The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

in Classical Greek Literature

This book traces the image of the pregnant male in Greek literature as it
evolves over the course of the classical period. The image – as deployed in
myth and in metaphor – originates as a representation of paternity and, by
extension, “authorship” of ideas, works of art, legislation, and the like. Only
later, with its reception in philosophy in the early fourth century, does it also
become a way to figure and negotiate the boundary between the sexes. The
book considers a number of important moments in the evolution of the
image: the masculinist embryological theory of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
and other fifth-century pre-Socratics; literary representations of the birth of
Dionysus; the origin and functions of pregnancy as a metaphor in tragedy,
comedy, and the works of some Sophists; and finally the redeployment of
some of these myths and metaphors in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and in
Plato’s Symposium and Theaetetus.

David D. Leitao is Professor of Classics at San Francisco State University and

Chair of the Departments of Classics and Comparative and World Literature.
He has published articles in Classical Antiquity, Mnemosyne, and Materiali e
Discussioni, as well as in numerous edited volumes.
The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor
in Classical Greek Literature

David D. Leitao
San Francisco State University
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The pregnant male as myth and metaphor in classical
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-01728-3 (hardback)
1. Greek literature – History and criticism. 2. Philosophy in literature.
3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) – History – To 1500.
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 For John
ἰατρῷ δυστοκίας
 Contents

Acknowledgments page ix
List of Abbreviations and Editions xi

1 Introduction 1
2 The New Father of Anaxagoras: The One-Seed Theory of
Reproduction and Its Reception in Athenian Tragedy 18
3 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus: Exploring Legitimacy in the
Classical City-State 58
4 From Myth to Metaphor: Intellectual and Poetic
Generation in the Age of the Sophists 100
5 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 146
6 The Pregnant Philosopher: Masculine and Feminine
Procreative Styles in Plato’s Symposium 182
7 Reading Plato’s Midwife: Socrates and Intellectual
Paternity in the Theaetetus 227

Appendix I. Did Any Thinker before Democritus Argue for the

Existence of Female “Seed”? 271
Appendix II. Women and Men as Grammatical Subjects of τίκτω 281
Works Cited 285
Index 301

vii
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Betty Belfiore, Ruby Blondell, Lesley Dean-Jones,

Zina Giannopoulou, Ann Hanson, Yurie Hong, Sarah Iles Johnston,
Greg Jones, Andrew Lear, Erin Moodie, Kathryn Morgan, Jay Reed,
David Grant Smith, Chris Weinberger, and two anonymous reviewers for
the Press, who provided generous and constructive feedback on parts
or all of the manuscript at different stages. The argument has been
improved immeasurably as a result. It goes without saying that these fine
scholars are not responsible for those infelicities of argument or expres-
sion that remain. I would also like to thank Michael Genhart and Dean
Paul Sherwin for their support, intellectual and moral, during the writ-
ing of this book; Beatrice Rehl and Emily Spangler at the Press, who
expertly facilitated the entire process from submission to production;
and Brian MacDonald, my patient production editor, who saved me from
countless errors and made many salutary suggestions that improved the
final manuscript. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents, who
first taught me to value the life of the mind, and to my husband, John
Furman, M.D., who provided much encouragement over the years, espe-
cially during those times when my confidence flagged. This book is
dedicated to him.
San Francisco, California
August 2011

ix
 Abbreviations and Editions

The names of most authors and works cited in this book may be found,
with additional bibliographical information, in H. Liddell, R. Scott,
and H. Jones, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition with supplement
(Oxford, 1968), and P. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1982).
I have adopted most of their abbreviations of authors and works, except
where clarity demanded a less-compressed abbreviation. I also employ
abbreviations for the following reference works and special editions of
some texts:
Aet. Fragments of Aetius in H. Diels, ed., Doxographi Graeci
(Berlin, 1879)
ARV   1 J. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1942)
ARV  2 J. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 3 vols., 2nd ed.
(Oxford, 1963)
Bernabé A. Bernabé, ed., Poetae epici Graeci: Testimonia et fragmenta,
4 vols. (Munich, 1987–2007)
CFA A. Hausrath and H. Hunger, eds., Corpus fabularum
Aesopicarum, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1959–70)
DK H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
3 vols., 10th ed. (Berlin, 1960–61)
FGrH F. Jacoby, ed., Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 3 vols.
(Berlin and Leiden, 1923–55)
IG Inscriptiones Graecae, 14 vols. (Berlin, 1873–)
LSJ H. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. Jones, eds., A Greek-English
Lexicon, 9th ed. with supplement (Oxford, 1968)
MW R. Merkelbach and M. West in F. Solmsen et al., eds.,
Hesiodi Theogonia, Opera et Dies, Scutum, fragmenta selecta,
3rd ed. (Oxford, 1990)

