρὸ τῆς τότε οὔσης Ἀνδοκίδου οἰκίας, καὶ τὸ πραχθὲν περὶ τὸν βωμὸν τῶν δώδεκα θεῶν. ἄνθρωπος γάρ τις ἐξαίφνης ἀναπηδήσας ἐπ᾿ αὐτόν, εἶτα περιβὰς ἀπέκοψεν αὑτοῦ λίθῳ τὸ αἰδοῖον. }[7]
Penises are extremities of herms. The man castrating himself on the altar of the Twelve Gods makes best sense in the context of parallel violence against the herms’ genitals. Both indicate hostility towards men’s sexuality under castration culture.
Ancient Greek myth also attests to hostility towards men’s sexuality under gynocentrism. Consider Actaeon. Through his mother’s familial line he was the grandson of Cadmus, the king of Thebes. Along with other men, Actaeon and his dogs were hunting on Mount Cithaeron in central Greece. There he encountered the goddess Diana, the granddaughter of Titans through her mother’s familial line. Healthy masculine desire to see the face and body of a naked woman didn’t prompt Actaeon’s encounter with the bathing Diana. Fate brought him to her:
While she of the Titans was being bathed there in her usual spring waters,
look! Cadmus’s grandson, his day’s labor deferred,
with unsure steps wandering through the unknown woods,
comes to the place. Fate so made it thus.
When he entered the grottoes, dripping with fountains
as they then were, the naked nymphs, seeing a man,
beat their breasts and suddenly filled the whole woods
with shrill cries. Having surrounded Diana,
they covered her with their own bodies. But taller than them
is the goddess herself, and her neck towers above all.
The color of clouds infused by opposing
rays of sun or the color of rosy dawn would be
as Diana’s face was, she seen then without her clothes on.{ Dumque ibi perluitur solita Titania lympha,
ecce nepos Cadmi dilata parte laborum
per nemus ignotum non certis passibus errans
pervenit in lucum: sic illum fata ferebant.
Qui simul intravit rorantia fontibus antra,
sicut erant, viso nudae sua pectora nymphae
percussere viro, subitisque ululatibus omne
implevere nemus circumfusaeque Dianam
corporibus texere suis; tamen altior illis
ipsa dea est colloque tenus supereminet omnes.
Qui color infectis adversi solis ab ictu
nubibus esse solet aut purpureae aurorae,
is fuit in vultu visae sine veste Dianae. }[8]
Many men are afraid to look at goddesses, or talk with them, or have sex with them. Prone to gyno-idolatry, men within gynocentric culture feel themselves to be inferior to goddesses. A man accidentally seeing a goddess naked might be embarrassing for both. However, such a fortuitous sight doesn’t challenge goddesses’ dominance over men. Such a sight is likely to enthrall a man further in gyno-idolatry.
Nonetheless, Diana was furious that Actaeon had accidentally seen her naked, bathing in the grotto. She treated him with contempt and dehumanized him:
Amid the surrounding turmoil of her servant-nymphs,
Diana stood with her side turned away and bent her head
backwards. And in this way she wished that she had her usual arrows.
What she had, she drew, and she drenched the man’s face
with water. Sprinkling his hair with a vengeful wave,
she added these words, foreboding a calamitous future:
“Now, you having seen me with my clothes off, you could speak
about it, if you are able to speak.” Without threatening more,
she gave his water-sprinkled head the horns of a lively stag,
gave his neck greater length, and made his ears pointed.
She changed his hands into feet, his arms into long
legs, and covered his body with a spotted hide.
And fear was added. Autonoë’s heroic son Actaeon fled,
and he himself marveled at his swift running.{ Quae quamquam comitum turba est stipata suarum,
in latus obliquum tamen adstitit oraque retro
flexit, et ut vellet promptas habuisse sagittas,
quas habuit sic hausit aquas vultumque virilem
perfudit, spargensque comas ultricibus undis
addidit haec cladis praenuntia verba futurae:
“Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine narres,
si poteris narrare, licet.” Nec plura minata
dat sparso capiti vivacis cornua cervi,
dat spatium collo summasque cacuminat aures,
cum pedibusque manus, cum longis bracchia mutat
cruribus et velat maculoso vellere corpus.
Additus et pavor est. Fugit Autonoeius heros
et se tam celerem cursu miratur in ipso. }
Classics scholars have been shamefully silent about the silencing of men. The goddess transformed the man Actaeon into a stag. He was no longer able to speak words like the human being he was. Actaeon’s own dogs spotted him and tore into him:
First Blackhair makes a wound in Actaeon’s back,
next Killer, then Climber bites onto his shoulder —
they ran forth later than other dogs, but by shortcuts over mountains
came faster than the usual way. While they hold their master,
the pack’s others gather and bring their teeth into his body.
Now no place lacks a wound. Actaeon groans and makes a noise,
and it isn’t a human noise, yet not a noise that any stag
would make. He fills the well-known mountain ridges with mournful laments.
…
On every side the dogs bite, and with their jaws in his body
lacerate their master under the deceiving image of a stag.
Not until his life had ended by many wounds
was the rage of the quiver-bearing Diana satiated.{ Prima Melanchaetes in tergo vulnera fecit,
proxima Therodamas, Oresitrophos haesit in armo:
tardius exierant, sed per compendia montis
anticipata via est. Dominum retinentibus illis,
cetera turba coit confertque in corpore dentes.
Iam loca vulneribus desunt. Gemit ille sonumque,
etsi non hominis, quem non tamen edere possit
cervus, habet maestisque replet iuga nota querellis.
…
Undique circumstant mersisque in corpore rostris
dilacerant falsi dominum sub imagine cervi.
nec nisi finita per plurima vulnera
vita ira pharetratae fertur satiata Dianae. }[9]
Violence against men because of absurdly defined male sex crimes must end. Women are complicit in penal justice systems that vastly gender-disproportionately punish persons with penises. Women must relinquish their unjustified rage and gave peace a chance.[10]
In another ancient Greek myth, the nymph-mother Chariclo perceived hostility towards men’s sexuality too late to save her son Tiresias from blindness. One day Tiresias sought to satisfy his thirst. That’s not a crime. He accidentally saw the goddess Athena naked, bathing in springs on Mount Helicon. Men seeing with their eyes isn’t wrong. Nonetheless, here’s what happened:
Unspeakably thirsty, he went to the flowing fountain,
wretched man! Unwittingly he saw what was not permitted.
