Poor old Priapus lived a hard life. He was known for his permanent, enormous erection, which is totally normal. Not the erection, but about being known for it. If you are lugging around a permanent enormous erection, word is going to get out. You’re going to be in a state of inadvertent frottage on every bus line in the city. Really, what do you do with such a thing? Hang an extra grocery bag from it? Pretend you’re dousing for water? Jump the TSA line with everyone’s blessing?

People tend to be interested in such a phenomenon, but they’re ambivalent about it. Even the gods were ambivalent about it. No one can agree who his mother was, various goddesses being in contention, including Aphrodite, even though the birth was probably memorably tricky. Several potential god-fathers had a look and said “That’s my BOY!” but when it came down to it, the other gods threw Priapus off Mount Olympus and down to Earth, leaving him on a hillside. Impaled, one assumes.

Heck, they weren’t even sure if he was Hermes’ father or Hermes’ son. That’s a phallus with a lot of reach.

Likely he was nobody’s father. Priapus was cursed by Hera with the inability to maintain an erection only when he was attempting intercourse. So he was a sort of god but he never got to Mount Olympus. In fact he never got to mount anything. It is said Hera cursed him with impotence when he was in somebody’s utero, probably Aphrodite’s, either because she was peeved that Paris thought Aphrodite was prettier than her, or because her husband Zeus was said to be the father. Either way it seems a rather irrelevant punishment. I smite you with impotence, fetus.

Once he was thrown to Earth, Priapus was found by shepherds, who raised him. He was probably super comfortable with sheep, but he was not an ass man. In fact he hated asses, purportedly because he was halfway to a successful rape of the goddess Hestia when a nearby donkey made a ruckus, caused him to go soft, and woke her up to boot. Hestia was famously virginal and remained thus. Oh, there are stories. He kept pestering the nymph Lotis for so long that the gods intervened and turned her into a lotus flower. No word on whether she was agreeable to that, but that’s the thing about gods. They’re impulsive and arbitrary. One day you’re a perfectly serviceable nymph with an unwelcome stalker, next day you’re a plant. They act like a bunch of drunken cabinet secretaries on Mt. Olympus.

Basically it was the same story with Hestia and Lotis, so there must have been some truth behind it. Priapus was said to have been so ticked off by the coital interruption that he bludgeoned the ass to death with his boner. That’s the kind of story that sounds rooted in truth, but cleaned up a bit for general audiences.

I’m not a student of mythology, but I imagine there was someone wandering around Greece with a similar affliction as Priapus and stories just naturally grew up around him.

To this day, Priapus has lent his name to priapism, a painful condition in which the penis is engorged with blood for hours upon hours without any sexual stimulation or relief, and wouldn’t we all like to be known for something? Maybe something else.

We do have a few depictions of poor old Priapus, including a bronze bust. Although how they can be sure it was Priapus just from the bust I do not know. I’m guessing the missing pedestal was really something, though.