xi
xii Abbreviations and Editions

P. Derveni T. Kouremenos, G. Parássoglou, and K. Tsantsanoglou,

The Derveni Papyrus: Edited with Introduction and
Commentary (Florence, 2006)
PCG R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds., Poetae comici Graeci (Berlin,
1983–2001)
PMG D. Page, ed., Poetae melici Graeci (Oxford, 1962)
RV Ap A. Trendall and A. Cambitoglou, eds., The Red-Figured
Vases of Apulia, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1978–82)
SnM B. Snell and H. Maehler, eds., Pindari carmina cum
fragmentis, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1975–80)
SVF J. von Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 4 vols.
(Leipzig, 1903–24)
TGF B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt, eds., Tragicorum
Graecorum fragmenta, 5 vols. (Göttingen, 1981–2004)
West M. West, ed., Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati,
2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1989–92)

For four texts, which are discussed at great length in the course of this
book, I use the following editions:
Euripides, Bacchae : J. Diggle, ed., Euripidis Fabulae, vol. 3 (Oxford,
1994)
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen: N. Wilson, ed., Aristophanis Fabulae, vol. 2
(Oxford, 2008)
Plato, Symposium: J. Burnet, ed., Platonis Opera, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Oxford,
1993)
Plato, Theaetetus: W. Hicken, ed., in E. Duke et al., Platonis Opera, vol. 1
(Oxford, 1995)
All translations of ancient texts are my own unless otherwise indicated.
 1

Introduction

Enter Plato
This book is an attempt to trace the image of the pregnant male in
­classical Greek literature. If it contains one main argument, it is that this
image, as deployed in myth and metaphor, originates as a way to figure
paternity and, by extension, “authorship” generally – of, for example,
ideas, works of art, and legislation – and that only later, with its recep-
tion in philosophy in the early fourth century, is it imagined to play a
role in figuring and indeed negotiating the boundary between the sexes.
We consider representations of the pregnant male in different literary
and intellectual contexts during this period: the new embryological the-
ories of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and other fifth-century pre-Socratics,
as well as the larger masculinist cosmologies of which they were a part
(Chapter 2); literary representations of the birth of Dionysus (Chapter
3); the metaphor of the pregnant male in tragedy, comedy, and the
works of some Sophists (Chapter 4); and the philosophical redeploy-
ment of some of these myths and metaphors in Aristophanes’ late play
the Assemblywomen (Chapter 5) and in Plato’s Symposium and Theaetetus
(Chapters 6 and 7, respectively).
The book began as an attempt to write the prehistory of Plato’s
famous description, in the Symposium particularly, of thought as a
metaphorical form of “giving birth.” There has been an almost uni-
versal assumption among scholars that the metaphor was originated
either by Plato himself or by his muse Socrates. Many have made the
assumption explicit. Gregory Vlastos, for example, probably the great-
est student of Plato during the second half of the twentieth century,
speaking of Plato’s metaphor in the Symposium, declared that “for this

