Fate then knocked or my door or rather pinged into my inbox, it was an email from my publisher – did I know of anyone who could write the Greek version of my book Sex & Sexuality in Ancient Rome? I didn’t, but I dutifully posted it on a couple of Facebook groups for historical fiction writers. Not a nibble. Which was when a small voice from deep within me piped up, ‘you could write it.’
My outer voice supposed I could, I had studied ancient Greece alongside ancient Rome so I had a reasonable understanding of ancient Greek society and history. It might actually be fun to revisit the ancient Greeks, to dig a little deeper than I had been able to do as an undergraduate back in the days of Britpop and Alcopops. Maybe I had been wrong to turn my back on them post university and concentrate only on Romans. Here was the chance to find out….
What I found out
Two years and 88k words later what I had found out is that, yeah sorry, I do prefer writing about Romans. Chiefly this is because I get Romans, I get how they think. Not that their culture is anything like ours; it’s not but I understand what underpins those differences. Ancient Greece on the other hand is a very strange place which still mystifies me even after having spent two years immersed in its people, its history and its culture.
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| Four men at a symposium. An 18th century copy of an original Greek vase design, Wellcome Collection. |
I suspect that this is because unlike ancient Rome ancient Greece isn’t one homogenous mass with a singular centre of power. Ancient Greece was made up of hundreds of city states who were governed in very different ways, ranging from totalitarian military states, absolute monarchies, oligarchies all the way down to the world’s first democracies. These city states had differing laws, variations on religious beliefs and vast differences in culture. This makes them very hard to pin down and make generalized sweeping statements about what the ancient Greeks thought or did, your average Athenian man in the 5th century BCE is going to be wildly different in his views from the average Spartan man living only 150 miles away. This causes many headaches should you have happened to volunteer yourself to write a general history book on a very general subject, sex and sexuality and what the entirely generalized ancient Greeks thought about it, Ooops.
I don’t mind admitting that Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Greece was a difficult and cumbersome write. All of which is fitting for a group of city states who between them gave us the twelve labours of Heracles, one of which involved decapitating the Hydra of Lerna. The Hydra not only had nine heads that needed detaching from her neck by Heracles but also, just to make things unnecessarily complicated, for every head slashed off by the hero, the Hydra would grow two new heads. It’s also a collection of cultures from which sprung Odysseus, a man who took ten years to travel from Troy to Ithaca despite it only being a week’s sailing maximum.
Ancient Greece and the ancient Greeks are unnecessarily complicated, tricky and take unexpected routes when you least expect it. That is their charm, their twinkle and if I should never write about them again let me leave you with something that took me completely by surprise about the ancient Greeks. Those clever men with beards who brought us democracy, philosophy, tremendous works of art and the backbone of medicine also handed to us a far greater gift, one that I believe has enriched our culture immeasurably: the knob gag.
Is that a javelin in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
As the person who invented the, then Twitter now X, hashtag #phallusThursday I am not new to images from antiquity of male genitalia. There are very few I haven’t seen, mainly because people still send them to me over social media with the accompanying comment. ‘I saw this and thought of you.’ I am the go-to classical penis woman, which I am fine with.
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| Phallus pillars in front of the Sanctuary of Dionysos, Delos shot by Anna Apostolidou. Wikicomms |
However, until I started writing my book I was unaware that the ancient Greeks not only perfected the art of depicting individual penises in very complicated group sex scenes on pots the size of gravy jugs but also the knob gag. As a child of the 70s/80s I grew up watching Carry On films and That’s Life, a magazine style TV show that devoted a whole segment each week to vegetables that had grown into amusingly rude shapes. I had a primordial soup of an upbringing that means I am pre-programmed to enjoy a good knob gag. Ancient Greek comedy is pleasingly bursting, or rather erupting with some tremendous knob gags.
The king of the Greek knob gag is undoubtedly the legend that is Aristophanes. Should anyone be of the misconception that Greek theatre was all heavy weight tales of incestuous marriages, patricide, suicide and gouging out your own eyes (and that’s all in just the one play) I would urge them to pick up a copy of any of Aristophanes’ plays and prepare to have your mind blown and your nipples shoot across the room.
