Priapus. Originally a Phrygian fertility deity, Priapus was a god of orchards and vineyards, bees and gardens, and goats and sheep as well as of childbearing women. By the time of the Macedonian domination of Greece, he was called a son of Aphrodite by Dionysus, Hermes, or some other god. His chief attribute was a grotesquely large penis, a deformity that Hera had wished on him and that caused his mother to abandon the infant. Priapus was historically more important in Asia Minor than in Greece or Rome.
    Priapus has little mythology but figures in the story of Lotis, a nymph he attempted to violate as she slept. An ass belonging to Silenus, with whom he had argued, brayed loudly, awakening the girl and her companions before Priapus could ravish her. Roman adaptations of the story sometimes applied it to Vesta, the chaste goddess of the hearth, to explain the custom of sacrificing asses to Priapus but crowning them with flowers on the feast of Vesta.
   
    Classical Sources. Catullus, Carmina 18, 19, 20 (19 and 20 spurious), 47. Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca 4.6. Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.346—49; Fasti 1.391—440, 6.319—48; Carmina Priapea (attributed falsely to Ovid). Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.31.2. Hyginus, Fabulae 160; Poetica astronomica 2.23.