1
2 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

striking image of male pregnancy there is no known precedent in

Greek literature.”1
There is every reason to credit Plato with all the originality he deserves,
but the danger of going too far is, paradoxically, a jejune Plato: an
inspired man who speaks in tongues but is not part of the larger conver-
sation of Greek culture. Not only did I find it difficult to believe, at least
so far as this particular metaphor was concerned, that Plato was a solitary
genius working in an intellectual desert, but I was convinced that this
powerful metaphor of the Symposium would be so much more interest-
ing – and more rhetorically effective – if it could be shown to have been
modeled on and indeed partly in reaction to the metaphors, images,
and ideas of other Greek writers of the classical period. My hunch about
the existence of a prehistory to Plato’s birth metaphor turned out, I now
believe, to be correct: this book is an account of that earlier development
of the idea of male pregnancy and parturition, and of Plato’s engage-
ment with it.
The obvious place to begin a reconstruction of the prehistory of Plato’s
male birth metaphor was myth, especially the mythic births of Athena
and Dionysus, the former born from her father’s head, the latter from
his thigh. Few classical scholars, to my surprise, have attempted to link
Plato’s male pregnancy metaphor to these examples of male pregnancy
from Greek myth, and even fewer have exhibited interest in the extent
to which Plato may have been influenced by the deployment of these
myths in classical literary texts, which might have resonated more with
Athenians of the classical period than, say, the Theogony of the archaic
poet Hesiod. And what about the origin of the metaphor of the preg-
nant male? Could we draw a line from myth (archaic and classical) to
metaphor? One obstacle to such a project is that texts documenting the
intellectual history of the Greeks between the archaic period and Plato,
especially texts by the pre-Socratics and Sophists, texts that would, had
they survived, be our sole witnesses to certain key moments in the his-
tory of classical ideas, are largely lost. But we now have a ­better under-
standing of this period than we did a generation ago. Recent scholarship
on the Derveni Papyrus, for example, stimulated in part by the publica-
tion of more authoritative and complete critical editions of the text,2 has
helped us to understand a whole area of public intellectual discourse in

1
Vlastos (1981) 21 n. 59; see also Halperin (1990) 138, quoted in Chapter 6, n. 1.
2
Janko (2002); Jourdan (2003); and Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou
(2006). See discussion of this papyrus in Chapters 2 and 4.
 Introduction 3

the second half of the fifth century that was defined by the overlap of
myth and religion, on the one hand, and natural and ethical philosophy,
on the other, an area of inquiry in which some pre-­Socratics and some
Sophists specialized. This recent work has indeed helped us to under-
stand not only poorly understood figures such as Diagoras of Melos,
Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Prodicus of Ceos, and Metrodorus of Lampsacus,
but also the larger intellectual context in which more familiar authors
such as Herodotus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plato worked.
It soon became apparent that mine would be the story not just of the
intellectual background to Plato (though it would be that too) but of
a robust idea – the pregnant male – deployed by many Greeks in the
period 470–350 b.c.e., especially at Athens, as a means to think through
and talk about a number of issues and controversies, among them the
origin of the embryo’s soul, the role of providence in the world, the
nature and origin of thought and creativity, legitimacy of birth and civic
status, ownership of intellectual property, and the nature of teaching. It
was indeed a surprise to discover that, during the fifth century at least,
male pregnancy myths and metaphors had little to do with sorting out
the competing social and political claims of men and women or with
constructing masculine gender identities, in spite of their superficial
feminine content.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the pregnant male was the
focus of a major “discourse” in classical Greece. In fact, its rather modest
status as a minor discourse, especially in Athens, is precisely what makes
it a manageable object for study. If it perhaps does not contain a micro-
cosm of the entirety of Greek thought in the classical period, it does nev-
ertheless reveal many of the harmonies, some sweet and some jagged,
that give texture to the larger trajectory of Greek thought in this period.
It will certainly make for a richer reading of Plato.

What Do Men Want?

The primary question with which we shall be occupied in some form
throughout the book is why. More specifically, why do Greek male authors
depict men as pregnant or giving birth in myth, in metaphorical turns
of phrase, in ritual, and in scientific theories of reproduction? Or, more
simply and provocatively, what is it that men want? This question, a play
on Freud’s famous question about women, reflects an assumption held
by nearly all classical scholars who have studied individual elements of
this broader discourse (e.g., the myths, Plato’s metaphor): men deploy
4 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

