Priapeia
The Priapeia (or Carmina Priapea) is a collection of eighty (in some editions ninety-five) anonymous short Latin poems in various meters on subjects pertaining to the phallic god Priapus.
However, it has recently been argued that the 80 poems are in fact the work of a single author, presenting a kind of biography of Priapus from his vigorous youth to his impotence in old age.
[2] Not counting the last few poems, which seem not to be part of the original collection, the Priapeia consists of 80 epigrams (average length 6 to 8 lines) mainly written in either hendecasyllables or elegiac couplets, with a few also in scazons.
Many of the epigrams are written as though they were to be engraved on the walls of a shrine[3] containing a statue of the god Priapus that stood in the midst of gardens as the protector of the fruits that grew in them.
[6] In the past one theory was that the Priapeia were the work of a group of poets who met at the house of Maecenas, amusing themselves by writing tongue-in-cheek tributes to the garden Priapus.
However, since a study by the German scholar Vinzenz Buchheit in 1962, the theory has gained ground that they are the work of a single poet illustrating Priapus's decline from a vigorous youth to an impotent old age.
These explanatory notes address such diverse topics as oral sex (fellatio and cunnilingus), irrumation, masturbation, bestiality, sexual positions, eunuchism, phalli, religious prostitution, aphrodisiacs, pornography, and sexual terminology, but are not always accurate scholarly reflections of ancient Roman practices.
[11] In their "Introduction" to the Priapeia, Smithers and Burton claim that "The worship of Priapus amongst the Romans was derived from the Egyptians, who, under the form of Apis, the Sacred Bull, adored the generative Power of Nature," adding that "the Phallus was the ancient emblem of creation, and representative of the gods Bacchus, Priapus, Hermaphroditus, Hercules, Shiva, Osiris, Baal and Asher, who were all Phallic deities."
For example, in the first group of 14 poems, the god's oversized phallus is referred to in a number of different ways (mentula, partī, inguen, tēlum, columna and so on).
[19] Another argument concerns the subject matter of the poems themselves, which like the collections of love poetry of the poets of the time of Augustus, show the course of an affair from its beginning to its end.
In poem 26 he confesses that he is worn out by sex (effutūtus) and thin and pale (macerque pallidusque) and complains that the neighbouring women give him no rest.
In poem 56 he is mocked by a thief and shown the middle finger (impudīcum digitum) because his phallus is only made of wood, and he is reduced to calling on his master to perform the punishment.
[23] Another piece of evidence is that certain words in the poems, such as circitor ("watchman"), rubricatus ("painted red"), prūrīgo ("sexual desire") and so on, are not used until writers of the time of Nero or later.
[25] For example, it has been argued that the long -ō in spondaic words like virgō and ergō (in 11 out of 13 cases in the Carmina Priapea) is closer to Ovid's practice than that of Martial, where the -o is usually short.
95 in Smithers and Burton's edition of the Priapeia) is a 50-line poem in hexameters in which Priapus recounts how the garden he was guarding, a former graveyard, was plagued by witches until suddenly the wood of his backside split open with a loud farting noise and scared them off.
