Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Three different breast similes in the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is an erotic love poem in the Hebrew language. Scholars continue to debate whether it was originally composed as a single poem or is a compilation of several older poems joined together into a single work. The date of the poem (or, if it is a compilation of several poems, the dates of the various poems that comprise it) is not entirely certain, but multiple clues, including the language of the poem and the poem’s numerous similarities to works of Hellenistic Greek bucolic poetry, suggest that it was most likely composed in around the third century BCE or thereabouts.

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote in May 2020, the Song of Songs consists mainly of a dialogue between two lovers: a woman and a man. In their speeches, the lovers praise each other’s bodies and describe the various activities that they want to partake in together in highly poetic language using vivid similes and metaphors. Some parts actually come across as quite raunchy.

Despite its highly erotic content and the fact that the entire poem never even once makes any mention of Yahweh the God of Israel by name, the Song of Songs became incorporated into the canon of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. As a result of this, it is also included in every Christian Bible as part of the so-called “Old Testament.”

The song spans only eight chapters, making it quite short (compared to other works that are included the Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Isaiah, which is sixty-six chapters, the Book of Jeremiah, which is fifty-two chapters, or the Book of Psalms, which is 150 chapters). Nonetheless, in those eight chapters, it manages to pack in no less than four different similes for women’s breasts. The earliest of these is by far the weirdest. In the Song of Songs 4:5, the man speaker says to the woman:

“‏שְׁנֵ֥י שָׁדַ֛יִךְ כִּשְׁנֵ֥י עֳפָרִ֖ים תְּאוֹמֵ֣י צְבִיָּ֑ה הָרוֹעִ֖ים בַּשּׁוֹשַׁנִּֽים׃”

“šənê šāḏayiḵə kišənê ‘ŏfārîm tə’wōmê ṣəḇîyâ hārwō‘îm baššwōšannîm:”

This means, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE):

“Your two breasts are like two fawns,
    twins of a gazelle,
    that feed among the lilies.”

Later, in the Song of Songs 7:6–9, the man, speaking to the woman, makes two more similes to describe her breasts in quick succession. He says to her, as translated in the NRSVUE:

“How fair and pleasant you are,
    O loved one, delectable maiden!
You are stately as a palm tree,
    and your breasts are like its clusters.
I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree
    and lay hold of its branches.’
O may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
    and the scent of your breath like apples,
and your kisses like the best wine
    that goes down smoothly,
    gliding over lips and teeth.”

These two aren’t too especially weird in my opinion, especially since the man uses them in the context of describing the woman’s whole body using fruit similes, so comparing her breasts to palm clusters and clusters of grapes makes sense in context. Later, though, in the Song of Songs 8:10, the woman speaker herself declares:

“אֲנִ֣י חוֹמָ֔ה וְשָׁדַ֖י כַּמִּגְדָּל֑וֹת אָ֛ז הָיִ֥יתִי בְעֵינָ֖יו כְּמוֹצְאֵ֥ת שָׁלֽוֹם׃ פ”

“’ănî ḥwōmâ wəšāḏay kammiḡədālwōṯ ’āz hāyîṯî ḇə‘ênāyw kəmwōṣə’ēṯ šālwōm:”

This means, as translated in the NRSVUE:

“I was a wall,
    and my breasts were like towers;
then I was in his eyes
    as one who brings peace.”

I personally think that this simile is a bit goofy. It sounds especially weird in context, since it is attributed to a woman speaker. Although I will admit that it is possible that a real-life woman might describe her own breasts as being “like towers,” it sounds to me far more like something that a gynophilic man would say.

ABOVE: The Song of Songs, painted by the French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (lived 1826 – 1898) in 1893

Breasts as “downy apples” in Idylls 27

Idyll 27, also known as the Oaristys or the Whispered Erotic Dialogue, is a bucolic poem in the Greek language in dialogue format. It was attributed in antiquity to the Hellenistic Greek bucolic poet Theokritos of Sicily (lived c. 340 – after c. 260 BCE) and has been passed down through the manuscript tradition under his name and as part of his corpus, but is now generally agreed to actually be a later imitation of his work by a different, anonymous poet. The date of the work is uncertain and it may have been composed anytime between roughly the late third century BCE and the third century CE.

