Instructions: After watching the video clip Speech of Aristophanes and reading Aristophanes’ Myth write an essay answering the below questions.  Make sure that you support your responses by offering paraphrased evidence. Your response should be no longer than 3 typewritten pages and should be submitted through the course website. Your essay should be a cohesive composition with complete paragraphs and sentences (not numerically organized answers), with proper spelling and punctuation, and satisfying all of the homework formatting requirements.

1.Explain Aristophanes’ “children of the sun,” “children of the moon,” and “children of the earth.”  In what ways are these offspring the same or different than children of today? 

2.What did the “children” of Aristophanes’ Myth do to anger Zeus?  Describe Zeus’ response to the children’s “insolence”?

3.How does the myth explain heterosexual and homosexual natures?  Aristophanes’ seems to claim that humans have a life-long desire for a mate?  Do you think he is correct?  Why or why not?

1) Aristophanes' myth is a quite insightful and ingenious invention, as are many creation myths from cultures around the world, especially when it comes to sexuality. Some are quite bizarre; ancient societies had not always recognized the correlation between the sexual act and childbirth. The Greeks were not that primitive, but this story does take a fairly simplistic approach to explaining sexuality.

I admire the symbolism of the children and heavenly bodies. Men are born of the sun because this celestial object was the most powerful and lofty, and Greek society was highly patriarchal (as were most cultures then, and many still somewhat so even now). Women are children of the Earth; it's lower in stature than the heavens, yet the source of our nourishment and shelter, so an apt analogy as well. The most clever, however is designating the man/woman, or androgyne, as a child of the moon. The myth is amazingly prescient in saying that the Moon was made of both the Sun and Earth, because modern astrophysicists do believe that a large meteor impact in our prehistory fragmented a large section of Earth that became our satellite. I wonder: was this referring to people with both sexual organs literally, or more to effeminate men/masculine women? Probably the latter.

The term hermaphrodite came to mind as I read this work, and the irony that it too has obvious Greek inspiration but hadn't been coined yet in Aristophanes' day. Greece was an interesting place sexually, to put it mildly. I'm realizing in this course, as well as my ancient philosophy class readings, how widespread homosexuality was among the elite and erudite. That is a remarkable difference between these “children” of then and now. While most modern Western societies have come to accept it, along with the whole LGBT spectrum, ancient Greece seemed to deem the gay lifestyle quite fashionable and flaunt-worthy. The patriarchal implications alone are profound.

(2)  As is common in many mythologies, gods are not pleased when mortals attempt to become more godlike themselves. Even a monotheist religion gave us “Adam and Eve” and their exile from paradise as punishment; the Greek pantheon was a much more capricious lot and always jealous of humans as well as each other. These “children” of the Aristophanes myth began an ascent to heaven (Mt. Olympus?) and this upset the gods assembled there, including Zeus, their king. His response was to cleave these four-legged, double-human original children into two parts, weakening them to lessen their threat to the gods.

The plan works, but too well‒ due to a design oversight, the genitalia are now on the wrong side of the body and the species is dying off. So Zeus revises his original plan so that males and females can procreate (or, quite tellingly, “if man came to man they might be satisfied.”) This has interesting results, since there were three types of these double bodies to split: male/male, female/female, and male/female. The resultant “halves” have a longing to find their counterpart, and it offers several combinations.

(3)  This is where the myth explains the various sexuality choices we find among humans; based on which half an individual originally came from. Seemingly six variations could exist‒ a male and female half from each of the three double-bodies. The myth gives a partial inventory only: Men or women who were formerly part of the man/woman androgyne become heterosexual; women from the female/female become lesbians; and men who came from male/male are gay. From the Greek perspective, the latter is the best outcome. “These are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature... these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only...”

While there does seem to be an almost instinctual desire to find a life-partner for most people, I do not think it is necessarily “life-long.” It is most prominent during the sexually virile and fertile ages of youth, which stands to reason because that's when it makes the most sense biologically. When starting a family, a male wants a female who will stay and nurture his children; likewise the female wants a male who can protect and provide for the family. The dynamics of that may be similar in homosexual partners, even though procreation doesn't factor in.

Companionship is important, even vital to many people, long after their sexual prime. This too has some possible evolutionary advantages‒ grandparents are a great resource for new parents and the grandchildren. Once children have “left the nest”, life would be very lonely if marriages dissolved at that time, their biological mission fulfilled. It's about more than that, of course.

The fact that fairly recent technology has given humans far longer life-spans than evolution (a very slow process) originally accounted for‒ this has skewed the whole “life-long” companion concept. A lifetime used to be thirty or forty years, and a marriage was only for a decade or two. Nowadays a couple can potentially be together for as long as eighty-plus years! That's a figure that Aristophanes could not have had in mind.