Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Why Were Ancient Dicks So Small?

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Have you ever been puzzled by proportions when looking at Ancient Greek statues? It can't just be us.From quarrying the stone to chipping away the final touches on your masterpiece - sculpting is a drawn out process. So why, after possibly years of work, did Ancient Greek artists make penises so small?Kate is joined by Professor Caroline Vout to find out what these sculptors meant by their statues' modest members, and what this tells us about the Ancient world.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Find the History Hit film 'Dicking About' here: https://access.historyhit.com/videos/dicking-aboutPlease vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You've come back. Oh, I'm so pleased that you have. You came back despite being warned that the show is going to contain rude content,

you absolute trooper. Well, I have to tell you again, I'm afraid. This is an adult podcast, welcome about adults to other adults, about adulty things, and an adulty wake-fing arranged adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. But if it didn't stop you last time, it's not going to stop you this time. Right, on with the show.

Take him in, Betwikers. There he stands, 10 foot five of rippling muscles, abundant curls, and, well, a bottom that he could bounce a penny off, quite frankly. This is quite clearly a statue of a man who has never mislegged day or arm day or back day or toe day. Here he is, leaning on a club draped with the skin of a lion he's just killed. This is Hercules, the Greek demigod carved from marble and shown to be at the end of his 12 labours. But let's wander around to the front, shall we? His eyes are downcast. He looks

exhausted. He has a magnificent beard, to be sure. And if we thought he looked hench from the back, just look at those arms and those abs. And if we go down a little bit further, well, oh, oh, oh, well, that's just rather disappointing, isn't it? All those rippling abs and pecks and glistening masculinity, and the artist has decided to go with a rather modest, manhood. Hmm. What is going on here? What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, K. Lister. When you imagine a male nude statue from the ancient world,

the odds are that we're all thinking of the Greeks, or people influenced by the Greeks, just it's mostly Greek themed. They have dominated the field with their bulging muscles and power stances. But while the ancient Greek influence extends far beyond these marble bodies, there is one thing that doesn't seem to extend very far at all. Aha, they're members. Willis, dicks, pricks, weaners, Toddard,

no matter what you call them, our society is obsessed with them. And for us, however unfair it may be, and it is unfair, we are convinced that bigger is better. We talk about big dick energy and what that means, and all porn stars have penises that you could club something to death with. But that wasn't the case in the ancient world. So why were the penises on ancient statues so small and when did the trend change? In this episode, I am rolling up my sleeves and I'm going to find out with a fabulous Carrie Vout. Carrie is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, no less,

and she joined me to discuss this very topic on the new history hit documentary, Dicking About, which you can now watch on History Hit TV. But for now, pants down, measuring tapes out. Let's get on with it. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caroline Vout, Howie. are you doing? I'm really well, thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming back to talk to us. And we've spoken off the podcast as well. We've spoken as part of the new history hit documentary

dicking about. We have. And huge fun. It was too. It was so much fun. This is a question that I'm sure every classics professor has been asked, every art curator has been asked, every classicist museum curator has been asked why are the penises on the statues so small? I'm sure you've been asked that before. I've been asked it a lot. It's the question I usually get asked when I go out to schools to give schools talks.

The first hand will go up and you know what they're going to ask. Yeah, I mean, your guess is as good as mine, but my sense is that it's aesthetic that by the time you get to the 5th century BC, which is the sort of body types that we're talking about when we think about

Greek sculpture. Why do we think about the ones conceived of in that period? Well, because they're the ones that are what we now call naturalistic. Okay. You know, they look like they're trying to look like a real body. I always think of them as naked. Were they naked more than usual people were naked? Is that just in my fervid imagination? They weren't naked walking around the streets doing their shop. You know, that wasn't what they were doing. But, you know, you think of them as not wearing any clothes. I do. I do. So many of their statues show them not wearing any clothes, or at least the male ones do. There we go on to talk about in a bit, I suppose. As for whether they had no clothes on in real life, sure, when they got in the shower, they had no clothes on. But the difference is that they did athletics without any clothes on. That is an interesting twist, isn't it?