The poem takes place at an isolated location somewhere in the rural countryside somewhere in the Greek world, possibly Sicily or southern Italy. The beginning of the poem may be lost, but the extant text of the poem begins just after a young man named Daphnis has kissed a young unmarried virgin girl. The girl’s name may be Akrotime, but the line in which this name occurs is corrupt and her name is not totally certain.

Daphnis’s exact age is uncertain, but he is most likely in his late teens or early twenties. The girl is almost certainly in her mid-to-late teenaged years, since she says that she is of marriageable age and that she has many suitors and Greek parents generally forced their daughters to marry in their mid-to-late teenaged years.

Daphnis tries to seduce the girl. At first, she spurns his advances, but he stubbornly refuses to take no for an answer. For every objection she makes against him, he responds with some excuse or rebuttal, which, in every case, the girl seems to accept. The girl coaxes him into promising that, if she lets him have sex with her, he will marry her. She additionally coaxes him into making various promises for the wedding. Lines 33–40 read as follows, as translated by Neil Hopkinson for the Loeb Classical Library:

Girl: “If I should consent, what gift do you bring worthy of my hand?

Daphnis: “You shall have my whole herd, and all my glades and pastureland.”

Girl: “Swear that when we have slept together you will not go away and leave me against my will.”

Daphnis: “By Pan I will not, even if you want to drive me off.”

Girl: “Will you build me my own chamber? Will you build me a house and sheep pens?”

Daphnis: “I will build you a chamber; and I’ll pasture your fair flocks.”

Girl: “How, O how shall I tell my old father?”

Daphnis: “He will consent to your marriage when he hears my name.”

Thus, the girl seems to agree to marry Daphnis and imply that they will have sex together. She asks him to take her to the cypress glade where he sleeps and he takes her there. Apparently after they arrive, Daphnis reaches under the girl’s dress and eagerly gropes her breasts without her consent. She protests and he makes a memorably pervy-sounding remark in reply. Lines 49–51 read as follows in the original Greek:

κορη: “τί ῥέζεις, σατυρίσκε; τί δ’ ἔνδοθεν ἅψαο μαζῶν;”

Δάφνις: “μᾶλα τεὰ πράτιστα τάδε χνοάοντα διδάξω.”

κορη: “ναρκῶ, ναὶ τὸν Πᾶνα. τεὴν πάλιν ἔξελε χεῖρα.”

This means, in Hopkinson’s translation:

Girl: “What are you doing, you little satyr? And why did you grasp my breasts underneath my clothes?”

Daphnis: “I’ll teach my first lesson to these downy apples of yours.”

Girl: “I feel faint, by Pan. Take your hand out of there!”

Daphnis apparently responds to this by throwing the girl into a ditch and continuing to sexually assault her. Here are lines 52–60 in Hopkinson’s translation:

Daphnis: “Be brave, my dear. Why ever are you trembling? How nervous you are!”

Girl: “You’re throwing me into the ditch and dirtying my nice clothes.”

Daphnis: “But look, I’m throwing a soft fleece under your robes.”

Girl: “Oh, you’ve torn my girdle too. Why have you undone it?”

Daphnis: “I give it as a first offering to the Paphian goddess [i.e., Aphrodite].”

Girl: “Stop, for goodness’ sake! Someone’s coming. I hear a sound.”

Daphnis: “It’s the cypresses chattering together about your wedding.”

Girl: “You’ve torn my shawl to shreds; I’m naked.”

Daphnis: “I’ll give you another shawl bigger than yours.”