Athena was furious with him, but she spoke nonetheless:
“You will never recover your eyesight, you, Tiresias,
Everes’s son. What divine power led you down this harsh path?”
She spoke, and then night seized the young man’s eyes.
He stood speechless, anguish glued his knees together,
and helplessness held back his voice.{ διψάσας δ’ ἄφατόν τι ποτὶ ῥόον ἤλυθε κράνας,
σχέτλιος· οὐκ ἐθέλων δ’ εἶδε τὰ μὴ θεμιτά.
τὸν δὲ χολωσαμένα περ ὅμως προσέφασεν Ἀθάνα·
“τίς σε, τὸν ὀφθαλμὼς οὐκέτ’ ἀποισόμενον,
ὦ Εὐηρείδα, χαλεπὰν ὁδὸν ἄγαγε δαίμων;”
ἁ μὲν ἔφα, παιδὸς δ’ ὄμματα νὺξ ἔλαβεν.
ἑστάκη δ’ ἄφθογγος, ἐκόλλασαν γὰρ ἀνῖαι
γώνατα καὶ φωνὰν ἔσχεν ἀμαχανία. }[11]
In short, Athena blinded Tiresias for accidentally seeing her naked. Tiresias was initially a man made speechless like Actaeon. Unlike Actaeon turned into a stag, Tiresias couldn’t run because anguish glued his knees together.
Tiresias’s mother Chariclo, who had been bathing naked with her friend Athena, profoundly lamented Athena’s harsh punishment of Tiresias. Chariclo had no idea how the ruling goddesses treat men, even men who are the sons of their friends:
What have you done to my son,
lady? Is this how you goddesses are friends?
You took away the eyes of my child. Accursed boy,
you saw the breasts and body of Athena,
but you won’t see the sun again!{ τί μοι τὸν κῶρον ἔρεξας
πότνια; τοιαῦται, δαίμονες, ἐστὲ φίλαι;
ὄμματά μοι τῶ παιδὸς ἀφείλεο. τέκνον ἄλαστε,
εἶδες Ἀθαναίας στήθεα καὶ λαγόνας,
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀέλιον πάλιν ὄψεαι. }
Athena of course blamed her action on the god Cronos, who had castrated his father Uranus. We need women leaders. Women, including goddesses, must lead in a new direction to promote justice for men. If women don’t lead in promoting true gender equality, their own sons will suffer.
Men have long endured sexual deprivation amid cultural hostility to men’s sexuality. About two thousand years ago, the uncultured Greco-Roman garden god Priapus complained:
The ancient Priapuses had river nymphs and woodland nymphs,
and a place that a god’s stiff penis could undergo.
Now so lacking a place to approach and so full is my libido
that I might think that all the nymphs have perished.
Shameful indeed it is to do, but so as not to burst with desire,
I’ll put aside my pruning hook and make my hand my lover.{ Naidas antiqui Dryadasque habuere Priapi,
et quo tenta dei vena subiret, erat.
nunc adeo nihil est, adeo mea plena libido est,
ut Nymphas omnis interiisse putem.
turpe quidem factu, sed ne tentigine rumpar,
falce mihi posita fiet amica manus. }[12]
Men in truth are not gods like Priapus, nor are women goddesses or nymphs. Men are similar to dogs on occasion, yet as meninists insist, men are human beings. Men deserve better than masturbation. Men deserve to be loved in the fullness of their human being. Men masturbating indicates that society has not encompassed well the needs of men.[13]
Violence against the penises and faces of herms in Athens in 415 BGC and ancient Greek myths about the sexual victimization of Actaeon and Tiresias testify to historically entrenched hostility toward men’s sexuality. In ancient Greco-Roman culture, sophisticated Priapus poems protested against brutalizing men’s sexuality. Today, all persons of good will around the whole world should lovingly support men’s sexuality.
Castration culture hurts women as well as men. In ancient Greek myth, the love goddess Aphrodite burned with passion for the more than heavenly young man Adonis. He died in a significant way:
By chance his dogs, having followed tell-tale tracks,
roused a swine from hiding, and as it prepared to rush from the woods,
Cinyras’s grandson Adonis pierced it with an oblique blow.
Immediately with its curved snout it dislodged the spear,
stained with its blood. The fierce boar chased the frightened one,
who was seeking a safe place. It buried all its tusks beneath
Adonis’s groin and flattened the dying one upon the yellow sand.{ forte suem latebris vestigia certa secuti
excivere canes, silvisque exire parantem
fixerat obliquo iuvenis Cinyreius ictu:
protinus excussit pando venabula rostro
sanguine tincta suo trepidumque et tuta petentem
trux aper insequitur totosque sub inguine dentes
abdidit et fulva moribundum stravit harena. }[14]
The swine struck Adonis in his genitals and killed him. The swine represents vicious proponents of castration culture. Their actions cause immeasurable grief:
On the hills lies beautiful Adonis, with tusk-wounded thigh,
wounded in his gleaming thigh by a gleaming tusk, and he grieves Aphrodite
as he breathes his final faint breath. His dark blood drips over his
snow-white flesh, under his brow his eyes grow dim,
and the rosy hue flees from his lip. Around him
dies also the kiss that Aphrodite will never again carry away.{ κεῖται καλὸς Ἄδωνις ἐν ὤρεσι μηρὸν ὀδόντι,
λευκῷ λευκὸν ὀδόντι τυπείς, καὶ Κύπριν ἀνιῇ
λεπτὸν ἀποψύχων· τὸ δέ οἱ μέλαν εἴβεται αἷμα
χιονέας κατὰ σαρκός, ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι δ’ ὄμματα ναρκῇ,
καὶ τὸ ῥόδον φεύγει τῶ χείλεος· ἀμφὶ δὲ τήνῳ
θνᾴσκει καὶ τὸ φίλημα, τὸ μήποτε Κύπρις ἀποίσει. }[15]
Beneath the groin and next to the thigh is the center of a man’s being, an instrument of his blessing. The great ancient Greek woman poet Sappho loved her brothers Charaxos and Larichos through difficult circumstances. Sappho taught women how to respond to the mortal sexual violence that Adonis suffered:
“He is dying, Aphrodite — he, graceful Adonis. What to do?”
