Typically, if an ancient statue's penis is missing, you can blame earthquakes and/or late antique Christians.

To begin with the former. Athens, like many other Mediterranean cities, is prone to earthquakes. Monumental buildings like the Parthenon are fairly resilient. The statues on and around them, however, are often precariously poised on plinths or perched in pedestals.

A marble statue's torso is fairly thick and hardy piece of stone. The same cannot be said of its appendages. If it falls from the pedestal or pediment on/in which it was placed, its arms, legs, head, and - in the case of a male statue - genitals are likely to break off. And once broken, those bits of marble were seldom reassembled; it was much easier to re-use them as rubble. When archaeologists rediscover these fragments, they try to put them back together. But those little stone penises - and since the Greco-Roman ideal of male beauty was the adolescent athlete, they are often very small indeed - are easy to loose.

Often, however, the genitals had already been removed in late antiquity. The urban elites of the Roman Empire - the guys, in other words, who ran the cities and state - were predominantly Christian by the mid-fifth century. These men, often educated in the best classical manner, had an ambivalent relationship with the nude statues that surrounded them. They appreciated them as artistic masterpieces and points of contact with a cultural tradition they treasured. But as Christians, they were uncomfortable with the sensuality implicit in their nudity.

Sometimes, Christian mobs simply smashed pagan statues - in the late fourth century, for example, the statues of the famous Serapeum were torn to pieces. In different cities and different times, however, various compromises were adopted. Statues might be re-deployed as nothing more or less than cultural ornaments, as in the massive sculptural collections of Byzantine Constantinople. Sometimes, they were carefully removed from public display, and collected by connoisseurs in their own homes. They might be left in place, but "sanitized." A cross might be carved into the forehead. Or, as happened in late antique Ephesus and elsewhere in Asia Minor, the exposed genitals of male statues (and sometimes the breasts of female ones) might be chiseled off.

I was in Athens this summer and wondered why the intact penises were small compared to the rest of their bodies. It was explained that Greeks believed that their intelligenece compensated fortheir need of a larger penis.

Can someone verify if this is true?

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