Why Were Ancient Dicks So Small?

Have you ever been puzzled by proportions when looking at Ancient Greek statues? It can't just be us. From quarrying the stone to chipping away the final touches on your masterpiece - sculpting is a drawn out process. So why, after possibly years of work, did Ancient Greek artists make penises so small? Kate is joined by Professor Caroline Vout to find out what these sculptors meant by their statues' modest members, and what this tells us about the Ancient world. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Find the History Hit film 'Dicking About' here: https://access.historyhit.com/videos/dicking-about Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you! Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister! You've come back! Oh, I'm so pleased that you have! You came back despite being warned that the show is going to contain rude content, you absolute trooper! Well, I have to tell you again, I'm afraid, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults about adulty things and adulty ways of arranging your subjects, and you should be an adult too! But if it didn't stop you last time, it's not going to stop you this time! Right, on with the show!

• 1:07Kate Lister?

  Take him in, betwixters! There he stands, ten foot five, with rippling muscles, abundant curls, and, well, a bottom that you could bounce a penny off, quite frankly. This is quite clearly a statue of a man who has never missed leg day, or arm day, or back day, or toe day. Here he is, leaning on a club draped with the skin of a lion he's just killed. This is Hercules, the Greek demigod carved from marble and shown to be at the end of his 12 labors. But let's wander around to the front, shall we? His eyes are downcast, he looks exhausted, he has a magnificent beard, to be sure, and

• 1:48Kate Lister?

  if we thought he looked hench from the back, just look at those arms and those abs! And if we go down a little bit further, well, oh, oh, well, that's just rather disappointing, isn't it? All those rippling abs and pecs and glistening masculinity, and the artist has decided to go with a rather modest manhood. Hmm, what is going on here?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  What do you call him, Anne?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Oh, money, of course.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. He's a hero, he's a hero now!

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

• 2:44Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kay Lister. When you imagine a male nude statue from the ancient world, the odds are that we're all thinking of the Greeks, or people influenced by the Greeks, just it's mostly Greek themed. They have dominated the field with their bulging muscles and power stances. But while the ancient Greek influence extends far beyond these marble bodies, there is one thing that doesn't seem to extend very far at all. Aha, their members. Willys, dicks, pricks, weeners, todes, no matter what you call them, our society is obsessed with them. And for us, however unfair it may be, and it is unfair, we are convinced that bigger is better.

• 3:29Kate Lister?

  We talk about big dick energy and what that means, and all porn stars have penises that you could club something to death with. But that wasn't the case in the ancient world. So why were the penises on ancient statues so small? And when did the trend change? In this episode, I am rolling up my sleeves and I'm gonna find out with a fabulous Carrie Vought. Carrie is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, no less, and she joined me to discuss this very topic on the new History Hit documentary, Dicking About, which you can now watch on History Hit TV. But for now, pants down, measuring tapes out, let's get on with it.

• 4:14Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caroline Vought. How are you doing?

• 4:21Speaker 06

  I'm really well, thank you.

• 4:23Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you so much for coming back to talk to us and we've spoken off the podcast as well. We've spoken as part of the new History Hit documentary, Dicking About.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  We have. And huge fun, it was too.

• 4:39Kate Lister?

  It was so much fun. This is a question that I'm sure every classics professor has been asked, every art curator has been asked, every classicist museum curator has been asked, why are the penises on the statues so small? I'm sure you've been asked that before.

• 4:57Speaker 06

  I've been asked it a lot. It's the question I usually get asked when I go out to schools to give schools talks.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  The first hand will go up and you know what they're gonna ask. Yeah, I mean, you know, your guess is as good as mine, but my sense is that it's aesthetic, that by the time you get to the 5th century B.C., which is the sort of body types that we're talking about when we think about Greek sculpture. Why do we think about the ones conceived of in that period? Well, because they're the ones that are what we now call naturalistic.

• 5:27Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  You know, they look like they're trying to look like a real body.

• 5:32Kate Lister?

  I always think of them as naked. Were they naked more than usual people were naked? Is that just in my fervid imagination?