“Beat your breasts, young women, and tear your clothes.”
{ κατθνάσκει, Κυθέρη᾿, ἄβρος Ἄδωνις· τί κε
θεῖμεν; καττύπτεσθε, κόραι, καὶ κατερείκεσθε κίθωνας. }[16]
In ancient Greece, women annually mourned Adonis with a festival called the Adonia. Women put into broken pots shallow earth seeded with fennel and lettuce seeds. These broken pots were known as “Gardens of Adonis.” They carried the Gardens of Adonis to rooftops. There the seeds sprouted and quickly withered. Gardens of Adonis, like a hateful Garden of Priapus, represent barrenness.[17] The Adonia commemorates that under hostile conditions, men’s seminal blessing withers and becomes merely inert yellow sand stained with blood.
Stay, Adonis,
stay, ill-fated Adonis, so that I may possess you one last time,
so that I may embrace you and mingle with you, lips with lips.
Rouse yourself a little, Adonis, to kiss me for a final time.
Kiss me as long as your kiss lives on,
until you breathe your last into my mouth, until your spirit flows into my heart,
and I drain your sweet love.{ μεῖνον Ἄδωνι,
δύσποτμε μεῖνον Ἄδωνι, πανύστατον ὥς σε κιχείω,
ὥς σε περιπτύξω καὶ χείλεα χείλεσι μίξω.
ἔγρεο τυτθόν, Ἄδωνι, τὸ δ’ αὖ πύματόν με φίλησον,
τοσσοῦτόν με φίλησον ὅσον ζώει τὸ φίλημα,
ἄχρις ἀποψύχῃς ἐς ἐμὸν στόμα, κεἰς ἐμὸν ἧπαρ
πνεῦμα τεὸν ῥεύσῃ, τὸ δέ σευ γλυκὺ φίλτρον ἀμέλξω,
ἐκ δὲ πίω τὸν ἔρωτα· }[18]
Alas for Adonis!
{ ὦ τὸν Ἄδωνιν }[19]
If you are unwilling to help men in order to progress toward gender equality, at least help men to promote the welfare of your daughters and sons, or the daughters and sons of family and friends.
* * * * *
Read more:
- ostentatio genitalium saves world from pathological gynocentrism
- Greek women warriors danced Pyrrhic victory for gender equality
- Hermes and Priapus against oppression: farting isn’t enough
Notes:
[1] Solon was reportedly the chief magistrate (archon) of Athens early in the sixth century BGC. The earliest visual and physical evidence of herms in the ancient Greek world dates to late in the sixth century (about 520-500 BGC). Osborne (1985) p. 48. Hipparchus {Ἵππαρχος}, son of Pisistratus, ruled Athens from 527 to 514 BGC. He reportedly erected herms in Athens. Platonic dialogue Hipparchus 228d–229a and Fragments of Old Comedy, Comic Adespota 238 from Story (2011) pp. 372-3. On the origin of herms more generally, Osborne (1985) pp. 47-57, Furley (1996) pp. 13-28.
Herms stood in places of ordinary life: before entrances to house, along public walkways (stoai) and near marketplaces and gymnasia (physical training facilities). Menander’s The Lyre Player / Kitharistes {Κιθαριστησ} refers to a “large group of statues of Hermes {herms} at the north-western entrance to the Athenian agora.” Arnott (1997) p. 127, n. 5 to Kitharistes fragment, v. 65. In addition:
In the gymnasium not far from the Athenian market-place, called Ptolemy’s from the founder, are stone herms well worth seeing.
{ ἐν δὲ τῷ γυμνασίῳ τῆς ἀγορᾶς ἀπέχοντι οὐ πολύ, Πτολεμαίου δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ κατασκευασαμένου καλουμένῳ, λίθοι τέ εἰσιν Ἑρμαῖ θέας ἄξιοι }
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.17.2 (Attica), ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Jones (1918). For more on the democratic associations of herms in ancient Athens, Quinn (2007) pp. 91-3.
Enthralled with a hateful phallus ideology, scholars have failed to recognize that herms challenge elite gynocentrism. A perceptive scholar understood that herms challenge elite cultural values in a way relevant to men’s distinctive sexual being:
the herm’s phallus makes an issue of the ‘undersized penis’ of the kouros, which Stewart suggested was originally intended to deflect attention ‘from this unheroic, unsightly and embarrassingly uncontrollable organ’ rather than attract it. The herm’s phallus can be seen as a direct challenge to the moderation and sexual regulation valued by the Attic aristocratic mentality, symbolized in the fetishization of small penises, and in particular the dainty genitals of the kouros.
Quinn (2007) p. 103. The kouros is an ancient, trans-Mediterranean sculpture of a highly stylized nude young aristocratic man. The ancient, trans-Mediterranean sculpture of a highly stylized young aristocratic woman (kore) complemented the kouros in representing elite values. Against the elite reign of the kore, herms affirmed ordinary men’s bodily value in ordinary household life.
[2] Thucydides was born in Athens about 460 BGC, his familial birthplace. He lived through the devastating plague in Athens in 430 BGC. He then risked his life as a general leading an Athenian military expedition to Thasos. Nonetheless, Thucydides was exiled from Athens in 424 BGC for failing to prevent the Spartans from taking the city Amphipolis on the Thracian coast. Thucydides thus wasn’t living in Athens when the herms were mutilated in 415 BGC. However, he surely had enough contracts in Athens to have been informed how exactly the herms were mutilated.
Thucydides doesn’t treat men as a distinctive gender. Within the constraints of dominant anti-meninist discourse, scholars are scarcely capable of analyzing Thucydides’s treatment of men and the gender injustice of excluding women from war. See, e.g., O’Sullivan (2024) and Shannon-Henderson (2019).
[3] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.27, ancient Greek text from Smith (1921), my English translation, benefiting from that of id., which translates πρόσωπα as “faces.” Subsequent quotes from Thucydides are similarly sourced.
