I am currently taking a class at my university about the Roman poet Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE). One of Catullus’s most notorious poems is “Carmen 16,” which begins with a shockingly obscene threat, directed at two critics who thought Catullus’s poetry was effeminate: “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō, Aurēlī pathice et cinaede Fūrī.” In English, this means “I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats, sodomy-lover Aurelius and pervert Furius.” The opening line of this poem was recently quoted in the Netflix comedy series History of Swear Words.
It occurred to me that there is a ton of readily available information on the internet about obscenity in Latin. (Notably, there is an entire Wikipedia article titled “Latin obscenity,” which has an entire section devoted to each word!) Meanwhile, there is virtually nothing accessible and comprehensive on the internet whatsoever about Ancient Greek obscenity that a person who does not already know Ancient Greek might be able to understand. Wikipedia has no article on the subject, I can’t find any blog posts that give comprehensive information, and, if you try to look up an obscene Greek word like πέος in the online LSJ, it gives you an extremely evasive definition in Latin because the word is apparently too obscene to define in English.
I have decided to remedy this situation. Below is a fairly extensive list of various oaths, insults, sexual vocabulary, and vocabulary related to human waste in Ancient Greek. This list should be useful to people who are simply curious about what Greek obscenity was like, people who are writing stories set in ancient Greece who want to incorporate historically accurate obscenity, and, of course, people who want to secretly cuss out their coworkers in Ancient Greek. (Note: It should go without saying that this content is not appropriate for children.)
Continue reading “Ancient Greek Swear Words”
