Strabo mentions that the area produced fine wine and that the God Priapus gave the town its ancient name.
François Rabelais mentions Vermont in the prologue to Book IV of Gargantua and Pantagruel, as one of a group of the most famous singers of the age, performing a bawdy song for Priapus.
Priapus |
Apprieu, from the Latin Apprius - an anagram of "Priapus", the ancient god of fertility associated with the ancient city of Lampsacus near Troy.
For example, a wall fresco which depicted Priapus, the ancient god of sex and fertility, with his extremely enlarged penis, was covered with plaster (and, as Schefold explains (p. 134), even the older reproduction below was locked away "out of prudishness" and only opened on request) and only rediscovered in 1998 due to rainfall.
He also reports that Ters, a deity who seems to have been an equivalent of Priapus, was invoked by Antwerpian women when they were taken by surprise or sudden fear, and that there was a house in Antwerp adjoining the prison (see Het Steen) that bore a statue which had been furnished with a large worn away phallus.
The first specimens of G. priapus were collected in the 1990s, during a series of Indo-Pacific research cruises jointly undertaken by the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN).
The semones would then be a class of semigods, i.e. people who did not share the destiny of ordinary mortals even though they were not admitted to Heaven, such as Faunus, Priapus, Picus, the Silvani.