Most scholarly works, including Smith (1921), translate πρόσωπα as “faces” in Thucydides’s account of the mutilation of the herms. Furley stated:
Thucydides tells us specifically that it was the faces of the Herms which suffered, but countless modern writers have speculated on the basis of a passage in Aristophanes that the phallos of the Herms also, or perhaps primarily, received the attention of the vandals. … I do not believe Thucydides can have meant by the πρόσωπα of the Herms their facade, including the phallos. I note, however, that Seneca once uses ‘facies’ (Phaedra 1047) to mean exactly ‘body’, ‘figure’, not ‘face’.
Furley (1996) p. 28, including ft. 66. In a passage describing the mutilation of the herms in Plutarch, Lives, Alcibiades 18, Perrin (1916) translated πρόσωπα as “faces and forms.” Moreover, Thucydides in describing the Athenians in battle used πρόσωπα to mean the battle-front. History of the Peloponnesian War 1.106. In describing the mutilation of the herms, Thucydides might have used πρόσωπα to mean fronts / facades. I have given the “father of objective history” Thucydides the benefit of the doubt in the translation above. If Thucydides referred only to the mutilation of the herms’ faces, that limitation provides further evidence of reluctance to mention sexual violence against men.
Quinn suggested that only the herms’ faces were mutilated. Crediting the leading historian of Greek sculpture Andrew Stewart, Quinn observed:
although the vases seem to show herms with ‘freestanding’ erections, suggesting that they were attachments, it may be that all or most archaic and classical herms had phalluses carved in relief like the Siphnos herm (Figure 1), which would be very difficult to chop or knock off entirely unless the marble was originally cut along the bedding. (To carve a ‘freestanding’ phallus from the same block of stone would of course be very wasteful, and this kind of virtuosity is customarily reserved for large scale civic statements, such as the Nike of Paionios.)
Quinn (2007) p. 90, n. 21. A penis carved in relief could nonetheless still be mutilated with a stone or a hammer. Mutilating a penis doesn’t imply knocking it off entirely.
In her hatefully anti-meninist work, Keuls highlighted the “castration” of the herms and denied that their faces were mutilated. Celebrating what she interpreted to be Athenian women’s deed, Keuls in the first paragraph of the first chapter of her book dramatically declared: “When Athens awakened, almost all of these phallic sculptures had been castrated.” Keuls (1985) p. 16. Interpreting Thucydides’s description of the mutilation of the herms, Keuls declared:
The Greek word used by the author for “front” is prosopon — literally, “that which meets the eye” — a word which can mean facade, mask, character, but also “face.” Despite his delicate {sic} phrasing, face is surely not what Thucydides had in mind.
Keuls (1985) p. 387. Cf. Furley (1996) p. 28, and Quinn (2007) p. 90, n. 21. Being sure of what Thucydides had in mind and trivializing his peculiar phrasing as “delicate” signals Keuls’s tendentious ideological commandeering of ancient evidence.
Both the faces and penises of the herms probably were mutilated. Thucydides’s account, along with other evidence, indicates that the herms’ faces were mutilated. Furley (1996) p. 28. Evidence from Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and Plutarch’s life of Nicias, presented subsequently above, strongly suggest that the herms’ penises were also mutilated. Reviewing passages from comic texts concerning the “impieties of 415,” Furley declared, “the truth in the historical case must be that faces as well as phalloi of the Herms were damaged.” Furley (1996) p. 145 (Appendix 2).
As Furley (1996) demonstrates, classicists themselves are reluctant to refer to men’s penises. See similarly in the context of the mutilation of the herms, Osborne (1985), Furley (1996), Henderson (2000) (note on Lysistrata vv. 1093-4), and Quinn (2007). Phallus / phallos (plurals phalli and phalloi) are ideological terms distant from the physical reality of men’s penises. Not surprisingly, “phallus” has been used in gross misinterpretations of men’s gender position in ancient Greece. Keuls (1985). A mere student writing a course paper at the University of Amsterdam deserved a high mark for referring to “the herm’s penis.” Theun (2015) p. 10.
The mutilation of the herms was regarded as a serious matter. The mutilation occurred just before a large Athenian armada was to sail to fight in Sicily (the Sicilian Expedition). Athenian officials offered a large reward for information about the perpetrators. They heard testimony from a variety of informants.
The Athenian statesman and general Alcibiades was implicated in the matter. According to Thucydides, men jealous of Alcibiades linked the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries with the mutilation of the herms. These men claimed that Alcibiades was involved in both outrages:
They exaggerated and shouted that both the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries and the mutilation of the herms had been done with the intention of overthrowing the democracy, and that none of these acts had been committed without his involvement.
{ ἐμεγάλυνον καὶ ἐβόων ὡς ἐπὶ δήμου καταλύσει τά τε μυστικὰ καὶ ἡ τῶν Ἑρμῶν περικοπὴ γένοιτο καὶ οὐδὲν εἴη αὐτῶν ὅ τι οὐ μετ᾿ ἐκείνου ἐπράχθη }
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.27. These accusations were treated seriously enough that Alcibiades was called back from the Sicilian Expedition.
Tertullian shows that the Eleusinian mysteries possibly were substantially connected to herms. The Eleusinian mysteries are commonly thought to involve enacting the story of Hades seeking a wife, the young woman Persephone, and her mother Demeter. However, the Christian scholar Tertullian, writing about 200 GC to disparage the gnostic heretics (the Valentinians) for being secretive about their beliefs, likened them to earlier Athenian priests of the Eleusinian mysteries. He then presented a sensational view of the Eleusinian mysteries:
It is just the same way concerning the Eleusinian mysteries, itself a heresy of Athenian superstition. It is a disgrace that they keep silent about them. In this way they torture for a long time those they initiate before they accept them. They train initiates for five years in order to build up belief by suspense and so cause what is seen exhibited to have awe so great as to match the desire that has been elicited. Thus follows their duty of secrecy. They guard closely what they are finally to reveal. Then the entire godhead of the sanctuary, the entire object of devoted sighs, the entire secret signed on all tongues is revealed to be a representation of a penis.
