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  • The Gnomes of Rome: Thoughts and Translations from the Carmina Priapea
  • C. Luke Soucy (bio)

The current cultural status of the garden gnome is, to put it mildly, a bit odd. As a decorative choice, the cheerful little men keeping watch over countless suburban lawns straddle the line between clever and kitsch, at once completely commonplace and subtly bizarre. Short, bearded, variously equipped, and almost always sporting a pointy red hat, the garden gnome has been a reliable mainstay of the modern yard for well over a century, though most would be hard-pressed to explain how or why. What is a gnome, anyway? Where do they come from? Dim, Tolkienian inklings of dwarven miners and magical associations ripple in the back of the cultural consciousness, but there are no answers lurking behind the garden gnomes’ smiles. They are motionless, muted, obscure—in a word, gnomic.

All the more amusing, then, that the same blank and nonthreatening stillness that defines the garden gnome has also made it a ripe target for comedic irony, spawning a pop culture characterization of the creatures wholly predicated on a malevolence and activity their real-life counterparts so clearly lack. Roaming gnome jokes of one kind or another have circulated for decades,1 but the trend attained true prominence with the French film Amélie (2001), whose title character playfully torments her father by sending him photographs of his beloved garden gnome on a world tour. The subsequent popularity of this “travelling gnome” prank, whose humor derives wholly from its dissonance with gnomes’ essential immobility, gave rise to Travelocity’s $80 million “Where is my gnome?” series of television ads, as well as a slew of copycat campaigns by other corporations.2 Nor is it only the gnomes’ motionlessness that is up for subversion; zombified lawn gnomes are recurring villains in the popular Goosebumps empire of children’s horror media, retailers from Etsy to Walmart stock [End Page 47] knock-off gnomes armed with cleavers and submachine guns, and the top result for “garden gnome” on Google Books is a handy volume titled How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (and They Will), a book whose cover gnome bears the caption “benign appearance belies murderous intent.”3 From the pseudo-revolutionary antics of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front to the warring clans of the Gnomeo and Juliet animated franchise, similarly intense jokes have permeated the culture, in every case playing on the garden gnomes’ transparent harmlessness by playing up their imagined harm. In short, although garden gnomes themselves barely merit a second thought, their quintessential inanimate benignity carries such rich opportunities for subversion that they have been portrayed in media almost exclusively as the opposite of what they are.


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Fig. 1.

Quoting Scarface compounds the gnome villain’s cultural currency. Specimens emblazoned “Don’t Tread on Me” are also available for purchase.

I have opened on this unusual note in the hope that it will serve to analogize what might otherwise seem an inscrutably antique concept, the familiarization of which is my present goal in writing: the depiction of Priapus in Roman poetry. To the degree that Priapus survives at all in the contemporary imagination, it is almost solely as a curiosity—have [End Page 48] you heard of the god with the gigantic penis? In English, his name is a byword for erectile hyperfunction: when the male organ is engorged, it is priapic; when engorged to the point of medical concern, it is priapism. So, it may come as a surprise that the primary role of Priapus in Roman literary sources was less that of a mighty divinity than a kind of phallic forerunner to the garden gnome,4 small wooden statues of whom were said to stand static guard against would-be vegetable thieves. And, much as a touch of movie magic can be relied upon to make our modern lawn ornaments shrug off their stationary harmlessness, comic poets of the classical era made Priapus the central figure in a longstanding tongue-in-cheek literary tradition that described the whittled watchman conducting himself with a violent and vehement...

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