IMPOTENCE IN ANCIENT GREECE

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Dr. Chris Steidle - Northeast Indiana Urology

Ancient Cures for Impotence
Not necessarily "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Impotence", but
interesting nevertheless.

Better Than Hemlock

Quoted from a review of Simon Goldhill's Foucault's Virginity by James Davidson
in The London Reivew of Books, October 1995.
An unusual feature of the topography of ancient Athens was the strange half-statues,
which the Athenians called Hermeses and we call herms: a representation of the god of
travel, trickery and luck, abbreviated to a pillar, a head and a penis. They were to be
seen all over the city, on street-corners, at cross-roads, by doors and gates, and midway on
roads from the country into town, providing points of reference in a city with few street-names
and little interest in town-planning. On the eve of ventures or on receipt of gains, Hermes
attracted 'pleases' and 'thank-yous' in the form of cakes and flowers, his penis conveniently erect for hanging gifts on. In 415, however, during preparations for a great voyage of conquest into the western Mediterranean, the Athenians woke up to discover their lucky herms vandalised: disfigured and (perhaps) unmembered.

Panicked and outraged, they set up an inquisition to find the culprits. Informers were forthcoming and a list of 'Hermokopidai' was drawn up, the majority of whom did not hang around long enough to test the equity of Athenian justice but abandoned their property to the public auctioneers, who catalogued it carefully and inscribed it on stone for the benefit of posterity. The expedition itself went ahead as planned. It was a disaster.

What possessed the 'herm-bashers' that night remains obscure. Traditional opinion divides
between jinx and high-jinks, between an oligarchic conspiracy to scupper the fortunes of the
democracy and a drunken prank at a spectacularly ill-judged moment in Athenian imperial
history. In 1985, however, Eva Keuls published a book which opened up a new line of inquiry.
The Hermokopidai were innocent, she suggested. The real culprits were the women of Athens,
striking a blow against phallocracy by hitting Athenian men where it hurt.

The penis was everywhere in the ancient world. Apart from the herms, there were giant
ceremonial dildoes carried in procession for Dionysus, satyriassic satyrs on vases and
in plays, priapic actors in comedy and naked men in gymnasia or in stone. Priapus
himself arrived rather later, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: a fertility god of orchards
and gardens, he sometimes doubled as a guardian, threatening scrumpers with impalement
on his elephantine organ. This array of virilia bore many symbolic associations. Big ones
seem most often to have indicated obscenity and buffoonery, lust, luck and fertility; others
were used to mark senility (when pendulous), otherness (when circumcised) and self-control. They were a symbol as much for women as for men and figured in a number of women-only festivals in the form of phallic costumes and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish different kinds of penis in art, and a strong contrast seems always to have been drawn between the gross members of satyrs and comic actors in Dionysus' entourage and the very modest manhood of heroic and civic ideal. Sometimes the phallus seems even to have a life of its own. It appears as a bird, with eyes and wings, or with four legs and a tail as a phallus-centaur. Disembodied and reembodied in this way, it had little to do with what most Greek men found between their legs.

Phallic symbolism in Greece seems, therefore, to have been particularly rich and complex,
but in recent years there has been a strong tendency to reduce all these penises, big ones,
small ones, wooden ones, leather ones, the attached and the unattached, the flightless and
the fully fledged, to one function only: masculine power. According to David Halperin, one of
the most sophisticated members of this school of thought, 'the symbolic language of
democracy proclaimed on behalf of each citizen. "I, too, have a phallus."

The herms are
Hermes no longer, but a symbol of the patriarch, not well-wishers on the way, but grim and
threatening guardians of the door, like Priapus, but without his sense of humour. The ideogram
of an oppressive, dystopian system, the ubiquitous penis is seen to represent the ubiquity of
male power: an attack on this sign, such as the vandalism of 415, looks very much like a revolt
of phallocracy's oppressed.

When it was first published, Keuls's suggestion seemed to belong to the fringes of ancient
studies; recently reissued, her book now nestles comfortably in the mainstream, a graphic
indication of the direction the current has taken over the past ten years. Her title, The
Reign of the Phallus, might stand as a summary of new thinking on ancient gender.
Blended with Beauvoir's Other, Freud and Foucaut, the phallus has come to be seen as the
key to a whole society, lying at the centre of a nexus of sex and power. 'Sex was phallic
action,' claims Halperin, 'it revolved around who had the phallus, was defined by what was
done with the phallus, and was polarised by the distribution of phallic pleasure.' Sex was a
chronic, traumatic, political event.

