Priapus

Fresco de Príapo weighing his member in a scale against the gain obtained from the fields (house of the Vettii, Pompeii).

Recorded with image of Príapo

In Greek mythology, Príapos (from ancient Greek: Πρίαπος [Príapos]) is a rustic minor god of fertility, both of vegetation and of all things. animals related to agricultural life, as well as male genitalia. He was worshiped as protector of the herds of goats and sheep, of bees, of wine, of garden products and even of fishing. Priapus is characterized by his enormous and permanent erection, which gave rise to the medical term priapism. He became a popular figure in Roman erotic art and Latin literature, and is the subject of the often humorously obscene collection of verse called the Priapeos.

Functions and origin

Príapo used to be represented with a huge phallus in a perpetual erection or in a phallic position, a symbol of the fertilizing force of nature. The Romans used to place statues of Priapus in their gardens, usually in the shape of crude fig-wood herms, stained with vermilion (hence the god was called ruber or rubicundus), with a huge erect phallus, carrying fruit on his clothing and a sickle or cornucopia in hand. Its function was to guarantee an abundant harvest. Priapus warded off the evil eye and his statue protected the orchards from thieves. Like other protective divinities of agricultural arts, he was believed to possess prophetic powers and is sometimes mentioned in the plural.

However, others show how the poets invented comic and obscene situations for Priapus, giving him a greater literary prominence than he enjoyed in rites and religion, although masked phallic figures were prominent on many festive occasions, both in Greece Like in the Roman world.

According to some mythographers, their original places of worship were the cities of Asia Minor located on the Hellespont, particularly Lampsacus. For this reason he was sometimes called “Helespontic.” Later, his cult would spread to Greece and Italy. The oldest Greek poets, such as Homer or Hesiod, do not mention Priapus, and Strabo expressly states that he was only lately the object of divine worship.

Priapus had so many traits in common with the other fertility gods that the Orphics identified him with their mystics Dionysus, Hermes, Helios, and so on. Attic legends relate him to beings as sensual and licentious as Conisalos, Ortanes, Fonile and Ticone. In some ways his equivalent in Roman mythology, where he was much more popular than in Greek, was Mutinus Mutunus, the personification of the fruitful power of nature.

Lucian tells in On the Dance that Priapus was considered a warrior god in Bithynia, a rustic tutor of the infant Ares.

Mythology

Birth

Priapo-Mercurio

Priapus is often considered the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. It is said that she had given in to the embraces of Dionysus, but during his expedition to India she was unfaithful to him and lived with Adonis (who would be her father according to a scholium On Lycophron indicated by Kerényi 1951). When Dionysus returned, Aphrodite returned to her side, but soon left him again and went to Lampsacus to give birth to the son of the god. Hera, disappointed by Aphrodite's behavior, touched her and her magical power caused her to give birth to an extremely ugly son with unusually large genitalia. In Helicon (Boeotia) the writer and traveler Pausanias pointed out a statue of Priapus that was "worth seeing":

This god is worshiped where the goats and sheep graze or where there are bees' swarms, but the people of Lampsaco worship him more than any other god, calling him the son of Dioniso and Aphrodite.

However, according to other sources Priapus was the son of Dionysus and a Naiad or Chione and gave his name to the Anatolian city of Priapus, present-day Karabiga, while others also describe him as the son of Adonis with Aphrodite, from Hermes, or a long-eared father, that is, Pan or a satyr.

Lotis

In Ovid's Fasti, the goddess Hestia fell asleep drunk at a banquet, and Priapus took this opportunity to try to rape her. With her stealth, she approached him, and just as he was going to embrace her, one of Silenus's donkeys (host of the banquet) alerted the rest of the guests with "shrill brays." Lotis woke up and rejected Priapus, but her true salvation was to be transformed into a lotus flower. To make him pay for spoiling this opportunity, Priapus killed the donkey. This anecdote served to explain why in the city of Lampsacus, where Priapus was worshiped among the offspring of Hermes, donkeys were sacrificed as a libation.

Priapus and the Donkeys

In addition to the above, other legends explained the reason for these sacrifices. According to one of them, Hestia was warned by a donkey when Priapus was going to rape her (and for this very reason, donkeys were crowned with flowers at Hestia's party). Another legend tells that the origin is in a fight that Priapus had with an ass (to which Dionysus had granted the gift of speech) over the size of their respective male members. Priapus won and killed the donkey, though he later felt sorry for it and took it up to the stars.

Art

During excavations in Pompeii, a famous fresco of Priapus was discovered painted on the walls of the vestibule of the Vettii house. It is believed that the function of this fresco was to counteract the evil eye of those envious of the wealth of the Vettii, two wealthy merchants from the city who spent large sums to decorate their mansion.

Epithets and attributes

Invocation of Príapo. Recorded of the nineteenth century of a supposed basrrelieve of Pompeya.

• Epithets:
  • δροσάθων Androsathōn, ‘with male genitals’;
  • Itífalo (γθφαλος) Ithifalls), ‘ erect phase’.
• Attributes: falo in erection.
• Sanctuary: Lamp, Civic, Mount Helicón.
• Sacrifices: milk, honey, cakes, rams, donkeys and fish.

The name and its derivatives

• The Turkish city of Karabiga was formerly Príapo, so called in Príapo's honor.
• Priapatios He was a king of the Parto Empire.
• His name is Priapeos (in Latin, Priapea) to a collection of about 80 elegant yet indecent Latin poems about Príapo.
• In medicine, it's called Priapism a painful and prolonged erection without sexual excitement.
• Priapula it's a pseudocelloid invertebrate animal foil.
• Priapella It is a kind of fish of the family of the fish.
• Priapellini is the tribe to which the gender is named Priapella.
• Priapichthys It is a kind of fish of the family of the fish.