A Schlong Time Ago: Let's Talk Dicks

For better or worse we live in a world where bigger is considered better. This wasn’t always the case however. Visit any Classical museum and you’re bound to see beautiful white marble statues of Greek and Roman heroes in their birthday suits, with rippling muscles but by our standards severely lacking in the dick-department. This is because this was the beauty standard of the Ancient Greeks and later the Romans, small willies were considered the height of sophistication. Big dongs were at best comedic and at worst, downright vulgar. 

A nice close up of The Farnese Hercules, copy of The Weary Hercules by Lysippos, 3rd century B.C.E. Arguably the greatest hero in Greek or Roman mythology, showing size doesn’t matter 

Size (or rather lack thereof) is not the most interesting feature of ancient Greek schlongs, rather what they were doing with said members. Let me introduce you to theKynodesme. The Greeks famously loved sports, starting the Olympics around 776 B.C.E. Of course you probably weren’t going to find cycling or table tennis, but rather sweaty naked Greek dudes, wrestling while covered in olive oil.* But if these fellas were naked, what's the polite thing to do with your bits? This is where the Kynodesme or Dog-tie comes in handy. Basically the gist is a cord that's tied tightly around the foreskin which could then be angled upwards and tied around the waist, exposing the scrotum, or angled kinda downward and curled to the side.** This keeps dangly bits (somewhat) out of the way, and protects their modesty, nudity was fine (encouraged even) but it was poor form to show the glans or head. 

As far as we can tell this was worn whenever they did sports. An excellent example is the bronze statue “The Boxer” made somewhere between the 4th and 2nd century B.C.E, found in Rome in 1885 . The statue is a shockingly detailed depiction of a boxer after a fight. Naked as the day he was born except for some hand-wraps and the kynodesme keeping him out of the way. If you’re interested there is a very cool 3D scan of this statue that you can check out here. Personally I’ve spent a lot of time looking at his junk trying to wrap my head around the kynodesme, but the statue is overall incredible. 

Close up of “The Boxer” 

All of this pulling on the foreskin helped guys achieve another aspect of Grecian penile-perfection, and that is to have a long foreskin. I must admit I’ve been out of the hetero-dating pool for a while so I don’t have much hands-on experience with what guys are working with these days, so let's fall back on statistics. In the 1950’s approximately 80% of baby boys were circumcised, one of the key reasons (but by no means the only reason) that people cited for having the procedure done was aesthetics, which is obviously a big shift away from loving the turtle-neck the way the Greeks did. The percentage of babies having this procedure done in the following decades has steadily decreased, currently only around 15-20% of boys are circumcised.(Triple J, 2018) So are we slowly coming back around to the look that the ancient Greeks loved so much? 

Achilles binding a wound on Patroclus’ arm, while Patroclus is free balling. To describe his foreskin, scholars have said it “decorously drapes” (Hodges, 2001) across his foot, which is a phrase I never thought I’d ever hear in relation to foreskin length.

Even when it was erect it was more polite and desirable to have a long, delicately tapered foreskin that was not pulled back. 

I don’t really have a conclusion or any point to this blog post if I’m being honest. We have a couple of uncut dong options, to at least try and relate this post to products that we sell, check them out here and here. 

Funtasia Sexpert and Classical Dick Specialist 

Verin Sampson 

*If they do this at Paris 2024 I might actually watch the Olympics this year.

 ** Check out the Wikipedia article, the (NSFW) photos are much more clear than my description. 

Sources 

Hodges, F.M. (2001) ‘The ideal prepuce in ancient Greece and Rome: Male genital aesthetics and their relation to Lipodermos, circumcision, foreskin restoration, and the KYNODESME’,Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 75(3), pp. 375–405. doi:10.1353/bhm.2001.0119. 

Triple J. (2018)Why are Australian men no longer getting circumcised?,triple j. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/why-are-australians-no-longer-getting-circumcised/10338572 (Accessed: 28 April 2024).