Why Do Ancient Greek Sculptures All Have Such Tiny Penises?

Whenever I talk about ancient Greek sculpture, there is always one question that everyone always asks me. It is not “How did the style of Hellenistic sculptures differ from the style of earlier Classical sculptures?” Nor is it “Can you tell me more about how ancient Greek sculptures were originally painted?” No, of course, not. The question everyone always asks me is “Why do they all have such tiny penises?” I have been asked this question so many times that I feel compelled to answer it.

My hesitancy in writing this article

For a long time, I thought I would never write about this subject because I did not exactly consider the size of the genitalia on classical sculptures a pressing issue and I was frankly too embarrassed to write about it. Nonetheless, whenever I wrote an answer on Quora about Greek sculptures, I almost invariably got people writing in the comments under the answer asking me, “Why do they all have such tiny penises?”

Finally, I figured I had already written an article about Roman orgies, so I did not really have that much dignity left to lose. Thus, I decided to give in and write an answer to the question about the tiny penises. For all the people out there who have ever wondered why Greek sculptures have such tiny penises, this is my answer. Enjoy.

Yeah, you’re right. They are pretty small.

The people giggling at classical sculptures for their tiny penises may be acting rather childish, but I will admit they do have a point. Many classical sculptures do indeed have disproportionately small penises. For instance, here is a photograph of the Farnese Herakles, a massive marble statue of the Greek hero Herakles carved in around the third century AD by a sculptor named Glykon as a copy of an earlier sculpture, probably of the Hellenistic Era:

As you can plainly see, his genitalia are indeed unusually small relative to the size of the rest of his body. To our modern eyes, this seems pretty weird. In our culture, we always think of large penises as being good and small penises as being bad, so it seems baffling to many people that the ancient Greeks would choose to portray men with such perfect bodies, but yet choose to depict them with such tiny penises.

This was certainly not an artistic choice on the part of a single artist based on an individual preference for smaller penises. On the contrary, this statue of Herakles is far from the only ancient Greek sculpture of a nude male to portray him with unusually small genitalia. Indeed, nude men are virtually always shown in Greek sculpture with unusually small genitals. For instance, here is the Kritios Boy, a Greek marble statue dating to c. 480 BC:

Here is a marble copy of the fifth-century BC sculptor Polykleitos of Sikyon’s Diadem-Bearer:

Here is The Victorious Youth, a Hellenistic bronze statue of an athlete dating to c. 310 BC:

Here is a Hellenistic bronze statue of a Seleucid prince dating to the third or second century BC:

As you can clearly see, all of these sculptures have rather small penises. Clearly, this was not an individual decision, but rather a pervasive tendency throughout ancient Greek art.

But why?

The reason why ancient Greek statues often portray men with abnormally tiny penises is not because the ancient Greeks actually had any smaller penises on average than southern European men today either. We have no evidence other than sculpture that would seem to indicate that the ancient Greeks had small penises.

Furthermore, we already know that ancient Greek sculptures do not depict men as they really appeared. For instance, we already know that the average ancient Greek man was not nearly as buff and handsome as the average Greek statue. It therefore hardly makes sense to assume that ancient Greek men must have had small penises simply because Greek sculptures depict men with small penises.

The real reason why ancient Greek sculptures seem to so often portray men with unusually small penises is because ancient Greek sculptures are heavily idealized. These sculptures show men who looked the way the ancient Greeks thought ideally beautiful men should look.

Now, it so happens that the ancient Greeks regarded small penises as aesthetically ideal. This seems puzzling to us because we live in a culture that glorifies large penises, but the ancient Greeks actually regarded large penises as ridiculous, grotesque, and unaesthetic. For the ancient Greeks, a small penis was seen as an indication of a man of proper masculine virtue; whereas a large penis was seen as an indication of a man of lecherous and bawdy character.

In the comedy The Clouds, written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) and originally performed at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and later revised between 420 and 417 BC, the character “Mr. Good Reason” tells the character Pheidippides, the son of the protagonist Strepsiades, to follow the behavior and virtues of older generations, promising him a small penis as a reward for his virtue. Here is the passage in question, as translated by Paul Roche:

“If you do this, let me tell you
(and never let it slip your mind)
you’ll always win
a glistening chest and glowing skin,
broad shoulders, a small tongue,
a mighty bottom and a tiny prong.
If on the other hand you go in
for the present
way of behaving, then you’ll gain
a puny chest, a doughy skin,
narrow shoulders, a lolloping tongue,
a tiny bottom and a long harangue.”

According to this passage, then, a tiny penis is ideal and a large penis is a laughingstock. This fits well with the documented fact that, in ancient Greek comedies, all actors portraying male characters wore enormous, fake, leather phalli underneath their costumes, which dangled between their legs. These were intended to be ridiculous and were meant for the audience to laugh at.

ABOVE: Depiction of an ancient Greek comic actor from a Sicilian kalyx-krater dating to c. 350 – 340 BC, showing part of his leather phallus hanging out from under his costume

Large penises in ancient Greek mythology and art

Interestingly, there actually are many depictions of enormous penises in ancient Greek art—but they always belong to individuals who are intended to be comical, hideous, or both. Satyrs, for instance, are lecherous male nature spirits whom the ancient Greeks believed inhabited the forests and woodlands. Satyrs were known for their ribaldry, their drunken revelries, and their insatiable sexual appetites.

In classical Greek depictions of them, satyrs are shown as naked men with the tails and ears of horses. They are shown with comically hideous faces with bulging eyes, snub noses, long, bushy beards, long, matted hair, and absolutely enormous, permanently erect penises. They are the exact opposite of what the ancient Greeks considered the aesthetic ideal.

Here is a depiction of a satyr from an Attic red-figure plate dating to c. 520 – c. 500 BC from the city of Vulci in Etruria:

Here is a depiction of a satyr masturbating from a black-figure column krater dating to c. 560 – c. 550 BC:

Here is a depiction of a balding old satyr balancing a kylix on the end of his enormous, erect penis from an Attic red-figure psykter dating to c. 500 – c. 490 BC:

Here is a statue of a satyr from the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, dating to c. 530 – c. 520 BC, currently held in the Athens Archaeological Museum:

Another entity in Greek art with an extraordinarily large, permanently erect penis is the rustic fertility god Priapos, who is commonly represented as an old, misshapen, garden gnome-like character with a gray beard and a red Phrygian cap. Here is a Roman fresco of Priapos from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, dating to the first century AD:

According to an ancient scholion, or scholarly commentary, on the Argonautika of Apollonios of Rhodes, Priapos was the son of the god Dionysos and the goddess Aphrodite. While Aphrodite was pregnant with him, the goddess Hera grew jealous that she was having a child and not her, so she applied a malicious salve to Aphrodite’s belly while she was sleeping to make the child deformed and hideous.

When Aphrodite gave birth to Priapos and saw the absurdly massive size of his penis, she was so horrified that she abandoned him to die in the wilderness. (Abandoning newborn infants to die was, unfortunately, quite common and acceptable in the ancient world, as I discussed in this article I published recently.) Priapos, however, was found by a shepherd, who raised him as his own child. It was later discovered that Priapos could use his unusually large penis to aid the fertility of both plants and animals.

Conclusion

As you can see, large penises clearly had their place in ancient Greek art, but as objects of ridicule and mockery—not admiration. Small penises were considered dignified and were deemed acceptable in the realm of the higher arts, such as sculpture; whereas large penises were considered obscene and were deemed inappropriate for depiction in sculpture.

Now that that is all finished, I will go back to explaining why so many ancient sculptures are missing their noses.