• 5:41Speaker 06

  They weren't naked walking around the streets doing their shop. You know, that wasn't what they were doing. But, you know, you think of them as not wearing any clothes because so many of their statues show them not wearing any clothes, or at least the male ones do, right? And that's something we can go on to talk about in a bit, I suppose. As for whether they had no clothes on in real life, sure, when they got in the shower, they had no clothes on. But the difference is that they did athletics without any clothes on.

• 6:06Kate Lister?

  That is an interesting twist, isn't it?

• 6:09Speaker 06

  It's an interesting twist. And, you know, why they did athletics without any clothes on, your guess is as good as mine. The ancient texts actually really sort of worry about it themselves, right? They knew that they didn't always perform athletics without clothes. If you read the Iliad, for example, there are athletic games associated with funerals. And it's, you know, they're not romping around naked. But by the time you get to, you know, the classical period, they are. All of these stories as to kind of why that might be the case, as they try and come to terms with their own cultural practice. And one of the best stories is That, you know, there's a runner running around and his loincloth falls off and he trips on it.

• 6:51Speaker 06

  And so it's a sort of health and safety issue that you have to remove your clothes. But I think it must be about, in some senses, not having anything to hide, making everybody equal in the eyes of spectators. But for whatever reason, it starts, it becomes very much defining of what it means to do Greek athletics. And what it means to be Greek as opposed to a non-Greek, a foreigner, a barbarian in the eyes of the Greeks. So it becomes a marker of civilisation.

• 7:20Kate Lister?

  I mean, we still have lots of debates that go on around what's appropriate to wear at the gym today. I see those all the time. And to think that the Greeks were just, no, we're just in the buff. I mean, there weren't mixed sex though, were they, their gyms?

• 7:32Speaker 06

  No, no. I mean, if you think about the Olympic Games, it's just male competitors.

• 7:36Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 7:36Speaker 06

  And they didn't have their bits flopping around. They used to tie them up.

• 7:41Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  What that looked like in practice, we're not really sure, but there are some representations of that on Greek vase painting, for example. And actually, there's a brilliant bronze sculpture of a boxer survives from Rome that shows his genitals sort of tucked in that kind of way.

• 7:59Kate Lister?

  So were the girls, when they were doing their, I don't even know if they did exercises, would they have been naked? Or was this very much all boys together, that it was men watching, it was men competing, this is a macho environment?

• 8:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, this is boys together. I mean, there, there is some evidence for female running races, for example.

• 8:18Kate Lister?

  You wouldn't want to run in the nip, would you? That would be awful.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  The women certainly, if they were doing exercises, were not doing that without any clothes on. No.

• 8:26Kate Lister?

  No, you need some kind of support. That would just be crazy. So the Greeks have got a culture of nudity and then there's nude bathing and they love a statue being nude as well. And it seems to me to be a very macho society. They really like looking at men naked. Maybe, maybe they don't, maybe I've, maybe that's unfair of me, but it seems like a very macho thing.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  They do. I mean, you know, if you think about early art that was made in the Aegean, for example, already in two thousand eight hundred B C through to two thousand B C, then you get figurines of men and women without any clothes on.

• 9:04Kate Lister?

  How very exciting.

• 9:05Speaker 06

  But by the time you get to, you know, seven hundred B C or just after six fifty, you're getting monumental sculptures, so sculptures that are life size or larger than life size. And those show usually the men without clothes. And usually the women with clothes, or the women always with clothes, the men usually without clothes. That's not to say that we don't have at that period figurines that show women without any clothes on. There's a little ivory, for example, that was found in a tomb in Athens that dates to end of the eighth century B C. But by the time you're getting into the seventh century, you've already got what looks like a kind of formula.

• 9:48Speaker 06

  Men appear in freestanding monumental marble form, showing off their prowess, their virtue by virtue of being without clothes. Whereas the women's goodness lies in their adornment, in their drapery, in the hours that they spent with the curling tongs doing their hair and putting on their jewellery.

