Reddit reviews Impotence: A Cultural History

>It had nothing to do with sexual preference of the period.

I would contend that this is incorrect, according to most evidence from the period. The small penis was viewed as the ideal of male beauty in Greek society. Big penises were, as I noted, considered to be vulgar and a depiction of a man as being more beast than man, or as belonging to a barbarian. This was a matter of sexual culture, as well.

It's well-documented that the ideal male penis, according to the ancient Greeks, was "small, thin, and had a pointed foreskin," as noted by McLaren (2007).

Good sources which discuss this matter are:

Garland, Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks, 1998.

Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme, 2001.

>Here, the allusion to the posthe clearly, although humorously, summons up an image of the entire penis, albeit one that conforms to the aesthetic ideal seen in artistic depictions of gods and heroes. The imprecise use of the word posthe serves the humorous context because, as others have shown, the Greeks valued the longer over the shorter prepuce in relation to the length of the entire penis, and the smaller over the larger penis as a whole. Even if one were to argue that the word posthe was being used precisely here, the rules of proportion, as deduced from art, would require that a petite posthe be part of a proportionally even more petite penis. (Hodges, 2001)

McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History, 2007.

McNiven, The Unheroic Penis: Otherness Exposed, 1995.

>Most nude male figures in Athenian vase painting are standard types: handsome, slim, and well muscled. With few exceptions, the penis is small. That this was associated with the ideal in ancient Athens is clear from Aristophanes' Clouds (l.l0l4).

You may also read Kenneth Dover's book, Greek Homosexuality.