Those who have followed me for a while know that I have written a lot about Priapus and I’ve expressed many times that we know very little of him in his pre-roman form. We know he was an important god for the city of Lampsakos, located on the western coast of Asia Minor on the Hellespont (aka Turkey today). While we have scarce literary sources attesting to this, Priapus shows up frequently on coins from this city.
I stumbled on a very recent article, New Evidence for the Late Hellenistic Coinage of Lampsakos (September 2023) which focuses on Lampsacene coinage, and most particularly on a series of coins which depict Priapus. While I won’t summarize the numismatic details - the article is free of access for anyone interested in the full study -, I wanted to focus on a rare depiction of Priapus which shows him with his phallus covered.
But let’s begin with the portraits on some of those coins, just because.
On the two coins above, we can see Priapus’ portrait on the obverse. He is shown as bearded and wears an ivy wreath, with his hair falling down to his shoulders. The reverse depicts Apollo Citharoedus standing, wearing a chiton and mantle, holding a plectrum in his right hand, and a lyre under his left arm.
However, on the following coins, the placement is reversed:
On these, it is Apollo’s portrait who is depicted, with a laurel wreath, his hair tied up in a bun at the back and with some loose locks down the neck. The reverse depicts Priapus as a bearded male figure standing right, his hair tied up at the back, wearing a chiton and mantle, and holding a kantharos in his right hand while he rests a filleted thyrsus over his shoulder with his left hand. All very Dionysian attributes.
The absence of a pronounced erect phallus, and the lack of detail due to the very small scale would make it very easy to see Dionysus instead of Priapus on these coins, if it weren’t for the fact we know where they come from, and the knowledge that those shared attributes are consistent with other examples from the area.
If we compare these Hellenistic coins (mid 2nd century BC) to Imperial ones (from the 1st century AD to the 3rd), the difference is striking:
On these later examples, Priapus is clearly recognizable in the way we most know him, his phallus is clearly visible, though we can also notice some of the traditional attributes.
The covered version of Priapus is called by scholars the “noble”-type Priapus, in opposition with the “traditional” representation called “Anasyrma”-type, where Priapus lifts up his chiton to reveal himself. However, the coins aren’t the only representations of a “noble” Priapus that we know of.
The author of the article points out to this votive:
And I also found, while digging a bit more, this incomplete statue, that is also described as being of him
And in both those cases, the phallus is covered and discretely put away, but still visible in the form of a bulge. In the case of the statue above, I haven’t been able to trace down any other information aside from it being Roman and from the 1st century AD.
But the change of representation is difficult to explain. In another article, The Late Hellenistic Tetradrachms of Parion and Lampsakos, the author brings forth the idea that Priapus might have been elevated from a rural deity to an important civic god in response to a time of crisis, alongside Aphrodite in Lampsakos:
“Cities in the Hellespontine region such as Lampsakos, Sestos, and Kyzikos faced no shortage of extreme dangers in 133–131. It is therefore entirely plausible that an epiphany of Priapos and Aphrodite (and perhaps also of Priapos’ father Dionysos) should have occurred at Lampsakos in the particularly perilous opening stages of the war [against Aristonikos], when Roman support seemed very far away.”
"Although Lampsakos was identified as the home of Priapos from at least the third century, it was only in the late Hellenistic period that the Lampsakenes elevated him to the status of their principal civic deity. However, once this change in status had taken place, Priapos became a natural choice for civic iconography, with the first opportunity to do so on coins apparently occurring ca. 100–70 […]"
The author notes that, if the choice from the Lampsacene to cover Priapus was due to a transition period where he was suddenly pushed at the forefront of civic patronage, this period only lasted a limited time, since he is purposefully shown fully exposed as soon as the Augustan period and for at least the next two centuries that followed.