• 10:11Kate Lister?

  And when they did start doing big old nude statues of women, it does sort of seem like the Greeks lost it, that they couldn't handle that very well. Or at least that's what was written down about the statue, was it Aphrodite of Knidos?

• 10:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so according to the mythology, I suppose, the first freestanding monumental female nude is this statue of Aphrodite that winds up in a sanctuary in Knidos, which is Asia Minor modern Turkey.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  And the stories about that statue make it clear that she was really shocking to everybody on the ground at that time, so shocking that one city says, look, we don't, we don't want this.

• 10:55Kate Lister?

  Oh, did they?

• 10:57Speaker 06

  And Knidos decide that to take the risk and they do, and they put her in their sanctuary and she becomes a Mediterranean-wide pin-up.

• 11:05Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  Now, of course, there've been representations of women without clothes on before this point. As I said, in miniature form, that's not at all uncommon. There are also, you know, representations of women without clothes on or goddesses without clothes on from beyond the Greek world. And even in monumental form in Greece, there's been a kind of game of concealment and revealment going on with the female body for a couple of centuries prior to the Aphrodite of Knidos being unveiled in around three fifty B.C. You know, some of the sexiest statues, I think, that survived from antiquity of the female form are images that date to the classical period, so the fifth century B.C.

• 11:50Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  And show sort of an Amazon with one breast bed, or they show children of Niobe, so mythological figures in distress, being shot with arrows by Apollo and Artemis because their mum's done something terrible, so they get the mum's been boastful, so they get it in the neck. And their distress is shown by the fact that their clothes are falling from their bodies. It's, it isn't just that all women are bundled up and then the female form is the Aphrodite of Knidos is suddenly without her clothes. There's been this sort of ongoing, sort of suggestive kind of thing going on.

• 12:27Kate Lister?

  One of my favourite stories about the Aphrodite of Knidos is that some bloke broke in to wherever she was being held and said that he left a stain upon her and then was discovered and threw himself off the cliffs for, for shame of it.

• 12:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:41Kate Lister?

  That's a hell of a story, sneaking it.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  It's a story that's reported in more than one ancient source. And, you know, kind of when you first think about that story, you think, hang on a minute. You know, this first ever monumental freestanding female nude is a representation of a god. So these stories seem a bit odd because so powerful is the male gaze that that statue attracts. That it becomes so penetrative that the guy in question actually kind of gets confused and thinks that what he's looking at is not a goddess but a girl and isn't stone but flesh and actually tries to make love to it.

• 13:21Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  And as you say, then has only one option left really, and that's to throw himself into the sea. And of course, Aphrodite is born from the sea. So, you know, maybe this is to die by suicide, but maybe it's actually the only way in which he can effectively commune with Aphrodite is by entering the waves. And I think, you know, to go back to that kind of the sense of what seems wrong with this story is that the the human male seems to have the power over this god. But ultimately, as you know, he does end up in the water and he ends up dead. And she is the goddess of sex. She's the goddess of love. She's the goddess of desire. She's got to make you want her.

• 14:00Kate Lister?

  She does. That's kind of her whole deal, I suppose, isn't it?

• 14:04Speaker 06

  You've got to feel either shame, embarrassment, or you've got to feel turned on, or she's not doing her job properly. And you're in a culture in which you know that if you just happen to come across a goddess without any clothes on because she's taking a bath with her nymphs or whatever, and she doesn't want to be seen, then God help you. You know, you get turned into a stag and ripped apart by your own hunting dogs if you're acting and then you've just seen Diana. So all the time that you're looking and lusting, you know that you're in really dubious water.

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  And that's why we can't have nice things. Let's talk about the male statues. I'm not aware of any stories of anybody becoming so overcome with lust that they try and make love to one of these male statues.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  Not make love to, but by the time you get into the Roman Empire, Roman emperors. Are really kind of interested in Greek material culture of the kind that has been flowing into Rome with those conquests for the last couple of centuries. And the Emperor Tiberius, who's the second of the Roman emperors, the one that succeeds Augustus. He becomes obsessed, according to the ancient literature, with an ancient Greek statue of an athlete.

