The men of ancient Rome may have suffered from a painful penis problem, an Italian researcher says after studying a rare, surviving 2,000-year-old fresco from Pompeii, the city that was covered with lava in the eruption of Vesuvius.
The fresco, discovered at the entrance to the House of the Vettii
in Pompeii, depicts the Roman god Priapus with a large, erect
penis, a customary image for the ancient Romans, who wanted to
depict their virility. Priapus was a god to be reckoned with,
representing all kinds of fertility-related things, from fruit
and livestock to male genitalia.
In the fresco, Priapus was suffering from phimosis – a condition
of the penis where the foreskin does not fully retract, which can
be debilitating in certain forms. And since we usually associate
gods with the best in mere mortals, Dr. Francesco Galassi
believes the condition afflicted the majority of Pompeii men of
the time, according to Discovery News.
“This condition presents different grades of severity, and in
this specific case appears to be of the highest grade, in which
there is no skin retractability on the glans,” he told the
website.
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Interestingly, Priapus did not appear to have the condition in
other frescos, leading Galassi to believe that perhaps a
prominent member of the Vettii family suffered from the condition
and thought it was a good idea to show that a mighty god can
suffer from it too.
But Galassi thought there might be another culprit. “It could
be that the condition was so widespread that the artist chose to
depict it,” he said.
The sheer amount of penis-shaped objects of wood and stone found
in Pompeii convinced Galassi he was on the right track. And he is
not the only researchers to have noticed the non-retracting
foreskin problem in ancient Roman art.
“Anatomical votive offerings made in Italy between the fourth
to second centuries BC do often show the penis with the foreskin
closed around the top, as in the later Priapus painting from
Pompeii,” said Jessica Hughes, lecturer in classical studies
at the Open University in the UK.
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Votives are closely related to healing and fertility, so Hughes –
a specialist in the field – believes the artifacts were
essentially offerings to the gods by men suffering from phimosis.
This is why she believes the Priapus fresco to be so interesting.
The god was supposed to be the opposite of anyone with a foreskin
problem, let alone something that could cause sexual dysfunction.
“In this case it’s more challenging for us to understand why
the artist would have chosen to represent a biological condition
that may have been seen to threaten fertility and health,”
Hughes told Discovery.
“Perhaps we need to see this painting as a comment on the
power of the divine body, which didn’t suffer from the same
biological limitations as the mortal body.”
Priapus also seems to suffer more often than others from penile
dysfunction: according to The Local, an academic wrote in 2007
that it was his interpretation that Priapus also suffered from
penis gigantism, known as Proteus syndrome.
The problem of phimosis was treatable in ancient Roman times, but
involved more painful methods than current treatments, such as
circumcision.
Nowadays, it’s easily treatable with a range of techniques and
medication.