Frescoes buried by volcano uncovered in ancient dining room in Pompeii

[frogmarch]

9. Thanks for the fascinating post!

But I still had to know about one little thing, so I googled it.

article excerpt:

Rewind to the ancient Greek world of around 400 BC, and you’ll find that large, erect penises were not considered desirable, nor were they a sign of power or strength. In his play The Clouds (c. 419–423 BC), ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes summed up the ideal traits of his male peers as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.”

Historian Paul Chrystal has also conducted research into this ancient ideal. “The small penis was consonant with Greek ideals of male beauty,” he writes in his book In Bed with the Ancient Greeks (2016). “It was a badge of the highest culture and a paragon of civilization.”

In ancient Greek art, most of a great man’s features were represented as ample, firm, and shiny—so why weren’t these same aesthetic principles applied to the penis? As Lear and other historians suggest, part of the answer lies in how the phalluses of less admirable men were portrayed.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ancient-greek-sculptures-small-penises