• 15:15Kate Lister?

  Oh, really?

• 15:15Speaker 06

  That stood outside a bathhouse in Rome. And he becomes so obsessed with it, and the text says he falls in love with it, that he removes it, or has it removed, and taken to his bedroom.

• 15:28Kate Lister?

  Oh, I stand corrected.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  You're left to imagine what he does with this statue, or wants to do with this statue in his bedroom. But before he can do anything, presumably, there's a big public outcry, because funnily enough, they loved it too, and they want it back.

• 15:42Kate Lister?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:47Kate Lister?

  These people are so crazy. I love it. The nude statues. One of the things that I was really quite taken aback by when we were looking around the sculpture museum in Cambridge, is just how ripped those men are. I mean, we talk about body beautiful today, and they looked exactly like the ideal male body form that you get on the front of Men's Health magazines. They're every bit as jacked and pumped and ripped as some guy that's been on protein shakes and low carb for the last six months.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Some of them are, yeah. I mean, the statues that we were looking at, we were looking at a statue by an artist, Polyclitus. He made a bronze sculpture of a spear carrier, a man carrying a spear, in about four fifty B.C. It doesn't survive anymore, but we have Roman marble versions of it. We were looking at that. We were also looking at a statue of a very similar kind of date of a discus thrower. The original of which was again made in bronze by Myron. And they are exactly as you described, right? So they've got really beautiful, kind of stereotypically beautiful in our eyes, male bodies that look like they've been working out quite a lot.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  By the time you get to the Hellenistic period, so a couple of centuries later, the Farnesi Hercules is like them on steroids. You know, his muscles are just absolutely massive. So those kind of images do promote this sense of. Gym culture, really. But I was gonna say there are a variety of masculine bodies, even within monumental sculptural form. So not all of them look like that. Some of them are much slimmer,

• 17:27Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Don't look quite as kind of jacked. They give maybe a slightly sort of false impression in some senses.

• 17:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah. What do you think that the Greeks saw when they looked at that kind of body? Do you think it's very similar to what we see? Because I think that there's still this narrative around that kind of body we associate with control, with willpower, with discipline. I mean, we channel it all into health, but really that's what it is. It's about, look at me, look how many cakes I didn't eat and how many heavy things I picked up. That's really what that body's doing.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I mean, I think the Greeks would have understood it in terms of control. To be a Greek man in the fifth century B C, yeah, you were lucky enough to have been born a boy and not a girl, but you're not born a man and you have to work at it. And you have to work on it in such a way that publicly you are affirmed in your masculinity by what you do and critically by what you don't do.

• 18:30Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  And, you know, you need to be sufficiently in control of yourself to walk this fine line between being always performatively active and never passive. Because if you're passive, that renders you an object and makes you potentially feminine and more.

• 18:50Kate Lister?

  Shock horror.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, but not so overly active as to be hubristic. So as to kind of, you know, challenge the gods or anything like that. Or to be so overly active that you are out of control, so animalistic. And that's the fine line you walk. And, and the next question becomes how do you represent that?

• 19:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 06

  And they do it with the kind of bodies that we've just been talking about.

• 19:20Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Carrie after this short break.

• 19:28Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 20:11Kate Lister?

  So let's move on then to the million dollar question. The body beautiful is clearly very important to these people, men and women, but men in particular are portrayed in certain ways and it does seem to be about control and about beauty. And then we've got the willies, these beautiful like abs, six packs, eight packs rippling and, you know, flexing biceps and then these rather diminutive little packages that are there. So I suppose my first question is going to be, is it even true that they are smaller than average? Or is it just something that we are maybe used to seeing huge penises in pornography? Are they actually smaller than standard?

• 20:53Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, given that a statue like Polycletus is spear carrier, at least in the marble versions that survive, they're bigger than life size, right? So they're about two metres tall, something like the Pharnesie Hercules is three metres tall. So you need their genitals to be proportionately bigger in proportion. And actually they're not, right? They are small and they're neat, but then that neatness is what's kind of crucial. It goes back to what we were saying about control. You know, the last thing you would want your image to look like was turned on, right?

