Priapic

The only relic of the temple of Isis is a priapic goblet; from the spout of which it is plain that the votaries must have quaffed the wine.

When God presented Lilith to Adam, Adam was overjoyed and enthusiastically set her on the ground and tried to mount her after the fashion of the animals; but Lilith protested and said: "Why should I be on the bottom and you on the top?" Priapic Adam was in no mood to explain the natural order of things (from his point of view) and so he simply tried to compel her obedience by force.

Both artists were charming, shameless and cruel, and revelled in what Bacon called an “atmosphere of threat”. Often on the run or hiding out, they led priapic private lives: Bacon was homosexual, Freud hetero.

And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.

But despite his waxworks appearance, pre-Weinsteinian penchant for priapic innuendo and lingering criminal trials, Mr. Berlusconi, a former Italian prime minister, is no longer the joke of European politics.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, a priapic, drug-addicted poet, war hero, military adventurer and man about town, was a mesmeric figure who encouraged triumphalism in Italy’s nationalist right-wingers.