pregnancy imagery to gain either some kind of political advantage over

women or some kind of psychic advantage in their encounter with the
female other, assumptions that are the basis of what we might refer to,
respectively, as social anthropological and psychoanalytic approaches to
male pregnancy as myth and metaphor. I have found both approaches
within classical scholarship helpful and will attempt, in a moment, to sit-
uate my own study within these scholarly traditions.
But first I wish to signal some qualifications to the framing of my own
analysis as a question of what men want. First, the fact that this book
focuses on men is to some small extent accidental, a function of the fact
that all our surviving classical Athenian authors are men. There is no rea-
son that women could not use pregnancy as a metaphor to describe, for
instance, their intellectual or creative efforts.3 We cannot assume that a
male author deploying a pregnancy metaphor is necessarily fashioning
himself at that moment as a man, rather than, say, as an Athenian or
as a member of an aristocratic clan or as a devotee of Cybele. Second,
when I suggest that my own project is, in a sense, an investigation of
what it is that men “want,” I do not mean to imply that I seek to plumb
the unconscious of individual male psyches or even necessarily seek to
reconstruct the “intent” of individual authors; rather, I aim, as much
as possible, to understand how male pregnancy functions rhetorically
within the economy of particular texts and within the larger discourses
of which these texts are a part. “What do men want?” might then be
shorthand for “What rhetorical function does male pregnancy play in
this male-authored text?”

Social Anthropological Approaches

Of the two dominant scholarly approaches to the image of the pregnant
male, the first derives originally from the field of social anthropology and
links male pregnancy imagery with the establishment of paternity, espe-
cially in ritual contexts. The “father” of this approach is the nineteenth-
century Swiss jurist and philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, author of
the famous 1861 book entitled Mutterrecht (Maternal Rule), who argued
for the existence of an earlier “matriarchal” phase of human history in
Greece and elsewhere, in which descent was matrilineal and men had

3
Indeed, the metaphor is used occasionally of female characters, though the texts are
written by male authors. See Chapter 4, n. 4.
 Introduction 5

to “adopt” ritually the children born to their wives in order to be recog-

nized as their fathers. Bachofen draws evidence for this earlier matriar-
chal phase from Greek and Roman antiquity, including two important
examples of “male pregnancy” from the Greek world: Dionysus’s birth
from the thigh of Zeus and instances of a ritual that anthropologists
refer to as the couvade, a ritual in which men perform a childbirth mime
after their wives have given birth, alleged in ancient sources to have been
practiced on Corsica, in northwestern Spain, near the Black Sea, and in
a somewhat altered form on the island of Cyprus.4 Bachofen suggested
that while few of the couvade rites survived into the patriarchal period,
because they ceased to perform any social function, myths, such as the
story of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus, remained widespread
because they could be reinterpreted in a patriarchal context.5 A version
of Bachofen’s approach found its way into classical scholarship in the
early twentieth century – both Lewis Farnell and Arthur Cook inter-
preted the myth of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus as reflecting
a primitive adoption ritual6 – and there was already a native version of
the idea in ancient Greece itself.7
More recent work in anthropology has attempted to describe a more
specific social context for such rites than the vague prehistoric pasts of
Bachofen, Farnell, and Cook. Wilson and Yengoyan, for example, found
that the couvade tends to turn up in advanced hunting-gathering or
rudimentary agricultural societies that lack well-developed male assis-
tance networks, which led them to conclude that the ritual works to
stage a crisis that could lead to the creation of a temporary network of
“friends,” who would assist the father in defending his paternity against
rival ­claimants.8 Broude, working in the related field of cross-cultural
psychology, showed that the ritual turns up not in societies characterized
by gender separation and antagonism, as many had hypothesized, but in
societies in which the father is fully integrated into the household and
4
Primary sources for the practice of the couvade in the ancient world: Diod. Sic. 5.14.2
(Corsica); Strab. 3.4.18 (Spain); Ap. Rhod. 2.1109–1114 (Black Sea); Plut. Thes. 20 =
Paion FrGH 757 F2 (Cyprus). These are discussed in Leitao (2007) 268–70.
5
Bachofen (1948) 629–47, 983–95.
6
Farnell (1896–1909) 5.110; Cook (1914–40) 3.79–98. Though both Farnell and Cook
(3.89 n. 1) mention Bachofen by name, they seem to have been working largely with
a generic “vulgate” version of Bachofen’s ideas, probably mediated by early work in
British social anthropology, rather than engaging directly with the text of Mutterrecht.
See the discussion of Georgoudi (1992) 457–59.
7
Hdt. 4.180.5, which is discussed in Chapter 5; cf. also Diod. Sic. 4.39.
8
Wilson and Yengoyan (1976).
6 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