After Daphnis finishes, the girl prays to the goddess Artemis, the protectress of virgins, to beg her forgiveness for the fact that she is no longer a virgin. Meanwhile, Daphnis promises to sacrifice a heifer to Eros, the god of lust, and a cow to Aphrodite. The girl declares in line 65: “παρθένος ἔνθα βέβηκα, γυνὴ δ’ εἰς οἶκον ἀφέρπω.” (“I came here a virgin, but I return home a woman [or a wife].”)

The poem concludes with a third-person narrator commenting that Daphnis and the girl were both pleased, but the girl was also ashamed for her lost maidenhood. Hopkinson translates lines 66–71 as follows:

“In this way they whispered to each other as they took pleasure in their young bodies; and their secret union was accomplished. She arose and went back to pasture her sheep with a shamefaced look, though in her heart she was happy, while he, rejoicing at their union, went off to his herds of cattle.”

Daphnis’s description of the girl’s breasts as “μᾶλα . . . χνοάοντα” (“downy apples”) sounds pretty goofy on its own, but, when read in the narrative context of him groping her breasts without her consent and continuing to sexually assault her afterward, it comes across as downright pervy and gross.

ABOVE: Painting by a member of the circle of the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin (lived 1594 – 1665), painted c. 1627, showing a young man and a young woman in classical attire surrounded by a bucolic landscape

Unfortunately, the ick factor here is even further magnified by the way modern professional classicists have treated this poem. Several of Daphnis’s actions in the poem clearly and incontrovertibly constitute sexual assault. Although the girl does vaguely seem to imply in line 35 that she will consent to have sex with Daphnis at some point, this vague implication does not constitute consent to the specific sexual acts at a specific time that he performs on her later in the poem.

At no point does the poem ever describe the girl as consenting, either verbally or nonverbally, to any specific act Daphnis performs on her. On the contrary, she specifically verbally objects to him fondling her breasts (lines 49–51), throwing her in a ditch and dirtying her clothes (line 53), tearing her girdle (line 55), and tearing her shawl (line 59). She even expressly, unambiguously tells him to stop what he is doing twice (in line 51 when he is fondling her breasts and line 57 when she says that she hears someone approaching). In every case, he simply ignores or dismisses her objection.

The fact that the narrator describes the girl as enjoying the sex in the end is completely irrelevant to whether Daphnis sexually assaults her, for a couple of reasons. First, consent can be selective; consenting to one thing does not imply consenting to another. The girl may consent to intercourse, but not to having her breasts fondled or her clothes torn off. Second, consent is not retroactive; if Daphnis does something to the girl without her consent, even if she decides that she enjoys it after he is already doing it to her, that is still sexual assault.

Despite this, nearly every scholar I have found who has ever commented on Idylls 27 has either ignored or dismissed even the possibility that the poem could describe any form of sexual assault. Hopkinson, whose translation I have been quoting, in his introduction to the poem (on page 373 of the Loeb volume of Theokritos’s Idylls), describes the girl as being “persuaded” into “reluctantly” having sex with Daphnis, writing:

“A girl, probably called Acrotime, at first rejects Daphnis’ courtship but is soon persuaded of his sincerity. She agrees to go with him to see his home in a glade. There, reluctantly on her part, they have intercourse, which both take to be the beginning of marriage; this is confirmed by the narrator in a short coda.”

David Sider, who is now a tenured full professor of classics at New York University, absolutely dismisses the notion that this poem could possibly describe sexual assault out of hand as scarcely even warranting attention in his paper “Theokritos 27: Oaristys,” published in 2001 in the academic journal Würzburger Jahrbücher 25 99-105.

In this paper, Sider cites the fact that the girl does not scream at the top of her lungs for help and that, when she thinks she hears someone approaching, she tells Daphnis to “stop” or “hold still” so that the person will not hear them as supposed definitive proof of her consent, writing (on page 105):

“And rape is totally out of the question. A women being raped was expected to scream, which could serve in some possible future trial as a sign of her being forced. Indeed, someone may be approaching this young couple; at least Akrotime says μίμνε, τάλαν· τάχα τίς τοι ἐπέρχεται· ἦχον ἀκούω [i.e., ‘Stop, for goodness’ sake! Someone’s coming. I hear a sound.’] (57), which is the very antithesis of what a girl being raped should say.”

