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The appearance of teeth as phallic symbols was noted several times by Freud6a, 7, 10a and has since been explored and documented in numerous studies. By far the most complete treatment of this symbolism was that of Feldman and Lorand.5 While they introduced a wide range of examples drawn from clinical practice, ethnology, and literature, they strangely overlooked the earliest and one of the most striking cases, a passage in the Histories of Herodotus18 (ca. 430 B.C.). The omission is all the more noteworthy since the authors mistakenly imply that the Greeks were ignorant of this particular symbolism.
In Book 6, chapter 107, of his Histories, Herodotus begins his prelude to the battle of Marathon. The invading Persians are acompanied by Hippias, the former tyrant of Athens who had been expelled some twenty years earlier. Now, upon his return to Athenian soil, Hippias is described as having the following experience:
The previous night Hippias had dreamed that he was sleeping with his mother, and he supposed that the dream meant that he would return to Athens, recover his power, and die peacefully at home in old age. So much for his first interpretation…. On the following day … he happened to be seized by an unusually violent fit of sneezing and coughing, and, as he was an oldish man, and most of his teeth were loose, he coughed one of them right out of his mouth. It fell somewhere in the sand, and though he searched and searched in his efforts to find it, it was nowhere to be seen. Hippias then turned to his companions, and said with a deep sigh: “This land is not ours; we shall never be able to conquer it. The only part I ever had in it my tooth possesses.” So he had had to change his mind—and the meaning of the dream was now clear.
In Herodotus, then, we find a clear example of a tooth's penetrating the earth being interpreted as a symbol of intercourse—the