In the Vatican Museums in Rome, a group of tourists stands in front of one of the showpieces: The statue of Laocoön and His Sons (also known as the Laocoön Group).
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The roughly 2,000-year-old sculpture stands at a little over two meters in height, and depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons. He is said to have advised his compatriots against bringing the Greeks' wooden horse into the city because he suspected it was a trick.
And it was. Warriors were hiding in the horse, which sealed the downfall of Troy. That was the plan of the gods, and because Laocoön wanted to interfere with them with his warning, they had him and his children killed by snakes.
An exciting story from an ancient period, but one detail in particular catches the eye of the tourists: Laocoön's penis is extremely small — and his is not the only one. Throughout the museum, there are statues of muscular men with tiny genitals.
People in the group wonder why the sculptors of antiquity endowed men so modestly. One Dutch tourist, who mentions with a grin that as a retired gynecologist he's not necessarily an expert on "the bottom part of male anatomy," nevertheless offers his theory: "Statistically speaking, southern European penises are supposed to be smaller than those from the north," he says.
That was definitely not the reason, clarifies archaeologist and guide: "For the ancient Greeks and Romans, large genitals were considered ugly," she explains. "The stonemasons modeled only small genitals because they wanted to make it clear: This man is a rational intellectual, and as such he has his urges under control."
Thus, the ancient man had a high degree of self-control and knew how to control himself — unlike the barbarians and some gods, including Dionysus, the god of wine, pleasure and ecstasy. He is usually surrounded by satyrs — a short half-man, half-goat (or horse) creature, always naked and depicted as being animalistic and hideous. They celebrated debauched feasts and amused themselves with the nymphs who lived in the forests.
"These gods and forest spirits were voluptuous, and their genitals were depicted accordingly," Chiara says. Dionysus' son Priapos, whom he fathered with the goddess of love Aphrodite, clearly had the largest. She abandoned the child with the abnormally huge phallus in the mountains. There, shepherds found him, raised him and revered him as a fertility bringer because of his impressive privates.