{ nam et illa Eleusinia, haeresis et ipsa Atticae superstitionis, quod tacent, pudor est. idcirco et aditum prius cruciant diutius initiant quam consignant, cum epoptas ante quinquennium instituunt ut opinionem suspendio cognitionis aedificent atque ita tantam maiestatem exhibere videantur quantam praestruxerunt cupiditatem. sequitur silentii officium; attente custoditur quod tarde invenitur, ceterum tota in adytis divinitas, tota suspira epoptarum, totum signaculum linguae: simulacrum membri virilis revelatur. }
Tertullian, Against the Valentinians {Adversus Valentinianos} 1.2-3, Latin text from Riley (1971), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Tertullian perhaps was projecting backwards what he knew about the Vestalia and the “innermost sanctuary of Vesta {penus Vestae}.” That is more widely regarded as including representations of penises. Another source indicates that the interpreter (hierophant) of the Eleusinian mysteries was a castrated man. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies 5.3
The mutilation of the herms was plausibly intended to weaken or abort the Athenians’ immediately impending Sicilian Expedition. That expedition nonetheless went forth. It was a colossal disaster for Athens. On the context and response to the mutilation of the herms, Osborne (1985), Furley (1996), Quinn (2007), and Hamel (2012).
The mutilation of the herms was effectively resolved politically by harshly punishing men despite questionable evidence. Given surviving sources, the most plausible perpetrators were participants in an oligarchic hetairia, an elite men’s social-political club. Cf. Keuls (1985) pp. 387-95 (crediting women for the “castration”). Thucydides commented:
No one was able to say with certainty, neither then nor later, about who did the deed.
{ τὸ δὲ σαφὲς οὐδεὶς οὔτε τότε οὔτε ὕστερον ἔχει εἰπεῖν περὶ τῶν δρασάντων τὸ ἔργον. }
History of the Peloponnesian War 6.60. Nonetheless, about twenty-three men were killed or sent into exile for being implicated in mutilating the herms. Another twenty-six men were convicted of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries and suffered heavy fines. Kousser (2015) p. 79.
[4] E.g. Andocides, On the Mysteries {Περι Των Μυστηριων} 39-40; Plutarch, Lives, Alcibiades 18. Writing in Latin in the first century BGC, Cornelius Nepos in his work About Eminent Men {De viris illustribus}, About Great Generals of Foreign Nations {De Excellentibus Ducibus Exterarum Gentium}, Alcibiades 3, used the verb “to be cut down {accido}.”
[5] Aristophanes, Lysistrata vv. 1093-4, ancient Greek text from Henderson (2012), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Here’s the English translation of Jack Lindsay (1926) and the English translation of an unknown translator. Lindsay’s translation for Lysistrata v. 1094 merely warns, “Who knows what kind of person may perceive you?”
Henderson’s note to Lysistrata vv. 1093-4 states, “In 415, just before the departure of the Sicilian expedition, the faces and phalli of the pillar-images of Hermes, which stood in the streets throughout Athens, were mutilated.” That’s the consensus scholarly view of what parts of the herms were mutilated.
For the compound word “Ἑρμοκοπίδης {herm-cutter},” Henderson’s translation is “Herm-Docker clan.” Given the ancient association of docks / ports with women’s genitals, Henderson suggests that women would mutilate the men’s erect penises. That’s a plausible inference in the context of Lysistrata, but not with respect to the mutilation of herms in Athens in 415 BGC. No historical evidence indicates that a women’s political protest of sexual refusal occurred in 415 BGC..
In discussing the mutilation of herms in Athens in 415 BGC, Plutarch uses the term “Ἑρμοκοπίδης {herm-cutter}.” Plutarch, Lives, Alcibiades 20.5, 21.5. Plutarch probably took that word from Lysistrata v. 1094. Plutarch’s diction attests to the relevance of Lysistrata v. 1094 and men’s penises to the mutilation of the herms.
Men suffer emotionally and physically from sex deprivation. A thoroughly gynocentric treatment of medical allusions in Lysistrata commented:
in Lysistrata, the men are ashamed of their erect phalluses and try to hide them under their clothes or explain them away (985-94, 1082-5). The symbol of male pride in its full vigour must now be covered because it is a κακόν, a terrible disease which tortures men.
Tsoumpras (2020) p. 14. Men’s sexuality isn’t a terrible disease. In a well-ordered society, women and men cherish men’s sexuality as a blessing.
Lysistrata underscores the importance of a gender-inclusive perspective on sexual assault. Lysistrata advises the beautiful young woman Reconcilation {Διαλλαγή} to assault sexually Spartan men if they don’t subordinate themselves to her desire:
If he doesn’t give his hand, take him by his cock.
{ ἢν μὴ διδῷ τὴν χεῖρα, τῆς σάθης ἄγε. }
Lysistrata v. 1119. Lysistrata suggests that wives normally engage in such sexually abusive behavior toward their husbands. Following modern decorum with respect to sexual assault, McClure characterized uncritically Lysistrata’s injunction to Reconciliation:
The injunction that she should lay hold of any unwilling man «by the prick» corroborates her status as a prostitute, since it is a gesture frequently associated with whores (ἢν μὴ διδῷ τὴν χεῖρα, τῆς σάθης ἄγε, 1119).
McClure (2015) p. 78, which includes an associated footnote providing references for her claim. Classics urgently needs to embrace meninist literature criticism to serve adequately gender equality and social justice.
An undergraduate honors thesis reproduces well the current state of classical scholarship. This thesis optimistically concludes:
it is impossible to say definitively that Aristophanes was a feminist, but it is not so difficult to see the makings of one.
This honors thesis further opines that women “could be exactly the cure for the ailing democracy and failing empire.” Fulton (2011) pp. 51, 53. Those not well-educated within today’s institutions surely understand that women are complicit in violence against men and that women are intimately associated with civic failings.
[6] With characteristic hateful anti-men bigotry, Keuls asserted that women mutilated the herms in Athens in 415 BGC:
I can see no other explanation for Aristophanes’ sudden preoccupation with female protest than that he, and at least part of the audience, knew or suspected that the castration of the herms had been perpetrated by women, a suspicion which by now could not possibly find overt expression. The mutilation was an act of impotent rage, and the women, their sense of independence fanned by the counter-cultural ritual of the Adonia, might well have rebelled at the prospect of renewed war and the inevitable slaughter being planned by their men.