Far from bringing people together sex kept them apart,
dividing those penetrating from those penetrated, while at the same time erasing distinctions
on either side of the phallic equation. Penetration, moreover, meant power. Those who had the
phallus and used it were the dominant citizen males. Those who had been born without one or
who had lost theirs somewhere along the way were the disenfranchised Other: women, slaves,
foreigners and men who enjoyed getting shafted. Sex made everyone either active or passive,
a plus or a minus; it was a zero-sum game.

It has been claimed that phallicism was not merely characteristic of sex in the ancient world
(as it has been thought characteristic of sex today) but actually constituted a sexuality. In fact,
there was no such thing as sexuality in antiquity, only 'a more generalised ethos of penetration
and domination'. Phallicism thus presented historians with a real-life example to support
Foucault's theory of radical discontinuity in the history of desire. The 'problem' of Greek
homosexuality was a problem no more. So long as they were on the positive end of the
penetrating penis, the Greeks did not care about the gender of the person on the other.

This view of ancient sexuality has been enormously influential over the past decade,
especially among non-classicists, who seem prepared to accept uncritically claims about the
ancient world that would, if made about more proximate cultures, attract much closer scrutiny.
The theory's ready acceptance is perhaps one of the main grounds for scepticism, since it
convinces not by means of an avalanche of indisputable ancient material, but by fitting in
neatly with contemporary concerns. Penetration is a peculiarly modern obsession, and
non-penetrative intercourse our peculiar holy grail. This makes the ancient phallocracy look
suspiciously like a genealogical exercise, an archaeology of the truth of Western patriarchy
in a time before it had gone undercover. Future historians will have little difficulty in
demonstrating a connection in the 20th century between sex, aggression and power. The
more adventurous among them might adduce the homosexual rape scene in Howard
Brenton's Romans in Britain, or the addition to military slang of the verb 'to scud',
glossed by one reporter during the Gulf War as to make love unfeelingly, but these are only
the more exotic reaches of a quotidian discourse constituted in a whole range of expletives
from 'up yours' to 'get screwed.'

Such language is conspicuous in ancient Greece by its absence, forcing the historians of
phallocracy to turn to images instead. But these images are silent and it is by no means
straightforward to make them speak without ventriloquising. Anything which strays from the
missionary position, for instance, is looked at with suspicion as being close to S&M:
'the rear-entry stance allows the painter to show women being used impersonally, as mere
sexual tools whose response and emotional reaction is of no concern to their male lovers.'
The foundations of the theory of ancient phallocracy, as well as the impressionable, fly-by-wire
approach to sexual imagery, have their origins not, surprisingly, in some post-Foucauldian
constructionalist treatise, but in a ten-page section on 'Dominant and Subordinate Roles' in
Kenneth Dover's normally sober work on Greek homosexuality.

Here, at the point where it
was perhaps most needed, Dover abandons his painstaking philology, turning instead to
pornographic vase-paintings elucidated with the help of anthropology and zoology. He notes
that Italians refer to a defeated football team as inculato and observes that it is an insult
in Norse sagas to describe someone as 'used like a wife'. Most of his evidence, however,
comes from analogies in the animal kingdom, although the animals generally seem more
sophisticated than Homo sapiens about sexual symbolism: 'Karlen observes that humans,
unlike many animal species which have ritualised homosexual "submission", can
complete a genital act "in expressing a power relationship". John Boorman's film
Deliverance makes striking use of this theme in depicting the maltreatment of urban
"trespassers" by rustic hunters.'

It is this modern view of penetration, universalised by human-zoo logic, that makes the
ancient phallocracy convincing. The idea that the ithyphallic herm is an aggressive
proprietorial marker is cogent not because of any compelling ancient evidence, but
because of an implicit or explicit analogy with the territorial displays of apes (I have myself
seen this reaction,' says Dover). Even Foucault, who would not normally allow a monkey
within a hundred miles of his philosophy, is quite happy to refer to Dover's bestiary as
evidence for ancient attitudes to penetration. His followers have tended to follow suit,
producing a curious blend of primatology and psychoanalysis, treating the penis as a
transcendental signifier and reading the meanings of making love without reference to
cultural conventions. A theory which claims to challenge universalising notions of sexuality
depends on universalising interpretations of sex.

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