Review by Choice Review
The sexual customs of the ancient Romans--like their empire--astonish, impress, and sometimes disturb the sexually pseudoemancipated US observer. Hooper (St. Luke's School) has not softened the variegated obscenities (oral, anal, and genital), the grotesque invective (against women, thieves, and homosexuals), or ludicrous vaunts (power and size). "Poet" Priapus's (otherwise anonymous) slangy collection of 86 short, comic, and mediocre poems come in various meters. A 46-page introduction contextualizes the wooden, scarecrow god and the post-Augustan poems in Greek and Roman public constructions of sexuality (sportive penetration and phallocracy). Ithyphallic Priapus emerges more as buffoon than sexual overachiever, more victim than conquistador. The poems (English and Latin) receive brief, helpful commentary (e.g., on foreskin infibulation). Hooper eschews close translation in order to preserve the crude punch lines. The translations generally rhyme and are for the most part dependable. They sometimes made this reviewer laugh, although Hooper obscured and even missed some original jokes. A representative territorial epigram reads: "If boy, or man, or woman steals I hump / (in converse order) pussy, head, and rump." Recommended for those libraries that lack Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God, introd., tr., and ed. by W.H. Parker (1988). Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers. D. Lateiner; Ohio Wesleyan University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
