Dildos may be seen in some examples of ancient Greek vase art. Some pieces show their use in group sex or in solitary female masturbation. One vessel, of about the 6th century BC, depicts a scene in which a woman bends over to perform oral sex on a man, while another man is about to thrust a dildo into her anus.
They are mentioned several times in Aristophanes’ comedy of 411 BC, Lysistrata.
LYSISTRATA
And so, girls, when fucking time comes… not the faintest whiff of it anywhere, right? From the time those Milesians betrayed us, we can’t even find our eight-fingered leather dildos. At least they’d serve as a sort of flesh-replacement for our poor cunts… So, then! Would you like me to find some mechanism by which we could end this war?
Herodas’ short comic play, Mime VI, written in the 3rd Century BC, is about a woman called Metro, anxious to discover from a friend where she recently acquired a dildo.
METRO
I beg you, don’t lie,
dear Corrioto: who was the man who stitched for you this bright red dildo?
She eventually discovers the maker to be a man called Kerdon, who hides his trade by the front of being a cobbler, and leaves to seek him out. Metro and Kerdon are main characters in the next play in the sequence, Mime VII, when she visits his shop.
Page duBois, a classicist and feminist theorist, suggests that dildos were present in Greek art because the ancient Greek male imagination found it difficult to conceive of sex taking place without penetration. Therefore, female masturbation or sex between women required an artificial phallus to be used.
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