[lit-ideas] Alkibiades and the Herm

 


 


 













 Geary:




Alcibiades mutilated the mutilated.?


 



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More. From Dover's book.



"Just as it is possible to infer from the faces of satyrs, ugly old men, 
barbarian slaves and comic burlesque what was thought beautiful [by the 
'classical' Athenians], and what was ugly, in repsect of hair, eyes, nose, and 
mouth, we can use the same material to distinguish disapproved from approved 
genitals.



The disapproved penis is thick, and long sometimes far exceeding anything to be 
seen in real life, and tending to a 'club' shape, with a comparatively narrow 
base and a bulging glans. 



The contrast between the ugly man of 456 and the youth of 458 is instructive. 
Ona? stayr in 329 the line of the corona is apparent on the outiside of the 
penis, whereas it is invisible in the same artist's portrayal of a young 
athlete 326 despite the great similarity of the figures in all other anatomical 
features below the neck. ... The running satyr in 295 has a penis almost as 
long as his thigh.



There seems little doubt that in 52 and 66 the painters' intention was to 
portray



?????????????? CIRCUMCISED SLAVES.



Circumcision was familiar to the Athenians as a feature of visitors or slaves. 



In 699, the painter has taken care to expose the Egyptian circumcised penises, 
the glans spotted, while 



??????????????? HERAKLES' UNCIRCUMCISED PENIS



is half the width of the Egypitans'. Herodotos expresses aesthetic disapproval 
of the practice



"Our nation leaves their genitals as they were at birth. The Egyptians on the 
other hand circumside their genitals for the sake of cleanliness, choosing to 
be clean rather than



???????????????? OF SEEMLY APPEARANCE (ii 36 3-37.2)



Aristophanes (Aves 504) puns on two senses of 'cut' (psolos) in a joke about 
the Egyptians. 

?

???????????????? A. Who's peeled the cock?

????????????????? B. These men, if they're given two drakhmai pay, will carry 
their arms in triumph over the whole of Boiotia.



Also in Ploutos, 265:



"Oh, here he's back again. The old man who's filthy,m hunchbacked, wretched, 
wrinkled, bald, toothless, and by the Gods, I think he's circumcised [psolos], 
too."



"The herm which stood at almost every Athenian front door consisted of a 
square-setion stone pillar surmounted by a head of Hermesand adorned, halfway 
down, with [gross, too big. JLS] genitals, the penis erect."



cfr. C. Osborne, 



herm: 







1727-41 CHAMBERS Cycl. s.v., Athens abounded
more than any other place in hermes's.













herm. "A sculpture in the form of an armless bust or head of a man surmounting 
a shaft tapering towards the bottom. It appeas in greek art from the 6th 
century BC (the name derives from the God Hermes) and originally exhibited a 
phallus on the shaft. Such herms were set up in Athens at street corners and 
outside the city as milestones. From the 4th cent BC the herm was increasingly 
domesticated and used for portrait and other heads, sometimes copied from 
full-length statutes. Since the *Renaissance it has been part of the general 
vocabulary of decorative art."











Decorative? Not for Alkibiades and his Troop!









Cheers,











JL












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