May 29, 2007
Fascinating Stuff
(David - photo by Richard Carter)
In the domain of pleasures, for instance, the longer prepuce often serves as the object of erotic interest and as a signifier of the sexually attractive male, as demonstrated by the following ribald passage from the Lexiphanes of Lucian:
"Surely," I said, "you don't mean that notable Dion, that lusty, low-scrotumed, cuntish, and mastic-chewing youth who masturbates and gropes whenever he sees someone with a large penis [πεωδη] and a long prepuce [ποσθωνα]?"
Lucian is not satirizing the fact that a long prepuce should function as the visual cue that triggers Dion's erotic responses. On the contrary, he is satirizing Dion's general lack of decorum and self-control in the face of such self-evident visual stimulants. The desirability of the long prepuce, hence, remains beyond question.
The eroticization of the prepuce is also evident in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, where the lusty father-in-law, pressing to his face a garment owned and worn by the young and handsome poet Agathon, exclaims: "By Aphrodite, this has a pleasant smell of [a little] prepuce [ποσθη]!" The diminutive posthion (ποσθιον), as opposed to the standard word posthe (ποσθη), is most likely used here as a term of endearment.
-- Frederick M. Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics
and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme (in the The Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
The most erudite piece I have ever read on such an entertaining subject.
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November 03, 2005
The Center
"This illustration from William Cuningham's The Cosmographical Glasse (1559) represents Ptolemy's conception of the universe. Atlas, dressed like an ancient king, bears on his shoulders an armillary sphere representing the universe. In the center of the sphere is earth, made up of the elements of earth and water. Surrounding the earth are two more elemental spheres, for air and for fire. Other bands represent the spheres of the planets, the firmament of fixed stars, the crystalline sphere, the primum mobile, and the signs of the zodiac. Below Atlas are lines on cosmological themes from Virgil's Aeneid." ----taken from world treasures of the Library of Congress
I've always been so much fond of the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe. And it is accurate in conceptual terms if not scientific: the Earth is currently the center of my Universe! :-)
Posted by claudia Permalink