for whom the couvade is just one of many life cycle commemorations in
which he plays a central role.9
There are three shortcomings of the social anthropological approach,
or at least certain variants of it. First, those who have used this approach
to account for the function of male pregnancy rituals in historical soci-
eties (as opposed to contemporary preindustrial societies) have often
failed to describe an adequately specific social and historical context.
The contexts described in the older work of Bachofen, Farnell, and
Cook are particularly vague: a primordial matriarchal past for Bachofen,
prehistoric Greece for Farnell and Cook. What we need is an account of
the deployment of male pregnancy imagery in ancient Greece that pro-
vides the same level of detail and the same appreciation for social and
rhetorical complexity that we find in the synchronic ethnographic stud-
ies of modern cultures. So this book is less interested in the supposedly
prehistoric origins of Greek male pregnancy rites and myths than in how
such myths, rites, and even metaphors functioned within classical Greek
society. Second, most of this work in social anthropology and in the ear-
lier generation of classical scholarship influenced by it does not attempt
to account for the agency or subjectivity of individual actors. It does not
help us understand which men performed the couvade rite on Corsica
and which did not, or what authors invoked the myth of Dionysus’s birth
and in what rhetorical contexts, and what authors did not. Third and
last, most practitioners of the social anthropological approach do not
really explain the feminine content of the myths and rites.10 Why is it
that men ritually claim paternity by taking on feminine traits themselves?
By focusing solely on the demonstration of paternity, adherents of this
approach downplay the fact that, in some situations at least, the gender
role men take on in this rite they take from women; in other words, they
elide the zero-sum political dynamics that characterize some relations
between men and women.
Although adherents of the social anthropological approach have tra-
ditionally focused on ritual and have often seen myth as merely a “reflec-
tion” of ritual patterns, I do not think that its application need be so

9
Broude (1988).
10
An exception are those anthropologists influenced by psychoanalysis. Broude (1988)
902 points out that most (if not all) modern examples of the couvade actually involve
not cross-gender behavior on the part of the husband (e.g., lying in, as though he had
just given birth himself) but only the observance of taboos on the occasion of the
wife’s parturition. But all four alleged ancient examples of the couvade (see n. 4) do
involve such cross-gender behavior.
 Introduction 7

limited. In fact, myths of male pregnancy are often invoked in classical

Greek authors as a way to talk about patrilineal descent and citizenship
more generally, and the metaphor of pregnancy was often deployed as
a way of claiming metaphorical paternity, including in many of the cir-
cumstances described by Wilson and Yengoyan, as when rival poets claim
artistic “paternity” of the same written work.

Psychoanalytic Approaches
Psychoanalytic theories focus on the extent to which male pregnancy
myths, rituals, and metaphors satisfy some psychological need or desire,
either on the part of individuals or on the part of larger segments of
society or even society as a whole. Whereas those who take a social
anthropological approach to these myths, rituals, and metaphors tend to
downplay the feminine content of the pregnant male’s “performance,”
those who pursue a psychoanalytic approach make this content central.
Psychoanalysis is most helpful in analyzing texts from the fourth cen-
tury, especially Aristophanes’ late play the Assemblywomen and Plato’s
Symposium and Theaetetus. It is only in these later texts that we encounter
extensive meditations on the political utility and psychological power of
male pregnancy myths and metaphors, on their implications for a man’s
sense of himself as a man.
The first generation of psychoanalytic interpretations of Greek male
pregnancy imagery within classical scholarship focused on myth – the
births of Athena and Dionysus – and drew on at least two different strands
of traditional psychoanalysis. The first of these strands is the orthodox
theory of sex and gender presented by Sigmund Freud himself. Freud
never developed a theory of “womb envy” parallel to his theory of “penis
envy” (a fact that would surprise no one), but he did attempt to under-
stand the fantasies of some men of having feminine bodies with feminine
(especially procreative) powers, most notably in the famous cases of the
Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Dr. Schreber. Typical was his understanding
of Schreber’s fantasy of being turned into a woman and impregnated
by rays of the sun sent by god: this fantasy, Freud argued, represented
a regression toward homosexual narcissism, in which the impregnat-
ing god is a substitute for the man’s father.11 Freud thought that the