It's an interesting twist. And, you know, why they did athletics without any clothes on, your guess is as good as mine. The ancient texts actually really sort of worry about it themselves, right? They knew that they didn't always perform athletics without clothes. If you read the Iliad, for example, there are athletic games associated with funerals, and it's, you know, they're not romping around naked. But by the time you get to, you know, the classical period, they are. All of these stories as to kind of why that might be the case

as they try and come to terms with their own cultural practice. And one of the best stories is that, you know, there's a runner running around and his loincloth falls off and he trips on it. And so it's a sort of health and safety issue that you have to remove your clothes. But I think it must be about, in some sense, is not having anything to hide, making everybody equal in the eyes of spectators. But for whatever reason it starts, it becomes very much defining of what it means to do Greek athletics and what it means to be Greek as opposed to a non-Greek, a foreigner, a barbarian in the eyes of the Greeks. So it becomes a marker of civilisation. I mean, we still have lots of debates that go on around what's appropriate to wear at the gym today. I see those all the time.

And to think that the Greeks were just, no, we're just in the buff. I mean, there weren't mixed sex, though, were they their gyms? No, no. I mean, if you think about the Olympic Games, it's just male competitors. And they didn't have their bits flopping around. They used to tie them up. Right. Okay. What that looked like in practice, we're not really sure. But there are some representations of that on Greek vase painting, for example. And actually, there's a brilliant bronze sculpture of a boxer survives from Rome that shows his genitals sort of tucked in that kind of way. So were there girls when they were doing their... I don't even if they did.

exercises? Would they have been naked? It was this very much all boys together that it was men watching, it was men competing, this is a macho environment. Yeah, no, this is boys together. I mean, there are some evidence for female running races, for example. We wouldn't want to run in the nip, would you? That would be awful. The women, certainly, if they were doing exercises, were not doing that without any place on. No. No, you need some kind of support. That would just be crazy. So the Greeks have got a culture of nudity and then there's nude bathing and they love a statue being nude as well and it seems to me to be a very macho society. They really like looking at men naked. Maybe they don't, maybe that's unfair of me but it seems like a very macho thing.

They do. I mean, you know, if you think about early art that was made in the Aegean, for example, already in 2,800 BC through to 2000 BC, then you get figurines of men and women without any clothes on. How very exciting. But by the time you get to 700 BC or just after 650, you're getting monumental sculptures. So sculptures that are life size or larger than life size. And those show usually the men without clothes

and usually the women with clothes or the women always with clothes the men usually without clothes that's not to say that we don't have at that period figurines that show women without any clothes on as a little ivory for example that was found in a tomb in Athens that dates to end of the 8th century BC

but by the time you're getting into the 7th century you've already got what looks like a kind of formula men appear in freestanding monumental marble form showing off their prowess, their virtue by virtue of being without clothes, whereas the women's goodness lies in their adornment, in their drapery, in the hours that they spent with the curling tongs doing their hair and putting on their jewellery. And when they did start doing big old nude statues of women, it does sort of seem like

the Greeks lost it, that they couldn't handle that very well. Or at least that's, or it was written down about the statue, is it Aphrodite of Canidas? Yeah, so according to the mythology, I suppose, the first freestanding, monumental, female nude is this statue of Aphrodite that winds up in a sanctuary in Canidas, which is Asia Minor Modern Turkey. And the stories about that statue make it clear that she was really shocking to everybody on the ground at that time, so shocking that one city says, look, we don't want this. Oh, did they?

And Knaidos decide to take the risk, and they do, and they put her in their sanctuary, and she becomes a Mediterranean-wide pin-up. Now, of course, there have been representations of women without clothes on before this point, as I said in miniature form, that's not at all uncommon. There are also, you know, representations of women without clothes on, or goddesses without clothes on, from beyond the Greek world. And even in monumental form in Greece, there's been a kind of game of concealment and revealment going on with the female body for a couple of centuries prior to the Aphrodite of Canidos being unveiled in around 350 BC. You know, some of the sexiest statues, I think, that survived from antiquity of the female form are images that date to the classical period, so the 5th century BC.

and show sort of an Amazon with one breast bed or they show children of Nyebi, so mythological figures in distress being shot with arrows by Apollo and Artemis because their mum's done something terrible. So they get the, mum's been boastful, so they get it in the neck. And their distress is shown by the fact

that their clothes are falling from their bodies. It isn't just that all women are bundled up and then the female form is the Aphrodite of Kna. is suddenly without her clothes. There's been this sort of ongoing, sort of suggestive kind of thing going on. One of my favourite stories about the Aphrodite of Canidas is that some bloke broke in to wherever she was being held and said that he left a stain upon her and then was discovered and threw himself off the cliffs for shame of it.

