Man may be the measure of all things, but there is only one measure of a man. And when we hold up the ruler to the pelvis of antiquity, we have — time and again — been disappointed to find that the glory that was Greece isn’t just a bit more glorious where it counts.
In a flurry of recent articles, we return again to the classic conundrum, a question that has been asked—and answered—hundreds of times: why oh why are ancient Greek dicks so small? The typical answer, which inevitably comes as a revelation, is that ancient Greeks regarded big dicks as tokens of bestial and barbaric appetitiveness, and considered smaller dicks a mark of restraint and civility.
This is a good opportunity, sometimes taken, to reflect on cultural relativity. For the Greeks, the power is in the penis, provided it’s not too big; for us, the power is in the (white) penis, provided it’s not too small. But the acknowledgment of difference usually ends there, leaving us to congratulate ourselves for our new understanding of the precise way in which that other culture is weird. Now when we go to the museum, we’ll laugh, not at the size of the dicks, but at the culture that preferred them that way.
And so what begins (in the best cases) as an attempt at cultural relativism ends as an exercise in cultural reductiveness, driven by the assumption that every culture is just like our own, notwithstanding a few small tweaks here or there. Newly equipped with Dover’s reasonable, though not inescapable, conclusion that small penises had certain positive associations which large penises did not, these articles conclude that ancient Greco-Roman masculinity must be the mirror image of contemporary masculinity, and then proceed to graft their own culturally-specific assumptions onto the fifth century BCE. If big dicks are good now, but bad back then, then it follows that everything that applies to big dicks for us applies to small ones for them. If small penises were good penises, then small penises were also powerful penises. And if small penises were powerful penises, then alpha males must have wanted small penises: “a small penis was the sought-after look for the alpha male.” Nay, “Small Penises Used to Be Worshipped!” The smaller the better!
(A quick word of caution. While I don’t doubt Dover’s hypothesis, it’s worth noting that the oft-quoted “confirmation” of this explanation is a single passage (red flag!) from a Greek comedy (red flag!) in which one notably unpersuasive character (red flag!), who embodies the stereotype of an extreme and contested position (red flag!) and who frames penis size as a choice (red flag!), states his own belief that boys with big virtues have little dicks. And in the end, he loses the argument, leaving his young addressee to a life of loose logic and a low-hanging cock (red flag! red flag! red flag!).)
One of the great benefits of studying another culture is the fresh perspective it confers on one’s own. And so, one hopes that a discussion of the “surprising” values of another culture might be accompanied by a reflection on, or at least an acknowledgment of, the assumptions that make other cultures’ norms so surprising. But even the best of these articles betrays a disappointing lack of self-reflection, as they miss the opportunity to reflect on our cultural assumptions and preoccupations, and end up reinforcing them in the process.
Back then, they suggest, penises were symbolic. Back then, penis size really meant something. “‘They used the penis as an index of character, explains Lear. ‘It *said* something.’” Now, they imply, we see penises as they really are, without all that distracting symbolism. Now, the cultural status of the penis accords with nature and reason. This explains why men nowadays are so typically unfazed when you suggest that their penises might be one or more millimeters below the mean, and why the President of the United States bragged about the size of his penis after his political opponent mocked the size of his hands. Indeed, as a “Fox & Friends” psychologist concluded, bragging about your yuge penis indicates “an incredible degree of psychological strength.” It’s only natural that we equate big penis with big power, and it’s only reasonable that the man wielding the biggest penis wields the biggest power, too.
Leaving aside the fact that the sculptured dicks of antiquity are only marginally smaller, if they are smaller at all, than your average pendulous peen (if you’re looking for the teeny weenies of old, look to vase painting instead) — and not to mention that they’re usually nestled handsomely beneath flowing ringlets of the finest pubic hair you’re ever likely to see — let’s pause to consider the question itself.
Why oh why do we care? And, really, why are we so surprised in the first place? What’s weird isn’t that ancient Greek sculptors frequently represented the male nude with average-to-slightly-below-average penises. What’s weird is that we can’t stop talking about it, especially in the face of far more egregious instances of misrepresentation. What’s weird is how sensitive (we think) we are to the role of ideology in shaping the aesthetics of others and how unreflective we are about its role in shaping ours.
These articles invariably begin from an expression of cognitive dissonance: Why doesn’t the size of the penis match the ideal attained by the rest of the body? Why are their muscles so defined, but their dicks undersized? Surely a man with six-pack abs must also have at least six inches below them? How could such a small penis belong to such a large personality? Why are sculptors so skilled at depicting other aspects of male beauty, but so bad at depicting the penis adequately? How could an alpha male have an omicron schlong? Why, given the choice, would any man allow himself to be represented in such a ridiculous way — in a medium as permanent as marble, no less? And since the ideal male form was invented by the Greeks, of whom we are the direct cultural descendants, why is their ideal different from ours?
The premise on which these articles rest betrays a dizzying array of phallocentric assumptions that make a man’s penis the crucial determinant of his musculature, body type, personality, and social status. And while these articles are helpful to the extent that they aim to dismantle the patriarchy one teeny weeny at a time, they also perpetuate the androcentric myth that penises are prerequisites for power and, moreover, that big penises are necessary for big power.
To return to a fact that is often flagged, and yet somehow always ignored: the idea that ancient representations of Greco-Roman penises in statuary are particularly small isn’t even particularly true, and its substantiation often involves a disturbing manipulation of the evidence. Why, for example, are we shocked at the decidedly boyish genitalia of the four-foot tall and visibly prepubescent Kritios Boy, who is not only a prepubescent boy but also one whose penis has also quite obviously fallen off?
Statues whose penises have clearly been lopped off, leaving only sad stumps of former glory, are actually favorite sources of evidence for these articles — articles like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. The Shocking Reason Why All Old Statues Have Such Small Dicks is disappointingly pedestrian: they are small because they have fallen off, because, you know, time. (Look out for my next piece for Eidolon, which uses the Sphinx of Giza to prove that ancient Egyptians preferred faces without noses).
And while we’re continually shocked at the possibility of a missing millimeter, ancient representations of the nude female — ffs! — normally don’t have genitalia at all, an observation which emerges from the bottomless depths of the internet in just two articles, one of which is just a summary of the first. (Google “ancient Greek statues no vulvas” and your fourth result will be “Why Do All Old Statues Have Such Small Penises.”) But since Greco-Roman androcentrism matches and justifies our own, there is (quite literally) nothing to see here. In place of the pièce de résistance of the nude male and the elegant coiffure that announced its presence, the nude female was left Barbie doll blank, without a curl or even a cleft, and usually posed to cover pudenda she does not have.
These articles — the assumptions they make, the questions they ask, and the more obvious questions they ignore — teach us far less about ancient cultures than they do about our own. Written to assuage our unjustified astonishment that poorly-chosen idols of masculinity don’t measure up to our unreasonable expectations, they suggest just how fraught and just how fragile our masculinity is. They remind us that a man is measured by the amount of space he can take up, by the depths he can penetrate, and by the size of the hole he can make, in our bodies and in our atmosphere. I have little nostalgia for the values of antiquity, but at a time when toxic masculinity has become alarmingly literal and world leaders equate the size of their genitals with the size of their potential for destruction, one can imagine what we might learn about ourselves from a culture other than our own, for whom bigger wasn’t always better.
Bill Beck is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania and the current Edward Capps Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he is finishing his translation of the first two books of the ancient scholia to the Iliad.