11
Freud 1953–74b [1911]. Cf. Lacan (1977) 199–215, who extends Freud’s interpreta-
tion of Schreber’s fantasy: Schreber’s psychosis is caused by his being disconnected
from the realm of the symbolic, a realm that Lacan sees as generated by paternal
8 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

homosexual regression he saw at play in all three cases was motivated

primarily by fears, arising during the oedipal stage, of castration at the
hands of the father. Freud also saw a role for pregnancy fantasies in the
development of “normal” boys, these too mediated by oedipal castration
fears. He argued that boys, before they understand the mechanics of
procreation, frequently imagine their own feces to be a baby to which
they could “give birth,” an idea sometimes called the “cloacal theory of
birth”; in some cases, he suggested, this fecal “baby” is assimilated to
the penis the boy must surrender to his father.12 What is striking about
Freud’s understanding of male pregnancy fantasies is that they have little
to do with the male child’s understanding of the female body (much less
envy of this female body) but turn entirely on his reaction to the threat
of paternal castration; this is an exclusively masculine drama enacted by
fathers and sons.
A number of psychoanalytic thinkers after Freud developed a more
general theory of “womb envy,” in which male pregnancy fantasies are
a potentially normative outcome of the male child’s encounter with the
female body. There are two versions of the theory of womb envy that
are of interest to us. According to one version, associated especially
with Bruno Bettelheim, men may fend off castration anxiety (which the
male child might associate with the mother rather than the father) by
identifying with the procreative mother, a potentially normal “defense,”
which has the paradoxical effect of shoring up the child’s masculine self-
image.13 Another version, associated especially with feminist readings
of the tradition, largely dispenses with castration anxiety and, taking a
cue from ego psychology, sees identification with the female other as
an “answer to the needs of the young male to have some contact with
the female experience of sexuality while affirming his own virility.”14 In
other words, the young male masters his feelings about lacking women’s
procreative powers – and about sexual difference generally – through a
partial identification with the female.

prohibition. What the psychotic Schreber seeks, according to Lacan, is not sex with his
father but to rejoin the domain of language and law.
12
On the “cloacal theory of birth,” see Freud (1953–74a [1908]), with further discussion of
Kittay (1995) 127–30. Kittay (1995) 156 n. 2 notes that Freud seems to focus on the anal
pregnancy fantasies of boys, even though there is no reason that girls could not develop
similar fantasies about reproduction. For possible reflections of anal birth in classical
Greek literature, see Caldwell (1989) 30–31; Simon (1978) 308 n. 20; and Chapter 5.
13
Bettelheim (1954); cf. also the general review of Jaffe (1968) 543–44.
14
Kittay (1995) 131, who sees antecedents of this view already in the theory of Bettelheim
(1954). Cf. also Kittay (1995) 137–38.
 Introduction 9

A psychoanalytic approach enters classical scholarship in the 1970s

in interpretations of Greek male pregnancy myths by Karl Kerenyi and
Walter Burkert.15 Kerenyi, in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life,
published posthumously in both German and English in 1976, sees the
myth of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus as a defensive response
to fantasies of the castrating mother, an approach very close to the strand
of psychoanalytic theory developed by Bettelheim. According to Kerenyi,
this myth originated in a misunderstanding of a rite of mutilation and
self-emasculation performed by Zeus, similar to that performed by Attis
and the galloi for the goddess Cybele, which is in effect a defense against
castration at the hands of the powerful “mother.” The myth of the thigh
birth, he argues, was invented in order “to cover over the god’s lavish gift
at the expense of his own body.”16
Walter Burkert, in his Greek Religion, first published in German in 1977,
interprets the birth myths of both Dionysus and Athena in terms that
combine Freud’s reading of the male pregnancy fantasies of Schreber
and others with his speculation about the phylogenetic origins of the
incest taboo and of religion generally. Burkert sees behind the birth of
Dionysus an original “wounding of the father god”: “The thigh wound
stands in relation to castration and death, obviously in the context of
initiations,”17 by which he means shamanistic initiations involving
death and resuscitation.18 Burkert understands the birth of Athena in
similar terms:
And yet in the violent bond [sc. between father and daughter] a highly
ambivalent relationship is suggested: splitting of the skull is always fatal,
and Hephaistos has good reason to flee with his axe. . . . This – never
expressed – element of patricide in the birth myth leads back to the apoc-
ryphal Pallas myth.19