Keuls (1985) p. 395. Keuls apparently was incapable of thinking that Aristophanes thought that Athenian women would protest because they loved Athenian men and despaired that so many Athenian men were dying in the gender-structured violence against men of the Peloponnesian War. Women historically have been horrified at men’s deaths in war.
The most credible evidence indicates that Athenian women celebrated the Adonia months before the night that the herms were mutilated in Athens. The Athenians’ armada departed for the Sicily in mid-summer 415 BGC. The herms were mutilated shortly before that departure. The date for the celebration of the Adonia in Athens is a matter of conflicting evidence and scholarly claims. The most contemporary evidence is Aristophanes’s Lysistrata vv. 387-98. These verses indicate that the Adonia was celebrated in the spring.
A scoliast’s note to Lysistrata stated that this comedy was also titled Adoniazousai {Αδωνιαζοσαι}. Reitzammer, (2008). The later title probably associated Athenian women’s protest against Adonis’s death with Athenian women’s protest against men’s deaths in the Peloponnesian War (Lysistrata vv. 387-98). That association supports dating the Adonia in Athens in 415 BGC to the spring, at least two months before the Sicilian Expedition departed. Cf. Plutarch, Lives, Alcibiades 18 and Nicias 13. For a careful analysis of the evidence concerning the date of the Athenian Adonia, Dillon (2003).
Keuls (1985) is misleading about the date of the Adonia in relation to the mutilation of the herms. Suggesting that Athenian women mutilated the herms, Keuls declared:
it should be remembered that the Adonia was being celebrated about this time {when the herms were mutilated}, which gave the women temporary freedom of movement.
Keuls (1985) p. 391. Keuls also declared:
In fact, Lysistrata provides the most contemporary evidence for the approximate coincidence of the Adonia with these other events {including the mutilation of the herms}.
Id. p. 394. Similarly, id. pp. 383 (“the coincidence with the Adonia”), 395 (“The mutilation of the herms was an act of impotent rage … fanned by the counter-cultural ritual of the Adonia”). In fact, Lysistrata indicates that the Adonia occurred months before the mutilation of the herms. Keuls apparently knew this:
Beginning with Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, literary sources establish that at least some of the deliberations over and preparations for the Sicilian expedition, possibly even the sailing itself, took place while the women of Athens celebrated the Adonia festival.
Id. p. 23. Deliberations and preparations for the Sicilian expedition took place from early spring to mid-summer in 415 BGC. Dillion (2003) pp. 6-12. The Adonia occurred during this period. However, the historical evidence indicates that the Adonia probably occurred months before the herms were mutilated. Id.
No evidence indicates that Athenian women mutilated the herms. Lysistrata v. 1094 expresses fear that herm-mutilators would engage in sexual violence against a man with an erection. Within Lysistrata, that reference to herm-mutilators plausibly refers to Athenian women. But as an allusion to historical events, it plausibly alludes to men mutilating herms in 415. Lysistrata itself shows that Aristophanes could imagine women crossing gender categories. Lysistrata thus does not provide clear evidence that women mutilated the herms in 415.
Keuls interpreted absence of evidence that women mutilated the herms as evidence that women committed that crime. The conspiracy of silence unraveled, but it actually didn’t, at least until Keuls revealed it:
It is, of course, improbable, if my speculation is correct, that in time the truth would not have leaked out. The hypothesis that the women were responsible provides the most likely explanation for the fact that this historical mystery remained unsolved: the truth was too shocking to acknowledge. By the time suspicions about the identity of the culprits began to filter through, so many heads had rolled that it would have been impossible to point the finger at that theoretically nonexistent class, the citizen women.
Keuls (1985) p. 393. According to this “analysis,” apparently Aristophanes and others knew that women mutilated the herms, but were unable to say so, because they theoretically believed women didn’t exist and they sought to maintain a conspiracy of silence responsible for killing men. That’s extremely bad reason in a highly acclaimed book. A scholar declared about Keuls’s “theory” that women mutilated the herms:
there is no support for it whatever in our sources. Indeed, Keuls has to ignore much of the evidence we do have in order to make her case. … That Keuls … urges a theory that has no support in our source without making the weakness of that theory clear is unfair in a book aimed at general readers, as most will not be in a position to assess the validity of her assertions for themselves.
Hamel (2012) pp. 301. Within today’s intellectual circumstances, persons are reluctant to criticize Keuls’s hateful anti-men bigotry, and they are willing to accept her unsupported “speculation” as compelling argument. For an example of reluctance to criticize Keuls, Reitzammer (2016) p. 21 and p. 157, n. 67; id. p. 84 and p. 194 n. 108. A master’s thesis learnedly declares, “Keuls makes a compelling argument for the women of Athens being the perpetrators.” Pettit (2014) p. 25.
Relatively well-documented judicial proceedings and actions in Athens concerning the mutilation of the herms indicates that many men were accused and convicted of mutilating the herms based on contemporary evidence. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.60, Hamel (2012) chapters 7-12. On the charge of mutilating the herms, about twenty-five men were either executed or fled fearing severe punishment.
Throughout history, penal systems have predominately punished persons with penises. That’s a grave gender injustice that’s almost never discussed. To recognize lives of Athenian men who suffered severely under the charge of having mutilated the herms in Athens in 415, names of such men are listed here:
Euctemon, Glaucippus, Eurymachus, Polyeuctus, Plato, Antidorus, Charippus, Theodorus, Alcisthenes, Menestratus, Eryximachus, Euphiletus, Eurydamas, Pherecles, Meletus, Timanthes, Archidamus, Telenicus, Panaetius, Diacritus, Lysistratus, Chaeredemus, Diocleides, Teucrus / Teucer, Andocides, Alcibiades
Andocides, On the Mysteries {Περι Των Μυστηριων} 34-5, 52-3, 66-8; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.27; Kousser (2015) p. 79, Hamel (2012). Cf. Keuls (1985) p. 388, Pettit (2014) p. 25. Men’s lives should matter!
