Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates
RELIGION AND ERoTIC
6, 4), “ with coarse laughing and jokes.” Still unknown to the older poetry of the Greeks, Priapus pops up in a comedy of Xenarchus (CAF., II, 472), called Priapus, of which nothing more is known. That he also came on the stage on other occasions is shown by the indignation of Macrobius and Augustine (Macrobius, Sat., vi, 5, 6; Augustine, De Civitate Det, vi, 7). Priapus plays a great part afterwards in Alexandrine literature, especially in the Palatine Anthology and the Bucolic poets ; a collection of Latin poems, in part strongly erotic and often of an obscene character, has been preserved under the name of Carmina Priapea.
Representations of Priapus in plastic art are numberless ; even on coins, especially from Lampsacus on the Hellespont, on not a few of whichand this is very important for the conception of the sexual idea—he is shown with member erect. In Rome the cult of Priapus was introduced comparatively late (Prudentius, Contra Symm.,1, 102 ff.). He was worshipped in cities in special sanctuaries, and in the country (Pausanias, ix, 31, 2) wherever goats and sheep and bees are reared; sailors and fishermen also worshipped him. ‘To Priapus was attributed not only the advancement of the fruits of the field, but he was also regarded as the warder off of thieves and birds. Thus the roughly made wooden figure, painted red, of a naked Priapus with a large erect member, was to be seen in fields and gardens, mostly with a sickle in his hand, not seldom a bundle of reeds on his head, intended to rustle in the wind and to scare away the birds. But as the phallus was also employed for the protection of graves, so Priapus likewise appears as the ornament of these memorials.
We need not go more closely into the question whether Dionysus and Priapus are identical (Ath., i, 30); in poetry Priapus is regarded as belonging to the retinue of Dionysus, so that Moschus (iti, 27) even spoke of several Priapi. Further, he was
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