This argument has numerous flaws. First of all, the fact that the girl does not scream and that she tells Daphnis to stop or hold still so that no one will hear does not in any way indicate that she consents to anything, because there are innumerably many possible reasons why a girl who is being raped might not want to scream or be found with her rapist.

Just to give one possible example of a reason why the girl might not want to be found, in the ancient world, being raped was considered to constitute a loss of a woman’s virginity and all first-time brides were expected to be virgins. The girl might consider that, if someone catches her being raped, then most or all of her suitors will probably terminate their pleas for her hand in marriage, because none of them will want to marry a girl who is not a virgin. Thus, if people find out, there may be no men left who are willing to marry her or, indeed, the man who is raping her may be the only one who is still willing.

The girl may therefore think that, if she remains quiet, she does not try to physically resist her rapist, and no one finds out, then she may still be able to marry a suitor whom she prefers. Alternatively, since the girl seems to genuinely like Daphnis, even if she does not like what he is doing to her, she may still not want to get him into any kind of trouble.

That’s just one problem with Sider’s interpretation. Another problem is that Sider seems to assume that there is only one possible interpretation of the girl’s words, which is that the girl is genuinely afraid that someone might be approaching. An at least equally plausible interpretation, however, is that she wants Daphnis to stop and she is using the claim that someone might hear them as an excuse to try to get him to stop, even though she knows full well that no one is there.

Finally, regardless of why the girl tells Daphnis to stop or remain still, he seemingly completely ignores her injunction to do so and continues having intercourse with her unabated. Even if what Daphnis is doing to her were not already sexual assault before this point, it is very clearly sexual assault after she expressly tells him to stop and he refuses to do so. It is absolutely reprehensible that so many highly eminent senior male scholars with PhDs and full tenured professorships are seemingly incapable of understanding that “no” means “no” and “stop” means “stop.”

Unfortunately, Sider goes even further than insisting that Daphnis does not sexually assault the girl; he insists that, really, the girl “manipulates” Daphnis into giving her everything she wants, including sex, making Daphnis the real victim. He even has the gall to try to portray this as some kind of feminist reading by claiming the girl as a strong female character who knows how to get what she wants from men. He writes (on page 105):

“Only in Daphnis’ mind – and in that of like-minded male scholars – can Akrotime be said to have been ‘persuaded’. If anyone has been persuaded, it has been Daphnis, although ‘manipulated’ would be a better word.”

I agree with Sider that the girl does convince Daphnis into making promises of marriage and wedding gifts that he would not make without her persuasion. There is absolutely nothing in the text, however, to suggest that she extracts any of these promises through any kind of dishonesty. Moreover, the girl’s reason for extracting these promises is clearly self-protection to ensure Daphnis does not have sex with her and then abandon her, leaving her unable to marry because no man wants to marry her now that she is no longer a virgin.

The assertion that this somehow constitutes “manipulation,” making Daphnis the real victim, is hard to explain as anything other than pure misogyny.

Ariadne’s completely gratuitous bare breasts in Catullus’s “Carmen 64”

With that slightly unhinged rant out of the way, let’s move on to my third and final example. This time, it’s not so much a weird or goofy description of breasts and more of a case of a male author inserting a gratuitous description of bare breasts into a passage where it is contextually inappropriate seemingly for no reason other than in order to appeal to the male gaze.

The Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) is primarily known for having written a large number of short poems and witty epigrams. He also, however, wrote a long, serious poem known as an epyllion or “little epic,” which is numbered in his poetic corpus as “Catullus 64” or “Carmen 64” (Carmen is the Latin word meaning “song” or “poem.”) This poem is sometimes considered his greatest literary masterpiece.