[7] Plutarch, Lives, Nicias {Νικίας} 13, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Perrin (1916). Following in the tradition of Thucydides, Perrin’s translation elided where on his body the man mutilated himself. Here’s Perrin’s translation of the final sentence in the quote above:
An unknown man leaped upon it all of a sudden, bestrode it, and then mutilated himself with a stone.
The ancient Greek text clearly specifies that the man mutilated his “genitals {αἰδοῖον}.” Castration for too long has been ignored, trivialized, or treated as a joking matter.
[8] Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.173-85, Latin text of Magnus (1892) via Perseus, my English translation, benefiting from those of Lombardo (2010) and Miller (1916). The English translations of Brookes More (1922) and A. S. Kline (2000) are freely available online. According to Ovid, Venus / Aphrodite ardently loved Adonis after her son Cupid accidentally grazed her breast with one of his love-inducing arrows.
“Spring water {lympha}” is closely associated linguistically with “young woman {nympha}.” Actaeon was on Mt. Cithaeron in Boeotia when he saw Artemis in her bath.
The Roman goddess Diana is largely equivalent to the Greek goddess Artemis. In a ranking of divinities by the number of shrines and temples dedicated to that divinity in the ancient Greek world, Artemis is second only to Apollo. Hussey (1890) p. 60. The emphasis on the maternal line of descent for both Actaeon and Diana underscores the relevance of this story to gynocentrism and men’s gender subordination to goddesses.
Ovid significantly interpolated his story of Venus’s love for Adonis with his story of Hippomenes winning the right to marry the eagerly willing, beautiful Atalanta. When Atalanta and Hippomenes were passing a temple of the Great Mother goddess Cybele, Venus inspired Hippomenes with desire to have sex with the warmly receptive Atalanta in a nearby cave. For doing so, Venus transformed the couple into lions serving Cybele along with Galli priests. Ovid’s interpolation thus further emphasizes castration culture.
The subsequent two quotes above are similarly from Ovid’s account of Actaeon and Diana: Metamorphoses 3.186-99 (Amid the surrounding turmoil…) and 3.232-9, 249-52 (First Blackhair makes a wound…).
[9] Even the brutal killing of Actaeon that the goddess Diana / Artemis instigated isn’t uniformly condemned. Ovid commented:
Common talk is undecided. To some, more vindictive than just
was the goddess for being seen. Others praise her and call her act worthy
of her severe virginity. Both parts find reasons.{ Rumor in ambiguo est; aliis violentior aequo
visa dea est, alii laudant dignamque severa
virginitate vocant: pars invenit utraque causas. }
Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.253-5, sourced as previously. Ovid, Sorrows {Tristia} 2.103-6. suggests Ovid personally had sympathy for Actaeon.
Ovid and Callimachus provide the only two surviving versions of the myth of Actaeon and Diana / Artemis in which Actaeon dies without having done any wrong: “the wider Graeco-Roman literary tradition paints Actaeon as either an intentional voyeur, a victim of lust, or a hubristic hunter in the mould of Orion.” Hawes (2008) p. 25. On variants of the myth of Actaeon and Diana / Artemis, id. and Lacy (1990).
[10] Callimachus, Hymn 5, On the Bath of Pallas / In lavacrum Palladis {Εισ Λουτρα Τησ Παλλαδοσ} vv. 77-84, ancient Greek text from Clayman (2022b), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Nicetich (2001). The subsequent quote above is similarly from Callimachus, Hymn 5.85-9 (What have you done…).
The story of Actaeon and Artemis and the story of Tiresias and Athena are part of a larger collection of myths describing a hunter hunted by a goddess. On that myth group, Fontenrose (1981).
[11] Professor Eva C. Keuls’s highly acclaimed book The Reign of the Phallus exemplifies the problem. Keuls’s book begins:
In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society.
Keuls (1985) p. 1. These categorical, disparaging statements about men are misleading or false. These statements would cause Keuls to be called a misandrist, if such name-calling occurred as does calling someone a misogynist. According to Keuls:
Plato’s own pupil Aristotle was one of the fiercest misogynists of all time, obsessed with the need to prove that women play no genetic part in reproduction.
Id. p. 405. That statement ridiculously mischaracterizes Aristotle. It suggests Keuls’s own narrow-minded obsession. Aristotle himself produced many, wide-ranging, highly regarded studies:
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even today continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description.
Text from the beginning of the Aristotle entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Regarding classical Athens, Keuls depicts an elite fantasy that has little relation to ordinary Athenian life. Most Athenians normally lived in the Athenian hinterlands. Most were probably too poor to have more than one-room lodgings. Their wives and daughter surely worked among other men in tending animals, gathering food and textile materials, washing clothes, buying and selling goods, and carrying water. For Athenian conditions during the Peloponnesian War (a time of particular focus for Keuls), Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.16-7 and 2.52.
Keuls’s fantasy world depicts Athenian men as beasts oppressing women through “phallocracy.” Keuls makes clear the hateful, anti-men bigotry by which she defines phallocracy:
as used in this book, the concept denotes a successful claim by a male elite to general power, buttressed by a display of the phallus less as an organ of union or of mutual pleasure than as a kind of weapon: a spear or war club, and a scepter of sovereignty. In sexual terms, phallocracy takes such forms as rape, disregard of the sexual satisfaction of women, access to the bodies of prostitutes who are literally enslaved or allowed no other means of support.
Id. p. 2. Keuls describes as a “special favorite” among phallic visual motifs “spearing, slashing, and clubbing to death of defenseless animals.” Id. p. 407. On Keuls’s faulty reading of images, Shapiro (1986). The penis has suffered historically from a deeply entrenched image problem. Keuls built The Reign of the Phallus on formal sexual bias against men.
The hateful, anti-men bigotry of Keuls’s The Reign of the Phallus has been celebrated among intellectual elites. Keuls did research for her book at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). That’s an elite institution in which Albert Einstein was one of the first professors. The University of California Press published The Reign of the Phallus in 1985. National Book Critics Circle selected it as a finalist for 1985 in its General Nonfiction category. As a Professor at the University of Minnesota, Keuls was selected as a Scholar of the College in 1989. The University of California Press reprinted in 1993 a largely unchanged second edition of The Reign of the Phallus. Keuls was subsequently honored with a place on the University of Minnesota’s Scholars Walk monument. Perhaps lacking his rhetorical subtlety in studying medieval gender, Keuls with her phallic work didn’t rise to the eminence of Georges Duby in French intellectual life. Nonetheless, the influence of the hateful anti-men bigotry of The Reign of the Phallus is still apparent in students’ education. See, e.g. Pettit (2014).