• 21:29Kate Lister?

  That's true, yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  It needs to look as though it's actually firmly in control of itself. And all of its bits. And it's also got to be beautiful to look at. It's got to work symmetrically to satisfy the gaze and what you need that image to do. And I think that's why these genitals are small. The kinds of images in that particular period that have large genitals tend to be associated with creatures like satyrs. And satyrs are only half men, they're otherwise half horse. And they sort of walk the boundary between civilized and completely uncivilized

• 22:11Speaker 06

  behaviour. They get to do things visually that mortals aren't normally depicted doing. And they have usually erect, large penises that wouldn't look out of place on a horse.

• 22:26Kate Lister?

  They could do big penises when they wanted to. And you see them cropping up, if excuse the expression, like all over the place. I know it's not the Greeks, but if you like the Romans, they loved a penis. They're all over Pompeii and they're massive, those ones.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  They are. They're all over Pompeii. Yeah, they're on. I mean, what's interesting about Pompeii is they're hanging outside from door frames. They're depicted outside of doors, almost kind of to mark the threshold, but also kind of ward off bad spirits. They're seen as lucky.

• 22:55Kate Lister?

  A lucky dick.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, you know, you get sex scenes on the walls of really quite beautifully decorated houses at Pompeii.

• 23:03Kate Lister?

  That's so different from our modern perspective, isn't it? It's the fact when you go into like, what is effectively a family home, and there's just this huge erotic fresco on the wall of where the family would have been sat. It's like watching Pornhub with your grandma. It's just so like, what were they seeing when they looked at it? They can't have been seeing what we're seeing.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  No, they certainly weren't. I mean, you know, I used to have a teacher here who said, even if he could take you back to Pompeii in a Tardis, when you got out, you wouldn't understand anything it was that you were looking at. Because your vision is so kind of culturally contingent. In terms of where those sorts of pictures were, you get kind of really quite beautifully erotic scenes in corridor spaces, but the kind of the more graphic sex scenes tend to be in bedrooms. So they're not in the dining room, for example. In the dining room at Pompeii, you might have pictures of a sort that you also wouldn't want in the dining room now, because they're often extremely violent. But they're not sex scenes.

• 24:01Kate Lister?

  So we've got big penises kind of associated with good luck and warding bad things off, but also associated with animal lusts. I've heard a few other theories as to why the Greeks would make their packages so small. And I'll put them to you and you can tell me what you think of it. One of them, and this is quite a dark one, is that it's about representing a juvenile body. Because we know that the Greeks did have this culture of where an older man would take on a young teen boy as an apprentice and there would be a sexual element to that. What do you think about that theory, that what we're looking at is sort of children's bodies?

• 24:40Speaker 06

  It depends. I mean, on Greek pots of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., you do indeed find young bodies depicted with genitals that suit the kind of putative age of that body. And you often find those bodies with older bearded men, sometimes even in the sixth century in what are obviously court scenes. So those bodies do exist. The sculptures, though, that we were talking about before, Polycletus's spear carrier, for example, that's not a little boy's body.

• 25:15Kate Lister?

  No, the Phanesi Hercules, huge beard.

• 25:17Speaker 06

  The Phanesi Hercules certainly isn't, right? These are, I mean, the Phanesi Hercules is an interesting one because of course he's son of Zeus, but he's got a mortal mum. And, you know, he has to kind of, it's only by virtue of his labours that he winds up on Olympus. So is he a god? Is he a man? Is a real kind of moot question with him. But Polycletus's spear carrier, you know, if you look at his face, he looks about eighteen, nineteen. If you look at his body, he looks more like thirty, thirty-five, but he doesn't look prepubescent. So that just doesn't work as a theory for those.

• 25:49Kate Lister?

  No. And you've got, in a lot of examples that we were looking at, this very neat little manscape that they've got of pubic hair, this very little delicate triangle that's almost just like pointing down in most of them.