Yeah. That's a hell of a story, sneaking into it. It's a story that's reported in more than one ancient source. And, you know, kind of when you first think about that, story, you think, hang on a minute. You know, this first ever monumental, freestanding female nude is a representation of a god. So these stories seem a bit odd because so powerful is the male gaze that that statue attracts, that it becomes so penetrative that the guy in question actually kind of gets confused and thinks that what he's looking at is not a goddess but a girl

and isn't stern but flesh and actually tries to make love to it. Yes. And as you say, then has only one option left, really, and that's to throw himself into the sea. And of course, Aphrodite is born from the sea. So, you know, maybe this is to die by suicide, but maybe it's actually the only way in which he can effectively commune with Aphrodite is by entering the waves. And I think, you know, to go back to that kind of the sense of what seems wrong with this story is that the human male, to have the power over this God. But ultimately, you know, he does end up in the water and he ends up dead.

And she is the goddess of sex. She's the goddess of love. She's the goddess of desire. She's got to make you want her. She does. That's kind of her whole deal, I suppose, isn't it? You've got to feel either shame, embarrassment, or you've got to feel turned on or she's not doing her job properly.

And you're in a culture in which you know that if you just happen to come across a goddess without any clothes on because she's taking her. a bath with her nymphs or whatever, and she doesn't want to be seen, then God help you. You know, you get turned into a stag and ripped apart by her own hunting dogs if you're acting and then you've just seen Diana. So all the time that you're looking and lusting, you know that you're in really dubious water. And that's why we can't have nice things. Let's talk about the male statues. I'm not aware of any stories of anybody becoming so overcome with lust that they try and make love to one of these male statues. Not make love to,

But by the time you get into the Roman Empire, Roman emperors are really kind of interested in Greek material culture of the kind that has been flowing into Rome with those conquests for the last couple of centuries. And the emperor Tiberius, who's the second of the Roman emperors, the one that succeeds Augustus, he becomes obsessed, according to the ancient literature, with an ancient Greek statue of an athlete. Oh, really? that stood outside a bathhouse in Rome, and he becomes so obsessed with it, and the text says he falls in love with it, that he removes it, or has it removed, and take into his bedroom. I stand corrected.

You're left to imagine what he does with this statue or wants to do with this statue in his bedroom, but before he can do anything, presumably, there's a big public outcry, because, funnily enough, they loved it too, and they want it back. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

These people are so crazy. I love it. The nude statues, one of the things that I was really quite a taken aback by when we were looking around the sculpture museum in Cambridge, it's just how ripped those men are. I mean, we talk about body beautiful today, and they looked exactly like the ideal male body form

that you get on the front of men's health magazines. They're every bit as jacked and pumped and ripped as some guy that's been, on protein shakes and low carb for the last six months? Some of them are, yeah. I mean, the statues that we were looking at, we were looking at a statue by an artist Polyclitus. He made a bronze sculpture of a spear carrier,

a man carrying a spear in about 450 BC. It doesn't survive anymore, but we have Roman marble versions of it. We were looking at that. We were also looking at a statue of a very similar kind of date of a discus thrower, the original of which was again made in bronze by Myron and they are exactly as you described right

so they've got really beautiful kind of stereotypically beautiful in our eyes male bodies that look like they've been working out quite a lot by the time you get to the Hellenistic period so a couple of centuries later the Farnasi Hercules is like them on steroids his muscles are just absolutely massive so those kind of images do promote this sense of

of gym culture, really. But I was going to say there are a variety of masculine bodies, even within monumental sculptural form. So not all of them look like that. Some of them are much slimmer. Don't look quite as kind of jacked. They give maybe a slightly sort of false impression in some senses. Yeah.

