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.
We prudish 21st-century westerners find it hard to understand how relaxed the Romans were about genitalia. From 1821 until 2000, the most erotic finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum were locked away in the Gabinetto Segreto, or Secret Cabinet, at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Over the centuries, depending on how prudish the society of the time was, the collection has been alternately viewable or completely censored. In 1849, the doorway to the museum was even bricked up.
Now the Gabinetto Segreto is one of the most crowded rooms in the museum, crammed with tourists who gawp at statues and frescoes depicting every conceivable sexual position and partner. There are men having sex on an amphora, a statue of a satyr and a nymph hard at it and couples doing it every which way.
There are penises everywhere at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Statues and frescoes of the permanently erect fertility god Priapus were particularly popular with ordinary Romans. Roof tiles, wind chimes and oil lamps were all made in penis shapes.
At Pompeii, erotic frescoes were once concealed behind metal cabinets and only shown to men for a fee. Now they are open to all, and the crowds pour in. The most famous spot is the Lupanar, thought to be a brothel, covered with frescoes of excited couples.
When graffiti artists weren’t drawing penises, they were writing about them. In Graffiti Latini (1998), the definitive work on Latin graffiti, 95 pages are given over to obscene lines. Some of it is almost too disgusting to translate. On one taverna wall at Pompeii is the line: ‘Verecundus mentulam lingit.’ (‘Verecundus licks cock.’)
Rude graffiti was scrawled all over the streets of Pompeii, where every Roman, women and children included, could cheerfully read it.
Even in the more distant reaches of their empire, the Roman enthusiasm for penises held firm. In the north of England, the cold, bored Roman soldiers stationed along Hadrian’s Wall wiled the time away carving cocks. In 2022, a team of researchers unearthed a stone carved with a phallus in the Roman fort of Vindolanda, a mile south of Hadrian’s Wall – the 13th phallic carving unearthed in just that particular spot.
The hamlet of Dulwich wasn’t around in the Roman era, but in Anglo-Saxon times its name was Dilwysshe, meaning ‘the meadow where the dill grew’, and it’s likely that Romans grew dill there commercially to supply to Londinium, some five miles away. Given what we know of Roman habits, it’s easy to imagine there was a Roman Penis Gang operating in the same neck of the woods as the Penis Gang of Dulwich Wood.
If the modern Dulwich gang, who are naive amateurs by comparison, want a grand Latin motto, they should borrow this graffito from a Pompeii street: ‘Mentula tua iubet, amatur.’ (‘Your cock orders you around, and it’s loved.’)
Hear more from Harry Mount on the Edition podcast, where he was joined by Indian academic, and author of ‘Pha(bu)llus: A Cultural History’, Dr Alka Pande to discuss his article:
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