Most ancient civilizations hand historians one kind of evidence and expect them to make do. Sometimes it is a wall of images with no explanatory text. Sometimes it is a body of literature with almost no surviving artwork.

Walk down almost any street in Roman Pompeii and you would meet the same image again and again — carved above a doorway, set into a paving stone, cast in bronze and hung at a shop's entrance. To a Roman eye, the phallus was not primarily an erotic picture. It sat closer to a road sign, a lucky…

Walk the classical galleries of any large museum and a pattern surfaces within a few minutes. The standing male figures share a build: broad across the shoulders, narrow at the waist, muscles described in clean geometric blocks, the head sitting at a repeatable fraction of the total height.

There is an old, lingering silence in the modern world regarding what it actually means to become a man. In our current era of digital convenience and sanitized experiences, "manhood" is often treated as a fluid concept, something one simply drifts into by reaching a certain age or acquiring a…