What do you think that the Greeks saw when they looked at that kind of body? Do you think it's very similar to what we see? Because I think that there's still this narrative around that kind of body we associate with control, with willpower, with discipline. I mean, we channel it all into health. But really, that's what it is. It's about, look at me, look how many cakes I didn't eat and how many heavy things I picked up. That's really what that body's doing. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the Greeks would have understood it in terms of control.

To be a Greek man in the 5th century, BC, yeah, you were lucky enough. to have been born a boy and not a girl, but you're not born a man and you have to work at it and you have to work on it in such a way that publicly you are affirmed in your masculinity by what you do and critically by what you don't do. And, you know, you need to be sufficiently in control of yourself to walk this fine line between being always performatively active and never passive, because if you're passive, that renders you an object and makes you potentially feminine and more shock, horror. Yeah, but not so overly active as to be hubristic, so as to kind of, you know, challenge the gods

or anything like that, or to be so overly active that you are out of control, so animalistic. And that's the fine line you walk. And the next question becomes, how do you represent that? And they do it with the kind of bodies that we've just been talking about. I'll be back with Carrie after this short break. So let's move on then to the million dollar question. The body beautiful is clearly very important to these people. Men and women, but men in particular are portrayed in certain ways.

And it does seem to be about control and about beauty. and then we've got the willies these beautiful like abs six packs eight packs rippling and you know flexing biceps and then these rather diminutive little packages that are there so I suppose my first question is going to be is it even true

that they are smaller than average or is it just something that we are maybe used to seeing huge penises in punography are they actually smaller than standard well I mean given that A statue like Polyclotus is spear carrier, at least in the marble versions that survive, they're bigger than life size, right? So they're about two metres tall.

Something like the Farnasi Hercules is three metres tall. So you need their genitals to be proportionately bigger in proportion. And actually, they're not, right? They are small and they're neat. But then that neatness is what's kind of crucial. It goes back to what we were saying about control. You know, the last thing you would want your image to look like was turned on, right? That's true, yeah.

It needs to look as though it's actually firmly in control of itself and all of its bits. And it's also got to be beautiful to look at. It's got to work symmetrically to satisfy the gaze and what you need that image to do. And I think that's why these genitals are small. The kinds of images in that particular period that have large genitals tend to be associated with creatures like satyrs. And satas are only half men, they're otherwise half horse, and they sort of walk the boundary between civilised and completely uncivilised behaviour. They get to do things visually that mortals aren't normally depicted doing. and they have usually erect large penises

that wouldn't look out of place on a horse They could do big penises when they wanted to And you see them cropping up, if excuse the expression Like all over the place I know it's not the Greeks but if you like the Romans They loved a penis They're all over Pompeii and they're massive those ones They are, they're all over Pompeii yeah

They're on I mean what's interesting about Pompeii is they're hanging outside From door frames They're depicted outside of door almost kind of to mark the threshold, but also kind of ward off, bad spirits. They're seen as lucky. A lucky dick. Yeah. And, you know, you get sex scenes on the walls of really quite beautifully decorated houses at Pompeii.

That's so different from our modern perspective, isn't it? It's the fact when you go into like what is effectively a family home and there's just this huge erotic fresco on the wall of where the family would have been sat, it's like watching porn hub with your grandma. It's just so, like, what were they seeing when they looked at it? They can't have been seeing what we're seeing. No, they certainly weren't. I mean, you know, I used to have a teacher here who said,

even if you could take you back to Pompeii and a Tardis, when you got out, you wouldn't understand anything it was that you were looking at because your vision is so kind of culturally contingent. In terms of where those sorts of pictures were, you get kind of really quite beautifully erotic scenes in corridor spaces, but the more graphic sex scenes tend to be in bedrooms. So they're not in the dining room, for example. In the dining room at Pompeii, you might have pictures of a sort

that you also wouldn't want in the dining room now because they're often extremely violent, but they're not sex scenes. So we've got big penises kind of associated with good luck and warding bad things off, but also associated with animal lusts. I've heard a few other theories as to why the Greeks would make their packages so small, and I'll put them to you and you can tell me what you think of it. One of them, and this is quite a dark one, is that it's about representing a juvenile body

because we know that the Greeks did have this culture of where an older man would take on a young teen boy as an apprentice, and there would be a sexual element to that. What do you think about that theory, that what we're looking at is sort of children's bodies? It depends. I mean, on Greek pots of the 6th and 5th centuries BC, you do indeed find young bodies depicted with genitals that suit the kind of putative age of that body. And you often find those bodies with older bearded men, sometimes even in the 6th century in what are obviously caught scenes. So those bodies do exist. The sculptures, though, that we were talking about before. for Polyclitis's spear carrier, for example, that's not a little boy's body.

