The Roman roots of the Dulwich Wood Penis Gang

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… in Dulwich Wood – a charming fragment of the medieval Great North Wood in south London – the self-dubbed ‘Penis Gang’ have been at work. The gang have been daubing huge penises, in red, black and green, on ancient tree trunks and branches. Sophia Money-Coutts, author and etiquette expert of our times, recently discovered the drawings as she walked her dog, Dennis, in the woods.

We prudish 21st-century westerners struggle to understand how relaxed the Romans were about genitalia

It’s all disgusting, of course. But the dog walkers of Dulwich can comfort themselves with the fact that penis graffiti has an ancient lineage. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Romans were completely obsessed with their members.

Roman schoolboys, like all schoolboys, loved scrawling willies on walls and no doubt on trees too. In the 1st century ad paedagogium – a boys’ school – in Rome, by the Circus Maximus, there’s a graffito of an erect cock and balls in profile. Nearby, at the Domus Tiberiana, also from the 1st century ad, there’s another graffito of the head of a man with an oversized penis for a nose.

It isn’t just crude graffiti of penises that survive across the Roman empire. In 2018, fantastically rude 2nd century ad mosaics were discovered on the floor of a latrine at Antiochia ad Cragum in Turkey. In one picture, Narcissus, instead of being obsessed with his own reflection, is fixated on his vast phallus. Another mosaic shows Ganymede, the best-looking mortal in Greek mythology, who was carried away by Zeus, disguised as an eagle, to be his cupbearer. In the Turkish mosaic, Zeus is still an eagle, but he’s reduced to a demeaning role, cleaning Ganymede’s large penis.