Burkert finds the theme of patricide implicit in two elements of the

myth. The first is the “always fatal” blow to Zeus’s head by his son (or

15
Cf. Delcourt (1961), who does not follow any particular psychoanalytic theory but nev-
ertheless speaks of “bisexual” imagery in Greek myth as something that arises in the
“hidden depths of human belief” (55) and “springs from the human mind and is
rooted deep in the unconscious” (60), a “dream of primordial unity” (69).
16
Kerenyi (1976) 276. He similarly understands (277) the public couvade ritual per-
formed on the island of Cyprus.
17
Burkert (1985a) 165.
18
An idea articulated more clearly in Burkert (1969) 23–25. Cf. Bettelheim (1954)
55–67, who focuses on puberty rites.
19
Burkert (1985a) 142–43.
10 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

stepson) Hephaestus.20 The second is the Pallas myth, which lies far-
ther in the background: Athena slew a giant named Pallas, whose skin
­covers the goddess’s aegis and whose name remains with her as an epi-
thet; according to some reliable later authorities, this Pallas was Athena’s
own father.21 Burkert alludes here to psychoanalytic ideas that he made
more explicit in his earlier Homo Necans (1972), in which he presented a
general theory of ritual violence: “Among the primitive hominid hordes,
brothers joined together to kill and eat their father because he jealously
prevented them from sharing his women. . . . Obedient to the dead man,
they submitted to the newly created order of renunciation and sexual
tabu. The father became mightier than before and was worshipped
as a god.”22 Both Burkert and Freud emphasize the hostility between
father and son, though Burkert focuses on the phylogenetic killing of
father by son (or daughter), whereas Freud focuses on the ontogenetic
­(threatened) castration of son by father. For Burkert, then, Zeus’s preg-
nancies with Dionysus and Athena constitute fantasy reenactments of the
original suffering of the father god.
There are two obvious shortcomings of these more traditional psy-
choanalytic interpretations of Greek male pregnancy myths. First, these
primordial psychoanalytic pasts are as vague and ahistorical as the pri-
mordial anthropological pasts of Bachofen, Farnell, and Cook. Our goal,
once again, ought to be not speculation about the possible psychologi-
cal drives that took shape within the distant past but a rich, synchronic
understanding of how the mythical births of Dionysus and Athena were
deployed during the classical period, especially in Athens. My discus-
sion of these myths in Chapters 3 and 5 will show that, during the clas-
sical period at least, they had more to do with conceptualizing kinship
and citizenship than with the intrapsychic conflicts of individual Greek
men. Which brings us to a second potential criticism of the traditional
psychoanalytic approach: it assumes some kind of psychic conflict (espe-
cially childhood sexual conflict generated in the course of the oedipal
process) at the origin of cross-gender fantasies. But many deployments
of male pregnancy myth and metaphor in ancient Greece, especially in
the earlier part of the period we survey (470–400 b.c.e.), do not appear
to be primarily about masculine gender identity.

20
Hephaestus as son: Hom. Il. 1.577–79, 14.338; Od. 8.312. Hephaestus as stepson: Hes.
Th. 927–29.
21
Burkert (1985a) 140.
22
Burkert (1983) 74.
 Introduction 11