No, the Farnesee Hercules, huge beard. The Farnozy Herculee certainly isn't, right? No. I mean, the Fonnesi, Hercules is an interesting one because, of course, he's son of Zeus, but he's got a mortal mum, and, you know, he has to kind of, it's only by virtue of his labours

that he winds up on Olympus. So, is he a god, is he a man? Is he a real kind of moot question with him? But Polyclitis is spear carrier, you know, if you look at his face, he looks about, 1819, if you look at his body, looks more like 30, 35, but he doesn't look prepubescent. So that just doesn't work as a theory for those.

No. And you've got, in a lot of examples that we were looking at, this very neat little manscape that they've got of pubic hair, this very little delicate triangle that's almost just like pointing down in most of them. Yeah, well, again, that's about nature versus culture, you know, that in nature, hair grows everywhere. Yes. And, you know, just as I said, you might have been.

lucky enough to be born a boy, but you're not born a man. You have to work at being a man. You have to work at being cultured. And a cultured body and a completely sort of wild body. A cultured body is one where it's preened and plumped at the gym and it might also be plucked. And so, you know, I think manscaping is the right kind of verb there. Another theory is that it's about making sure that these images aren't sexual. And I suppose if you had a great big swinging penis hanging off it, it would land differently. It certainly would land differently, yes. I'm not sure, though, that by giving statues small genitals, you necessarily make them non-sexy.

You might make them non-sexual, but erotics and pornography, they can be different categories. I mean, the power of desire is that it's always something that you're reaching. towards and actually that you may not ever kind of consummate. And so I think a lot of these statues are. They're erotic. They have the potential to stimulate desire in their beholder. And the ones that are made in the 5th century BC, they combine those small genitals and that really beautiful chiseled form

very often with a gaze that doesn't look out but looks down to the ground. and the moment you turn your head and look down to the ground, we read that as coy and we read it as flirtatious and it's a sort of a means of asking or inviting the viewer to stare and become the active partner that we were talking about before. So desire is very much on the cards here. You're being asked to kind of excite them. Maybe that's it.

Yeah, like a tease thing. On a very practical level, it was suggested that they're small because big penis is, snap off easily from statues. That's also true, right? If you go to museums today, you will see that anything that's made of marble in figurative form quite often has lost its penis,

has lost its nose and has lost its arms. And that's because, you know, if a statue falls over, those are the first bits to take the hit. And so, yes, I mean, if a statue had a huge penis, then it would indeed snap off. It's also not very practical. Marble is extremely expensive material. You don't want to have too much wastage.

No. And a myth has sort of sprung up that that was the Victorians going around chisling all of the penises off statues because they were so shocked by it. But I was put straight on that by people in the British Museum who were like, no, they just snapped off. That's right. I mean, that's not to say that censorship didn't happen, not just in the Victorian period, but, you know, way before that too.

But yes, I mean, unfortunately, there's a much more boring reason as to why a lot of statues no longer have their bits. So for your money, then, this is about portraying. neatness and about preserving the lines of the male body and sort of not getting distracted by an appendage. Yes, but it's also about control. I mean, the Greeks really put a premium on what they called Encrataea, the need for self-mastery. This is not the same as self-denial. It's about kind of putting yourself in situations that might kind of, you know, get you to act in ways that are uncivilised, but making sure that you don't. And, you know,

when you look at these statues, yes, they look like they've spent hours and hours romping around to get the body shapes that they do, but they also look as though they're very much in control of their self in other ways. And I think it is about that really. Why did it continue, do you think? Because that controls a big one for the Greeks, but we can see these smaller packages being repeated for centuries after Renaissance art. We've got quite little diddley ones there. Michael Angela's David. He's again, quite quite Well, I mean, I think Rome has to take the hit for that in that, you know, if you ask what a Roman body looks like, well, Roman bodies representationally would traditionally be clothed. You think about Roman bodies, you think about togas or you think about armour. And actually the Romans thought that they didn't like the idea of Greek nudity. They didn't like the idea of culture that spent all of its time in the gym. But then the Romans had an inferiority complex when it came to the Greeks. Rome was. was a latecomer to the Mediterranean stage.

