In the spring of 1904, on a farm called Rällinge in the Swedish province of Södermanland, a twelve-year-old boy turned up a small bronze man in a potato field. The figure sits cross-legged, wears a pointed cap, tugs at a pointed beard, and has an unmistakable erection. He is seven centimetres tall…

Visitors filing into the House of the Vettii at Pompeii tend to stop about two paces inside the door. On the right-hand wall of the entrance passage sits a painted figure weighing part of his own body against a sack of coins on a set of scales. Modern tourists laugh, or blush, or take a photograph…

On the sacred island of Delos, a theatre producer once celebrated a winning play by erecting a monument to a body part. The Stoivadeion, the island's sanctuary of Dionysus, still holds the base of two pillars that each once carried an outsized marble phallus. An inscription records that the…

Exploring the primal symbols of desire, power, and restraint that still haunt men today The Shadow That Stirs When night falls and old stories are told, men have always found themselves mirrored in the monsters that prowl the darkness. The werewolf, the vampire, the satyr — these figures linger…