PRIAPUS was an ithyphallic deity of ancient Greece and Rome. He is known mainly as the god of Roman gardens, where images of him, usually holding up his fruit-laden garment to exhibit his outsize sexual organ, were often placed. However, from the time of his appearance at the dawn of the Hellenistic age well into the Christian Middle Ages, Priapus (Gr., Priapos) may have a basis in some very different realities. From Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Athenaeus, 5.201c), for whom Priapus occupies a mythico-political position, to the epigrams in the Greek Anthology or to the kitchen gardens of Priapea in the Corpus Priapeorum, this god—whom Horace makes into an obscene scarecrow (Satires 1.8)—finds no place among the theological definitions proposed by the ancients. Neither do they seem to have assigned him his own place in their pantheon, even though he was traditionally considered to be the son of...