• 26:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, again, that's about nature versus culture. You know, that in nature, hair grows everywhere.

• 26:07Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 26:07Speaker 06

  And, you know, just as I said, you might have been lucky enough to be born a boy, but you're not born a man. You have to work at being a man, you have to work at being cultured and a cultured body and a completely sort of wild body. A cultured body is one where it's preened and plumped at the gym and it might also be plucked. And so, you know, I think manscaping is the right kind of verb there.

• 26:32Kate Lister?

  Another theory is that it's about making sure that these images aren't sexual. And I suppose if you had a great big swinging penis hanging off it, it would land differently.

• 26:43Speaker 06

  It certainly would land differently, yes. I'm not sure, though, that by giving statues small genitals, you necessarily make them nonsexy. You might make them nonsexual, but erotics and pornography, they can be different categories. I mean, the the power of desire is that it's always something that you're reaching towards. And actually, that you may not ever kind of consummate. And so I think a lot of these statues are, they're erotic, they have the potential to stimulate desire in their beholder. And the ones that are made in the fifth century B C, they combine those small genitals in that really beautiful chiseled form.

• 27:28Speaker 06

  Very often with a gaze that doesn't look out, but looks down to the ground. And the moment you turn your head and look down to the ground, that's, we read that as coy. And we read it as flirtatious and and it's a sort of a means of asking or inviting the viewer to stare and become the active partner that we were talking about before. So desire is very much on the cards here. You're being asked to kind of excite them.

• 27:55Kate Lister?

  Maybe that's it, yeah, like a tease thing. On a very practical level, it was suggested that they're small because big penises snap off easily from statues.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  That's also true, right? If you go to museums today, you will see that anything that's made of marble in figurative form quite often has lost its penis, has Lost its nose and has lost its arms. And that's because, you know, if a statue falls over, those are the first bits to take the hit. And so, yes, I mean, if a statue had a huge penis, then it would indeed snap off. It's also not very practical. Marble is extremely expensive material. You don't want to have too much wastage.

• 28:36Kate Lister?

  No. And a myth has sort of sprung up that that was the Victorians going around chiseling all of the penises off statues because they were so shocked by it. But I was put straight on that by people in the British Museum who were like, no, they just snapped off.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  That's right. I mean, that's not to say that censorship didn't happen, not just in the Victorian period, but, you know, way before that too. But yes, I mean, unfortunately, there's a much more boring reason as to why a lot of statues no longer have their bits.

• 29:01Kate Lister?

  So for your money then, this is about portraying neatness and about preserving the lines of the male body and sort of not getting distracted by an appendage.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Yes, but it's also about control. I mean, the Greeks really put a premium on what they called enkratia, the need for self mastery. This wasn't, this is not the same as self denial. It's about kind of putting yourself in situations that might kind of, you know, get you to act in ways that are uncivilized, but making sure that you don't. And, you know, when you look at these statues, yes, they look like they've spent hours and hours romping around to get the body shapes that they do, but they also look as though they're very much in control of their self in other ways. And I think it is about that, really.

• 29:47Kate Lister?

  Why did it continue, do you think? Because that control's a big one for the Greeks, but we can see these smaller packages being repeated for centuries after Renaissance art. We've got quite little diddly ones there. Michelangelo's David, he's again quite coy.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I think Rome has to take the hit for that in that, you know, if you ask what a Roman body looks like, well, Roman bodies representationally would traditionally be clothed. You think about Roman bodies, you think about togas or you think about armour. And actually, the Romans thought that they didn't like the idea of Greek nudity. They didn't like the idea of a culture that spent all of its time in the gym. But then the Romans had an inferiority complex when it came to the Greeks. Rome was a latecomer to the Mediterranean stage.

• 30:37Kate Lister?

