Money, Sex and Power

Fresco of Priapus, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii

"Depicted weighing his enormous erect penis against a bag of gold."

This is neither the time nor the place to go into the connection made by some after Lacan between the Phallus and Money. However I believe it is appropriate to point to some ancient Mediterranean cultural convergences with respect to the fresco above. As I look at this image I can't help but think of some other Mediterranean characters.

Judas Iscariot, as is well known, betrays Jesus to the Priests for 30 pieces of silver. Many Christian writers elaborated on the story as it is related in the Gospels, and one lesser known legend of the demise of Judas is from Papias of Hierapolis, preserved in the writings of Apollinaris of Laodicea (d. 390).

"Judas was a terrible walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily... His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else's, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame." (trans. from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, pg. 757)

Susan Gubar writes in Judas: A Biography, "Having grown larger than a cart... flabby Judas... sprouts enlarged genitals. Yet unlike the Greek god Priapus, who is endowed with a huge erection, Judas gains no phallic potency."

And there's more of the "grotesque" to add to this cultural mix. From the Talmud, Baba Metsia we read of another Jew who informs on his fellow, only to regret it later. In what may be a parodic adaptation of the Papias tradition of Judas we read of the trials and triumphs of the enormous sage Rabbi Eleazar the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (what follows is a series of excerpts strewn together so the reader here will have to make sense of the picture portrayed in quotations): "When R. Ishmael son of R. Jose and R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon met, one could pass through with a yoke of oxen under them and not touch them. Said a certain [Roman] matron to them, ‘Your children are not yours!’ They replied, ‘Theirs [sc. our wives’] is greater than ours.’ ‘[But this proves my allegation] all the more!’ [She observed]. Some say, they answered thus: ‘For as a man is, so is his strength.’

... The member of R. Eleazar the son of R. Simeon was [the size of] a wineskin of seven 9 kabs... [n.b. not in the vilna shas but in many mss.]

Every evening they spread sixty sheets for him, and every morning sixty basins of blood and discharge were removed from under him...

Then there came sixty seamen who presented him

with sixty slaves, bearing sixty purses.

One day she [his wife] said to her daughter, ‘Go and see how your father is faring now.’ She went,

[and on her arrival] her father said to her, ‘Go, tell your mother that our [wealth] is greater than

theirs’ [sc. of his father-in-law's house]."