Culture vultures. Greek culture was absolutely where it was at. And as we've already talked about, you know, the Romans, they expand into Greece, they bring back all of this beautiful Greek art, a lot of it without clothes. And it goes on display in their porticoes and in their temples. They get attracted by it. They want to own it. They adapt it.

They copy it. They commercialise it. They buy it on the art market. They put it in their villa gardens next to their swimming pool. and in their own gymnasia, Roman emperors, when they want to show themselves to be virtuous, performatively male in the right kinds of ways, are sometimes depicted with togas,

but increasingly as the empire progresses, are given heroic Greek-style bodies, some of which will have no clothes on. You know, Greece is part of the Roman Empire. I've got to appeal to those viewers too. And, of course, you know, how does the 15th century experience antiquity? It does it through Rome. It doesn't do it through Greece, but it's rediscovering all of this visual heritage. And that's then dictating what its

heritage looks like. So, you know, if you want to paint an image of Venus in the 1500s, then it's no surprise that it should look like the Aphrodite of Knidos that we were just talking about that had been so copied by the Romans in so many different forms. I'll be back with Carrie after this short break. As a counterpoint, I know we were talking about the penises, but I'm always interested, did the Greeks do anything with vulvas? They just seem to have been hidden away for like in art, like sort of mainstream art rather than pornography for an awfully long time.

Yeah, I mean, you do occasionally get some sort of demarcation with a little large, gesture. Yeah, in pop painting and actually in figurines. But you're absolutely right that in monumental freestanding form, like the Aphrodite of Comidas, she is without genitals in a sense. Of course, most of it was painted in antiquity. It's a bit unclear whether paint was used on some of these bodies. We have got some really exquisite terracotta figurines.

There's one I can think of in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It actually comes from Egypt, but it shows an Aphrodite-esque body with pubic hair. It's beautifully painted. But, you know, I think you're absolutely right that Aphrodite of Canidos, I think it'd be unlikely for her to have had any pubic hair. That we were talking about manscaping before, but the need to pluck and preen the female body was there in antiquity already. Women were deemed to be wilder than men.

And so you put their naked female form on display, and there's even more of an imperative to kind of control it in some senses. So as a final question then, and we're into the realms of speculation here, I guess, because we'll never know it exactly. A narrative has arisen in popular culture looking at the genitals on these statues and sort of said that people back in the ancient world preferred a smaller penis, and then that's immediately contrasted with our modern obsession, our Freudian obsession with bigger is better,

bigger powerful, you know, we want it as big as King Kong's little finger and all of that nonsense. Do you think they're like looking at those statues, we could extrapolate anything about the lived experience of your day-to-day person? Do we even have enough evidence to be able to say something like that, is that they preferred smaller penises? I don't know, you can say that. I mean, they prefer them representationally. In art. Yeah. But in life, I can't think of any Greek sources off the top of my head, But I can think of Roman ones where, you know, people are talking about juvenile and satirical poets like this, talking about dick's eyes in the bath, for example. And so the size of a penis was not a non-question in antiquity. It is still a live question.

And I think for all that the Greeks might want to think of themselves as civilized and controlled and neat and that, you know, it's the barbarian other or it's the animal world or it's satyrs that have penises that can't be kept under. control. Actually, you know, life isn't as easy as those binaries suggest and they knew that as well as we do. Oh, Kerry, you have been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, I don't have any website presence, really. So you just have to find me on the Cambridge University webpage. Fabulous. Thank you so much. You have been marvellous. Thanks, Kate. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Carrie for joining me. And if you like what you heard. Don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is, you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to email us your feedback on tiny penises, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. If you've enjoyed this, go to History Hit TV and watch our documentary on this very question. And they have a free trial so it won't cost you a bean. Otherwise, join me back on the pod wherever it was you found us today. Over the next month, we will be diving betwixt the sheets of Queens. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixta Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.

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