Flora Unveiled

202 i Flora Unveiled

The few surviving fragments of the poem leave out most of the details of the story.
However, it appears that one of these presexual humanoids, upon seeing another of its own
kind, was filled with sexual desire:  “upon him comes also, through sight, desire for inter-
course.” But intercourse was impossible between sexless humanoids. To remedy the situa-
tion, Aphrodite, who presided over all sexual matters, tore up their bodies and deposited
the pieces on the ground. Those falling onto cold, damp earth became women and those
falling onto warm, dry earth became men. The Greeks believed that men had more heat
than women, and, as a result of this, according to Empedocles, “men are dark and sturdier
of limb and more shaggy.”
In Empedocles’s poem, hermaphrodism is regarded as a rather inconvenient, awkward,
and unsatisfying intermediate stage in human development. The story presages Plato’s
tongue- in- cheek treatment of the origin of the sexes described in “The Symposium.”
However, in Plato’s version of the story, human hermaphrodites begin as exalted god- like
creatures whose pride and arrogance lead to their downfall. The story occurs in a famous
passage in which Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, recounts the origin of heterosex-
ual and homosexual love. In the beginning, says Aristophanes, there were three types of
humans, male, female, and

a third which partook of the nature of both, and for which we still have a name,

though the creature itself is forgotten. For although “hermaphrodite” is only used

nowadays as a term of contempt, there really was a man- woman in those days, a being

which was half male and half female.^40

Aristophanes describes these three types of humans as spherical, each with two sets of
the appropriate body parts:

[E] ach of these beings was globular in shape, with rounded back and sides, four arms

and four legs, with one face one side and one the other, and four ears, and two lots of

private parts, and all the other parts to match.

They could move backward or forward as they pleased, but when they broke into a run,

they simply stuck their legs straight out and went whirling round and round like a

clown turning cartwheels. And since they had eight legs, if you count their arms as

well, you can imagine that they went bowling along at a pretty good speed.

Aristophanes is clearly pulling our leg— or legs, as the case may be. The males, he tells
us, were descended from the sun, the females from the moon. Because of their strength and
energy they soon became arrogant and tried “to scale the heights of heaven and set upon the
gods.” Annoyed by their aggressive behavior, Zeus called a meeting of the gods:

At this Zeus took counsel with the other gods as to what was to be done. They found

themselves in rather an awkward position; they didn’t want to blast them out of exis-

tence with thunderbolts as they did the giants, because that would be saying good- bye