This entire sequence - the next five pages - has been turned into a slide show with music, off-site.

This bronze satyr killing a snake, 44 cm high and 2350 years old, is from the mysterious civilisation of Etruria in northwestern Italy. He originally supported a large vase.

Unlike most satyrs, his penis is neither outsized nor erect.

On this bronze Etruscan pot from Pareneste (Palestrina), wing-heeled Hermes brings three goddesses to Paris (seated) for his judgement.

The 63cm high pot is finely detailed

This larger-than-life bronze youth was fished up near the Greek island of Antikythera (along with the amazing Antikythera mechanism) in 1900. He was cast about 340 BCE, probably by Euphranor. He originally held something in his right hand, perhaps an apple. He has a prominent acroposthion and a visible corona.

This bronze statue of a victorious athlete touching the olive wreath on his brow was fished out of the Adriatic Sea near Fano, Italy in 1964. It was probably made ~300-100BCE for a shrine at Olympia or Delphi. and plundered from Greece by Rome in a ship that was wrecked.

Though realistic, his penis is small after the Greek ideal. Despite centuries of submersion and encrustation, what may be the realistic detail of a superficial dorsal vein has survived.

The Dying Gaul shows a Celt from Galatia, whom the Greeks regarded as barbarian, so they did not give him a classic small penis.

The artist has shown his acroposthion, like his scrotum and public hair, in detail.

Laocoön warned the Trojans against "Greeks bearing gifts". Poseidon sent sea serpents to strangle him and his sons as punishment. This group, thought to be made ~40-20 BCE by Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus from the island of Rhodes, was unearthed in 1506 near the site of the Domus Aurea of the Emperor Nero.

Lacoön's acroposthion may be damaged, but his and his sons' penises are among the few in the Vatican Museum that have not been attacked with hammers or bowdlerised with drapes or figleaves.

This 2500-year-old Greek satyr's penis is comically large, his foreskin still covering most of his glans.

Nymphs beware!

"Thou foster-child of silence and slow time...
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

- Keats

This amphora, painted by Euthymides, son of Polias, over 2500 years ago, was found in Vulci in Etruria.

The reveller's small penis is typical.

Why so small?

We should never assume that the Greeks, Romans and Etruscans considered images of penises as we do. They used them on amulets to ward off the evil eye, with perhaps no more thought for sexuality than we consider crossed fingers to be a Christian symbol. And the fertility of plants, beasts and people was ever an issue, since it could not be taken for granted or brought under human control by material means.

Roman gold amulet, 1st century CE, about 1 cm across

London, British Museum

"Herms" were common in ancient Greece, protecting the area if paid due reverence.

Why always covered?

The Greeks considered only the glans, not the whole penis, to be obscene. In the gymnasium, men kept their glanses out of sight by tying a thong (kynodesme) around their foreskins, and Hellenised Jews sought foreskin restoration to make that possible. The "red-tipped" phallus that the Chorus of The Clouds disdained would have belonged to a circumcised Egyptian (leather intact phalluses were part of the costume in all comedies, including The Clouds). The glans was only shown on purely phallic images, such as those used in religious festivals. On those, the artists showed wrinkling to indicate the foreskin.

Even on the point of penetration, erotic images showed the foreskin as fully forward.