Priapus- Roman GodDeity"Guardian of Gardens"

The Curse

Juno struck him in the womb. His mother was Venus, his father Bacchus, and Juno's jealousy ensured the child would be born grotesque: misshapen and permanently, enormously erect. Venus rejected him. Shepherds near Lampsacus on the Hellespont raised him instead, and he grew into a god of exactly the world they inhabited. Not marble temples and state processions, but goat pens and orchards where fruit needed guarding and the soil needed blessing.

The Speaking Statues

Roman gardeners carved his likeness from wood, painted it red, fitted it with a pruning knife, and set it at the garden's edge. The statue faced outward: part scarecrow, part god. Virgil mentions him in the Georgics as a standard fixture of Italian horticulture.

The Priapeia, a collection of anonymous Latin verses, give the statues a voice. In poem after poem, the wooden Priapus addresses passersby, warns off thieves, and threatens trespassers with sexual violence in language that is deliberately, extravagantly crude. The humor was the point. Martial picked up the tone in his own epigrams, and Tibullus placed Priapus in an elegy as a comic advisor on love. He was a god people laughed at and prayed to in the same breath.

The Donkey

Ovid tells the story twice in the Fasti, with different victims. In one version, Priapus crept toward the sleeping nymph Lotis at a feast of the gods, stepping carefully over the other drunken guests. Just as he reached her, a donkey brayed. Lotis woke, screamed, and every god in the grove saw Priapus standing there exposed. In the other version, it was Vesta he approached, and the donkey belonged to Silenus. The result was the same: humiliation. Priapus demanded that donkeys be sacrificed to him ever after. During the Vestalia, donkeys were garlanded and given a day's rest from labor, a detail Ovid connects to the same story. The animal that ruined Priapus got a holiday.