Phallic Fullness Fractured

I happen to be taking a course on Ancient Greek mythology which provides me with endlessly fascinating peaks into this Classical culture. My vague familiarity with it comes from a childhood of loving myths, briefly living in Athens, and attending a college where we spent our Freshman year reading Ancient Greek texts and studying the language. This course, or rather than erudite professor, is a fountain of information into the culture.

Most of it does not concern art or artifacts so I have not had cause to mention it but today I learned about herms and simply had to find an image to confirm what I had been told. Basically, herms were simple block sculptures with a head of bearded Hermes, and a phallus towards the bottom. The one to the left is in the Istanbul Archeological Museum, and is supposed to be from the 5th century BCE. They were placed at crossroads and borders. They were also placed outside homes as good luck, to protect the inhabitants from any bad fate entering the domestic realm.

They are not dissimilar to the gargoyles placed on cathedrals to keep devilish spirits from profaning the house of god. Walter Burkert adds in his book, Greek Religion, that a tribe of chimpanzees do something similar. In order to guard the tribal area, male chimps take turns standing on the borders with erect penises. After several hours, one group is retired and another group of male chimps intimidates any potential enemies with their ugly faces and full erections.

These were mentioned in class because all the herms in Athens were vandalized the night before the greatest armada ever gathered by Athens was to depart on a mission to Sicily as a part of the brutal Peloponnesian War. This was considered an extremely bad omen, though the armada sailed. Around the same time, the Eleusinian mysteries were profaned.

General Alcibiades was accused of the herm destruction but the armada had already sailed and he did not stand trial (short version, believe me). The Athenian elders noticed that many of those who seemed to be involved in this rising disrespect of the rituals and customs had been students of Socrates. Ten years later Socrates would stand trial for corrupting the youth because some mocked the secrets and attacked phallic statuary.