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| Venus Callipyge National Archaeological Museum, Naples |
The Venus Callipyge is a 1st century BC marble Roman statue. The name means "Venus (or Aphrodite) of the beautiful buttocks." The statue shows a woman, whom some consider to be Venus, performing an anasyrma to expose her buttocks. She is peering at her buttocks which further draws attention them.
The statue conjures up the following story which can be found in Athenaeus' Deipnosophists (12.554 c–e) about two teens in Syracuse, Sicily who were trying to determine which of them had the most attractive buttocks:
"Once upon a time a farmer had two beautiful daughters. One day these girls, getting into a dispute as to which one had a more beautiful backside, went out onto the public street. And by chance a young man was passing by, the son of a rich old man. They showed themselves to him, and when he saw them he voted in favor of the older girl. And in fact, falling in love with her, when he got back to town, he took to his bed and told his younger brother everything that had happened. And the younger brother also went to the country and saw the girls, and he fell in love with the other daughter. And so when the boys' father tried to get them to marry someone of the upper classes, he couldn't persuade his sons, and so he brought the girls in from the country, with their father's permission, and married them to his sons. And so these girls were called fair-buttocked by the citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his Iambic Verses: "There was a pair of beautiful-buttocked girls in Syracuse"
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