  Culture vultures.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  Greek culture was absolutely where it was at. And as we've already talked about, you know, the Romans, they expand into Greece, they bring back all of this beautiful Greek art, a lot of it without clothes and it goes on display in their porticoes and in their temples. They get attracted by it, they want to own it, they adapt it, they copy it, they commercialise it, they buy it on the art market, they put it in their villa gardens, next to their swimming pools and in their own gymnasium. Roman emperors, when they want to show themselves to be virtuous, performatively male in the right kinds of ways, are sometimes depicted with togas. But increasingly, as the empire progresses, are given heroic Greek-style bodies,

• 31:23Speaker 06

  some of which will have no clothes on. You know, Greece is part of the Roman Empire, got to appeal to those viewers too. And of course, you know, how does the 15th century experience antiquity? It does it through Rome, it doesn't do it through Greece, but it's rediscovering all of this visual heritage. And that's then dictating what its heritage looks like. So, you know, if you want to paint an image of Venus in the 1500s, then it's no surprise that it should look like the Aphrodite of Cnidos that we were just talking about, that had been so copied by the Romans in so many different forms.

• 32:05Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Carrie after this short break.

• 32:16Speaker 07

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

• 33:12Kate Lister?

  As a counterpoint, I know we were talking about the penises, but I'm always interested. Did the Greeks do anything with vulvas? They just seem to have been hidden away for like in art, like sort of mainstream art rather than pornography for an awfully long time.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you do occasionally get some sort of demarcation with a little line.

• 33:35Kate Lister?

  Gesture.

• 33:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, in pot painting and actually in figurines. But you're absolutely right that in monumental freestanding form, like the Aphrodite of Knidos, she is without genitals in a sense.

• 33:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  Of course, most of it was painted in antiquity. It's a bit unclear whether paint was used on some of these bodies. We have got some really exquisite terracotta figurines. There's one I can think of in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It actually comes from Egypt, but it shows an Aphrodite-esque body with pubic hair. It's beautifully painted. But you know, I think you're absolutely right that Aphrodite of Knidos, I think it'd be unlikely for her to have had any pubic hair. That we were talking about manscaping before, but the need to pluck and preen the female body was there in antiquity already. Women were deemed to be wilder than men.

• 34:33Speaker 06

  And so you put their naked female form on display and there's even more of an imperative to kind of control it in some senses.

• 34:42Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, and we're into the realms of speculation here, I guess, because we'll never know it exactly. A narrative has arisen in popular culture, looking at the genitals on these statues and sort of said that people back in the ancient world preferred a smaller penis. And then that's immediately contrasted with our modern obsession, our Freudian obsession with bigger is better, bigger, powerful, you know, we want it as big as King Kong's little finger and all of that nonsense. Do you think that like looking at those statues, we could extrapolate anything about the lived experience? Of your day to day person, do we even have enough evidence to be able to say something like that, is that they preferred smaller penises?

• 35:20Speaker 06

  I don't know, you can say that. I mean, they preferred them representationally.

• 35:24Kate Lister?

  In art?

• 35:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, but in life, I can't think of any Greek sources off the top of my head, but I can think of Roman ones where, you know, people are talking about juvenile and satirical poets like this, talking about dick size in the bath, for example. And so the size of a penis was not a non-question in antiquity. It is still a live question. And I think for all that the Greeks might want to think of themselves as civilised and controlled and neat and that, you know, it's the barbarian other, or it's the animal world, or it's satyrs that have penises that can't be kept under control. Actually, you know, life isn't as easy as those binaries suggest, and they knew that as well as we do.

• 36:08Kate Lister?

  Oh, Carrie, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Well, I don't have any website presence, really. So you just have to find me on the Cambridge University webpage.

• 36:22Kate Lister?

  Fabulous. Thank you so much. You have been marvelous.

• 36:24Speaker 06

  Thanks, Kate.

• 36:29Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Carrie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to email us your feedback on tiny penises, then you can email us at [email protected]. If you've enjoyed this, go to History Hit TV and watch our documentary on this very question. And they have a free trial, so it won't cost you a bean. Otherwise, join me back on the pod wherever it was you found us today. Over the next month, we will be diving betwixt the sheets of queens. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets,

• 37:11Kate Lister?

  the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.