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Diagnosis: Ugly Dick in Ancient Greek and Rome
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grahamlore's fault and you should blame them.
So, for professional reasons, I found myself reading Frederick Hodges's "The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme", and it proved fascinating reading, because man, the Greeks were the JUDGIEST BITCHES about foreskins.
For them, the ideal foreskin was long and delicately tapered. Such famous historical figures as Galen waxed lovingly upon it. Many a sculpture and vase painting depicts it. Never was the glans to be shown, except in very specific, highly sexual situations--the Greek male version of "as long as there's no nipples showing, that's okay." They even had a specific, derogatory term for the kind of over-sexual weirdo foreigner who'd do such a thing. (You might be going, "waaaaait a minute. Is this an anti-Jewish thing?" We'll get to that, keep it in mind.)
Since some Greeks (and the non-Greeks who lived alongside them) were expected to perform in the nude (athletes, for example), they developed ways that not only prevented undignified flopping and scandalous glans-flashing, but also played to their beauty standards: namely, the kynodesme, a leather thong you tied around your foreskin to keep it shut (and then, depending on taste and profession, tied around your waist, in a bow, or to the base of your dick so it curls back on itself).
You might be thinking this caused a major cultural problem for circumcised men (not just Jews, apparently, there were probably other groups who did it), and it did. But it also caused problems for men who just naturally didn't have a long enough foreskin to cover up. Both situations became a medical diagnosis in ancient Greek (and Roman) societies: lipodermos. But fear not, you poor psolos dickhead! Modern ancient medicine can fix you!
I don't know about you, but I always kinda assumed that the medicalizing of natural individual differences was a modern thing. Nope! Been true for two thousand years! Or well, at least since roughly 47 CE, by which time Aulus Cornelius Celsus had written De Medicina (On Medicine). (Book 25 covers surgical foreskin plastic surgery, if you want it from the horse's mouth.)
The kynodesme, besides the purposes I already described, would also help stretch the foreskin into the more socially desirable state. If yours wasn't long enough to do this, there were various goops to apply that'd both make the penile skin stretchier and more swollen, or metal weights to help pull and stretch. Last ditch, there was surgery: cutting the skin at the base of the dick and then pulling the whole thing forward, tying it off with a kynodesme, and eating barely anything because god help you if you had the energy to get an erection during recovery.
The Romans took this a step further, using piercings to permanently (or semi-permanently) shut the foreskin. This was generally done on slaves (presumably as a way of showing the power you had over someone, even who and how they could fuck) or to preserve the singing voice, though even back then, a lot of people (including Aulus Cornelius Celsus) thought that was dumb.
The Greeks thought you were horny and backward and ugly if you were circumcised, but it was even more political, it seems, with the Romans. See, for both peoples, circumcision was seen as a marker of foreignness, a sign someone wasn't a proper Greek or Roman, someone overly sexual who made their dick ugly ON PURPOSE. It seems beyond coincidence that this was around the time the Romans were taking over the independent Jewish Hasmonean state and dealing with religious revolts there. There was a lot of religious conflict around this time (like the Fall of the Second Temple, the Jews being banned from Jerusalem except one day a year, mass murder of Jewish people and their supporters) and the male beauty standards around foreskins were probably wrapped up in all that. After all, it sure is an easy way to demonize another group of people when you can claim they're ugly and indecent, using a very visible feature that's hard to hide in a public bath!
I suspect that this became a really incendiary issue with the Maccabeans and the Hasmonean kingdom as a whole, but my reading on that was aaaaaages ago and I am stranded in the boonies far from a library and unable to easily hit the books. Besides, this is a stupid silly post about ancient Greco-Roman penile beauty standards, not war and oppression.
As a final note, apparently the ancient Greeks would use "foreskin" as a way to refer to a child: "oh, what a cute little foreskin!" You're welcome.
grahamlore's fault and you should blame them.So, for professional reasons, I found myself reading Frederick Hodges's "The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme", and it proved fascinating reading, because man, the Greeks were the JUDGIEST BITCHES about foreskins.
For them, the ideal foreskin was long and delicately tapered. Such famous historical figures as Galen waxed lovingly upon it. Many a sculpture and vase painting depicts it. Never was the glans to be shown, except in very specific, highly sexual situations--the Greek male version of "as long as there's no nipples showing, that's okay." They even had a specific, derogatory term for the kind of over-sexual weirdo foreigner who'd do such a thing. (You might be going, "waaaaait a minute. Is this an anti-Jewish thing?" We'll get to that, keep it in mind.)
Since some Greeks (and the non-Greeks who lived alongside them) were expected to perform in the nude (athletes, for example), they developed ways that not only prevented undignified flopping and scandalous glans-flashing, but also played to their beauty standards: namely, the kynodesme, a leather thong you tied around your foreskin to keep it shut (and then, depending on taste and profession, tied around your waist, in a bow, or to the base of your dick so it curls back on itself).
You might be thinking this caused a major cultural problem for circumcised men (not just Jews, apparently, there were probably other groups who did it), and it did. But it also caused problems for men who just naturally didn't have a long enough foreskin to cover up. Both situations became a medical diagnosis in ancient Greek (and Roman) societies: lipodermos. But fear not, you poor psolos dickhead! Modern ancient medicine can fix you!
I don't know about you, but I always kinda assumed that the medicalizing of natural individual differences was a modern thing. Nope! Been true for two thousand years! Or well, at least since roughly 47 CE, by which time Aulus Cornelius Celsus had written De Medicina (On Medicine). (Book 25 covers surgical foreskin plastic surgery, if you want it from the horse's mouth.)
The kynodesme, besides the purposes I already described, would also help stretch the foreskin into the more socially desirable state. If yours wasn't long enough to do this, there were various goops to apply that'd both make the penile skin stretchier and more swollen, or metal weights to help pull and stretch. Last ditch, there was surgery: cutting the skin at the base of the dick and then pulling the whole thing forward, tying it off with a kynodesme, and eating barely anything because god help you if you had the energy to get an erection during recovery.
The Romans took this a step further, using piercings to permanently (or semi-permanently) shut the foreskin. This was generally done on slaves (presumably as a way of showing the power you had over someone, even who and how they could fuck) or to preserve the singing voice, though even back then, a lot of people (including Aulus Cornelius Celsus) thought that was dumb.
The Greeks thought you were horny and backward and ugly if you were circumcised, but it was even more political, it seems, with the Romans. See, for both peoples, circumcision was seen as a marker of foreignness, a sign someone wasn't a proper Greek or Roman, someone overly sexual who made their dick ugly ON PURPOSE. It seems beyond coincidence that this was around the time the Romans were taking over the independent Jewish Hasmonean state and dealing with religious revolts there. There was a lot of religious conflict around this time (like the Fall of the Second Temple, the Jews being banned from Jerusalem except one day a year, mass murder of Jewish people and their supporters) and the male beauty standards around foreskins were probably wrapped up in all that. After all, it sure is an easy way to demonize another group of people when you can claim they're ugly and indecent, using a very visible feature that's hard to hide in a public bath!
I suspect that this became a really incendiary issue with the Maccabeans and the Hasmonean kingdom as a whole, but my reading on that was aaaaaages ago and I am stranded in the boonies far from a library and unable to easily hit the books. Besides, this is a stupid silly post about ancient Greco-Roman penile beauty standards, not war and oppression.
As a final note, apparently the ancient Greeks would use "foreskin" as a way to refer to a child: "oh, what a cute little foreskin!" You're welcome.