The narrator of the epyllion begins by describing the pines that were felled to build the Argo, the ship sailed by the hero Iason and his Argonauts on their quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the land of Kolchis in Greek mythology. He quickly moves on, though, to describe the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of the hero Achilleus, who is best known for his prominent role in the myths of the Trojan War.

He soon moves on again to give an extremely lengthy and detailed ekphrasis (i.e., description of a work of art) of the highly intricate blanket that has been woven for Thetis’s marriage bed, which depicts a scene of the Athenian hero Theseus abandoning the princess Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Krete, on the island of Naxos.

The narrator goes on the spend the bulk of the rest of the poem describing this scene in vivid detail. He describes Ariadne standing alone on the beach, absolutely distraught and stricken with grief at her lover’s betrayal, watching as his ship sails away onto the distance.

For seemingly no logical or story-related reason whatsoever, Catullus describes all Ariadne’s clothes as having fallen from her body to her feet, leaving her standing there on the beach completely nude. (Apparently she is just too grief-stricken to keep her clothes on.) Not only does he make her nude for absolutely no reason, but he emphasizes the fact that she is nude at great length, going on for eight whole lines just describing how absolutely naked she is. In the course of this description, he spends two whole lines specifically describing how her breasts are bare. He writes, in lines 60–67:

“Quem procul ex algā maestīs Mīnōis ocellīs
saxea ut effigiēs bacchantis prōspicit, ēheu,
prōspicit et magnīs cūrārum fluctuat undīs,
nōn flāvō retinēns subtīlem vertice mitram,
nōn contecta levī uēlātum pectus amictū,
nōn teretī strophiō lactentīs vīncta papillās,
omnia quae tōtō dēlapsa ē corpore passim
ipsius ante pedēs fluctūs salis adlūdēbant.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Far away, from the seaweed, the daughter of Minos watches him [i.e., Theseus] with sorrowful eyes,
stony just like the image of a Bacchante, alas,
she looks and fluctuates with great waves of concerns,
not retaining her subtle headband on her blond hair,
not concealed, her chest not covered with a light garment,
her little milk-bearing breasts not tied with a rounded breastband.
All things having completely fallen from her body here and there,
beneath her own feet, they were playing games in the salt tide.”

This is a lovely, poetic description, but the whole thing about her being naked, and especially the part where he goes on about her “lactentīs . . . papillās” (“little milk-bearing breasts”), comes across in my opinion as a bit pervy and contextually inappropriate.

ABOVE: Ariadne, painted c. 1905 by the English painter Herbert James Draper, most likely inspired by Catullus’s description of Ariadne naked on the shore in his “Carmen 64”

John Donne’s metaphor of women’s bodies as books

John Donne (lived 1571 or 1572 – 1631) was an early modern English poet and contemporary of Shakespeare who is known for his highly intellectual poetry, which often makes use of unusual extended similes and metaphors comparing things that are not at all alike. He wrote numerous erotic poems dealing with various aspects of love and sex.

One of Donne’s most famous poems, Elegy XIX (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”), is addressed by the male poet to his mistress when they are about to have sex. In it, he makes an unusual and somewhat creepy, but interesting, comparison of women’s bodies to books, comparing women’s clothes to book covers that uneducated men can admire and their nude bodies to the pages that educated men can read. He writes (ll. 32–43):

“Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
to taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
are like Atalanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
that when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
his earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
for lay-men, are all women thus arrayed;
themselves are mystic books, which only we
(whom their imputed grace will dignify)
must see revealed.”

The phrase “Atalanta’s balls” is an allusion to the golden apples that Hippomenes used to distract Atalanta in a classical myth, which I discuss in this older post I wrote in February 2019.

While this passage is not strictly about breasts, but women’s bodies more generally, I decided to include it here because it fits into the same category and is suitably weird.

ABOVE: Portrait of John Donne as a young man, painted c. 1595