[12] Songs of Priapus {Carmina Priapea} 33, Latin text from Porter (2021a), my English translation, benefiting from Gua, Hayes & Nimis (2017) and Porter (2021b). Here are English translations by Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton.
Men’s sexual despair can progress beyond masturbation. Callimachus has a man declare:
For me this would have been best:
to toss my hair for Cybele
to the Phrygian flute.{ ν μοι τοῦτ᾽ ἂν ἦν ὀνήϊσ[το]ν
.]υ[.].[.]Κ[υβή]βηι τὴν κόμην ἀναρρίπτειν
Φρύγ[α] πρ[ὸς] αὐλὸν }
Callimachus, Iambus 3.34-6, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Clayman (2022a). Men castrated themselves to become Galli eunuch priests serving the Phrygian goddess Cybele.
[13] Cf. Foster (2024), Mares (2020).
[14] Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.710-6, Latin text of Magnus (1892) via Perseus, my English translation, benefiting from those of Lombardo (2010) and Miller (1916).
[15] Bion of Smyrna, Lament for Adonis {Επιταφιοσ Αδωνιδοσ} vv. 7-12, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Hopkinson (2015). Here’s an English translation of the Lament for Adonis by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1851) and by J. M. Edmonds (1912).
Bion’s Lament for Adonis draws upon Theocritus, Idyll 15, That idyll describes a festival of Adonis at the palace of Ptolemy II, the pharaoh in Egypt from 284 to 246 BGC.
[16] Sappho, Fragment 140 / 140A, ancient Greek text from Campbell (1982) via Digital Sappho, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. On translating Sappho. Here’s the translation of Edwin Marion Cox (1924).
[17] The Gardens of Adonis were part of a widely practiced women’s festival of Adonis, the “Adonia {Ἀδώνια}.” On Gardens of Adonis in ancient Athens, Reitzammer (2016).
The Gardens of Adonis birthed an ancient proverb: “More barren than Gardens of Adonis {᾿Ακαρπότερος εἶ ᾿Αδώνιδος κήπων}.” Text as recorded in the second century GC by the Greek sophist Zenobius. Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum 1.49 / Leutsch & Schneidewin (1839) p. 19. For related references concerning the barrenness of Gardens of Adonis, Plato, Phaedrus 276B and Plutarch, Plutarch, Moralia, On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance / De sera numinis vindicta {Περι Των Υπο Του Θειου Βραδεωσ Τιμωρουμενων} 560B-C (section 17). For further ancient citations concerning this proverb, Reed (1995) p. 324, n. 30.
On the garden of Priapus, Richlin (1982). On Richlin’s approach to Priapea, see notes [4] and [6] in my post on Priapea.
[18] Bion of Smyrna, Lament for Adonis vv. 42-9, sourced as previously.
[19] Sappho, Fragment 168, sourced as previously.
[images] (1) Peplos Kore restored as goddess Artemis. Restoration based on the study of Vinzenz Brinkmann and painted by Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. This restored replica is preserved in the Glyptothek (Munich, Germany). Source image (alternate version) thanks to Marsyas and Wikimedia Commons. The Peplos Kore, a Parian marble statue, originally was painted, but the painting has survived only in traces. It was made around 525 BGC. The Peplos Kore apparently stood originally on the Acropolis of Athens. Here’s the Peplos Kore in its surviving form. The restoration as Artemis isn’t securely know. Here’s an alternate restoration of the Peplos Kore as Athena. More information about the Peplos Kore.
(2) Ithyphallic herm painted on Athenian red-figure krater. Ithyphallic herm painted on Athenian red-figure column krater. Painted c. 480–470 BGC and attributed to the Geras Painter. Preserved as item 83.AE.255 in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Source image from item 7 in Tsiafakis (2019). Statues of herms were honored. See, for example, the two-handled red-figure jar (neck amphora) depicting a herm in front of an altar. It was made in Athens in 470–460 BGC and painted by the Nikon Painter. The herm has been honored with a wreath on its penis and flowers on its head and shoulder. It’s preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as accession # 68.163.
(3) Satyr with an axe attacking a herm’s face (hermocopide). Painting on red-figure pelike from Nola. Attributed to the Geras Painter, c. 470 BGC. Preserved as Lausanne, Musée cantonal d’archéologie et d’histoire, 3250. AVI 4123, Corpus Vasorum 352524. Image (color-adjusted) from Plate 2 of Murer (2023). Murer convincingly argues that this image belong to a group of images known as “mimetic satyr images”: “depictions of satyrs destroying tombs and herms may refer to actual events from the world of the polis.” Id., Summary.
(4) Herm of Demosthenes. Sculpture made about 1520 GC and preserved as item 292 in the Glyptothek, Munich, Germnay. Replica of a herm erected in the Athenian agora in honor of the statesman Demosthenes and made by Polyeuktos, c. 280 BGC. Source image thanks to Bibi Saint-Pol and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s an image of a copy of a herm sculpted by Alkamenes of Athens in the fifth-century BGC. It was dedicated by Pergamios in Pergamon, Bergama.
(5) Actaeon attacked by his hounds. Detail from a Lucanian red-figure nestoris, Metaponto, made c. 390-380 BGC and painted by the Dolon Painter. Preserved in the British Museum as GR 1865.1-13.17 (Cat. Vases F 176), Pourtalès Collection. Image thanks to Jastrow (2007) and Wikimedia Commons.
(6) The Death of Adonis (with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces). Painted by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614. Preserved in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem as accession # B00.0735. Via Wikimedia Commons.
(7) Bust of Phrasikleia kore with crown of lotus buds and holding a lotus bud. Parian marble statue made between 550 and 540 BGC by Aristion of Paros {Ἀριστίων Πάριος}. Preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Color reconstruction by Vinzenz Brinkmann, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, and Heinrich Piening in the Gods in Color exhibition. Source image via Wikimedia Commons.
References:
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