The plot of any Aristophanes play lends itself to at least a dozen decent knob gags, in Lysistrata the women of Greece stage a sex strike to try and end the Peloponnesian War which is the set up for a series of gags revolving around that classic of the knob gag, the embarrassing erection.
‘[Enter the Spartan herald. He, too, has a giant erection, which he is trying to hide under his cloak.]
Spartan Herald: Where’s the Athenian Senate and the Prytanes? I come with fresh dispatches.
Cinesias [looking at the Herald’s erection Are you a man,or some phallic monster?
Spartan Herald: I’m a herald, by the twin gods. And my good man, I come from Sparta with a proposal, arrangements for a truce.
Cinesias: If that’s the case, why do you have a spear concealed in there?
Spartan Herald: I’m not concealing anything, by god.
Cinesias: Then why are you turning to one side? What’s that thing there, sticking from your cloak? Has your journey made your groin inflamed?
Spartan Herald: By old Castor, this man’s insane!
Cinesias: You rogue, you’ve got a hard on!
Spartan Herald; No I don’t, I tell you. Let’s have no more nonsense.
Cinesias: [pointing to the herald’s erection] Then what’s that?
Spartan Herald: It’s a Spartan herald’s stick.’
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| An assumingly shaped croissant |
The Assembly Women sees the women of Athens take over the running of the city (the satirical point being that women couldn’t make any more of a mess of it then the then Athenian council) and institute a law that ’decreed that if a man desires to fuck a young woman, he may do so only after he fucks an old one. Further, should this young man refuse to obey by this statute, the older woman shall be authorised to drag the aforesaid young man by his cock, without any legal ramifications to her person or property!” ‘
In Women at the Festival, Mnesilochus disguises himself as a woman to infiltrate a mass protest by the women of the city. The scene where Mnesilochus’ deceit is uncovered by the women particularly stands out.
‘Cleisthenes: Stand up straight. What do you keep pushing that thing down for?
First Woman: peering from behind
There's no mistaking it.
Cleisthenes: also peering from behind
Where has it gone to now?
First Woman: To the front.
Cleisthenes: from in front
No.
First Woman: from behind
Ah! it's behind now.
There are perhaps a few things I should mention about Greek comedy at this point, firstly the actors were all male thus all the female characters would have been performed by men. Secondly these male actors all wore costumes, comedy costumes. The images below depict comedic actors, note that thing hanging between their legs. No, your eyes are not deceiving you, it is a costume penis. Generally made from leather these were sewn onto leotard style outfits and they served as a useful prop. Read the scenes above but this time with the floppy, leather costume phallus in your head. You can picture the physical comedy of it better now, can’t you?
First Woman: peering from behind
There's no mistaking it.
Cleisthenes: also peering from behind
Where has it gone to now?
First Woman: To the front.
Cleisthenes: from in front
No.
First Woman: from behind
Ah! it's behind now.
There are perhaps a few things I should mention about Greek comedy at this point, firstly the actors were all male thus all the female characters would have been performed by men. Secondly these male actors all wore costumes, comedy costumes. The images below depict comedic actors, note that thing hanging between their legs. No, your eyes are not deceiving you, it is a costume penis. Generally made from leather these were sewn onto leotard style outfits and they served as a useful prop. Read the scenes above but this time with the floppy, leather costume phallus in your head. You can picture the physical comedy of it better now, can’t you?
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| Comic actors. Terracotta calyx-krater (mixing bowl) attributed to the Dolon Painter, Fletcher Fund 1924, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA |
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| Terracotta statuette of an actor, Rogers Fund 1913, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. |
The knob gag deserves to be included amongst all those great things ancient Greece bequeathed us. It is in the cradle of civilisation, snuggled somewhere between medicine and art, for without it our society would be very different. Would any of us want to live in a world where an amusingly phallic shaped vegetable or indeed croissant did not elicit a smile? Absolutely not.
L.J. Trafford writes books about Romans and now the Greeks! Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Greece will be published next year (probably). You can find details of her other books here
