Just an update.
Posted on 11/06/2018 9:39:09 AM PST by ETL
As men relieved themselves at the public toilets in the coastal city of Antiochia ad Cragum some 1,800 years ago, they probably would have been amused by dirty scenes crafted into floor mosaics, archaeologists have found.
"We were stunned at what we were looking at," said Michael Hoff, an archaeologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"You have to understand the myths to make it really come alive, but bathroom humor is kind of universal as it turns out."
The two mosaic scenes twist common tropes in Greek and Roman art. Narcissus is typically shown falling in love with his own reflection in water. In the mosaic at Antiochia ad Cragum, which was likely created in the second century, only half of the scene is preserved —but, Hoff told Live Science, "it's the good half."
Narcissus is shown with an uncharacteristically long nose, which would have been considered ugly by the beauty standards of the time. He looks down, presumably admiring the reflection of his conspicuous p____ instead of his face.
In myth, Zeus disguised himself as an eagle to kidnap the Trojan adolescent Ganymede and make him a cupbearer to the gods. (The myth offered a model for relationships between men and adolescent boys in ancient Greece.) In art depicting that abduction, Ganymede is often shown holding a stick and rolling hoop as a toy.
In the image in the latrine, Ganymede instead holds tongs with a sponge, a reference to the sponges that would have been used for wiping the toilet. And Zeus is not an eagle but a heron, with a long beak grasping a sponge and dabbing Ganymede's p____.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
They had a song called “Detachable Penis” ...
It achieved a certain notoriety.
I guess it did, with that title...
But nature gave you,
A second chance.
You stopped to fart,
And s—t your pants.
The really scatty stuff is (or at least used to be) in a private area in the Naples museum. Michael Grant (and probably others) did a book about those exhibits.
Oh my, you’re good! LOL
That's probably where it was, then. We had an Italian host, slightly older, who was an archaeologist and who took us there, so he probably got us into that collection. He was so dry and matter-of-fact, it was not really all that titillating; just naughty. It's sort of a part of classical Italian culture to walk up to the line between naughty and nasty and not go over into violence porn as is now ubiquitous around the world. At least, not far over the line—sort of a sexual self-confidence that was in contrast to the Puritan heritage still in the American air back in the mid-60s. If an Italian youth wolf-whistled or made passes at us and we weren't interested, they just smiled and shrugged instead of resorting to put-downs or aggressiveness like American frat boys—if not us, soon there would be another woman who would like them! It was quite an education to note the difference.
Just an update.
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