This finding is indeed anticipated by some native ancient Greek

­interpretations of male pregnancy fantasies. Artemidorus, a dream inter-
preter writing in the second century c.e., interprets a number of dreams
in which a man imagines himself to be pregnant, to have given birth,
or to breast-feed (1.14, 1.16). Artemidorus’s interpretations of these
kinds of dreams, which, like all Greek dreams, were thought to predict
some future outcome, suggest that the Greeks associated pregnancy
dreams not with emasculation but with success or failure in business or
­marriage. For a wealthy man or a businessman, a dream of pregnancy
indicates that he will be beset with worries or troubles, whereas a dream
of parturition indicates that he will lose investments or debts owed to
him, unless he is currently in possession of a large cargo that has not
yet been sold, in which case a dream of parturition indicates that he
will sell the cargo. For a poor man or a slave, on the other hand, these
dreams are always good: a poor man who dreams of being pregnant or
of breast-feeding will amass great wealth, and a poor man or slave who
dreams of giving birth will put aside his troubles. One’s marital status
affects the outcome of the dream in a similar way. If a married man
dreams of being pregnant, it means he will lose his wife (he will have
to, in effect, become his own wife); if a married man dreams of breast-
feeding, he will likewise lose his wife and have to raise (nourish) his
children on his own, unless he is married and childless, in which case
the dream betokens the birth of children. But it is quite the opposite
for an unmarried man: if he dreams of being pregnant, it means he will
marry a likeminded wife, and the same if he dreams that he is breast-
feeding.23 Perhaps Plato, another native informant, gets it right when he
has Diotima in the Symposium (206a11–12, 206e8–207a2) suggest that
what motivates men to “give birth” intellectually is “to possess the good
eternally.” This does not mean that the feminine symbolism of Greek
male pregnancy myths and metaphors has no stable referent and that
we should interpret it in abstract structural terms.24 But we should keep

23
A few miscellaneous dreams in Artemidorus do not point to changes in a man’s socio-
economic or marital status. For example, a sick man who dreams of giving birth will
experience a quick death, and an athlete or gladiator who dreams that he breast-feeds
will fall ill (1.14, 1.16). It is only dreams in this latter category, by far the minority, that
could perhaps be interpreted along traditional psychoanalytic lines as revealing a fear
of castration.
24
One encounters something very close to a structural interpretation of Plato’s male
pregnancy metaphor in Hobbs (2006), who suggests that all language of difference,
including gender difference, functions, in part, as a characterization of the ultimately
unreal world of change and becoming. Cf. also Guattari (1984), who suggests, more
12 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

open the possibility that some versions, at least, of the male pregnancy
fantasy do not provide a window into intrapsychic sexual conflict or have
to do with sex or gender at all.
Two more recent psychoanalytic approaches to Greek male pregnancy
imagery, by Nicole Loraux and Page duBois, who draw on both femi-
nist psychoanalysis and poststructural linguistics, are largely successful
in dodging the two shortcomings we have identified in traditional psy-
choanalytic interpretations: they present their arguments within a broad
historical framework that culminates in fourth-century philosophy, and
their analysis of literary representations of male pregnancy constitutes
a “psychoanalysis,” as it were, not of individuals but of Greek society
more generally or, better yet, of the numerous discourses that reflect
and indeed constitute the Greek social fabric. Loraux, in The Experiences
of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, first published in French in
1989, begins with a conflict at the heart of Greek masculinity: a desire
to be “impermeable” to anything feminine and a countervailing desire
to absorb femininity, in the belief that “a man worthy of the name is
more virile precisely because he harbors within himself something of the
feminine.”25 These competing definitions of masculinity can be partly
mapped onto an opposition between the political and the psychological:
the Greek man profits from a sharp opposition between sexes, because
“it assures him of dominance, but one could postulate that is unbearable
because it reserves for the other sex the intensity of pleasure and pain.”
So there is opposition between a man’s political advantage and his psy-
chological advantage. “Unless it meets the other, the masculine man –
this political subject – has no body.”26 Loraux’s understanding of man’s
craving for the body that femininity offers is partly inspired by Derrida’s
notion of supplementation: femininity functions as an “operator par
excellence that makes it possible to conceive of identity as fashioned, in
practical terms, by otherness.”27
There is also a historical dimension to Loraux’s analysis. She finds in
the Homeric poems numerous portrayals of male heroes who feel their
bodies fully, which is to say feel pain like a woman; Greeks during this
period, she argues, were comfortable with a notion of masculinity beset

generally, that “becoming a woman” could represent any number of ways that subjects
find “an escape route from the established order,” any situation in which we find the
dominant “semiotic system being broken down.”
25
Loraux (1995) 4.
26
Loraux (1995) 10.
27
Loraux (1995) 4.
 Introduction 13

with contradiction.28 But in the archaic and early classical periods, when
the hoplite ideal and the democratic city-state that it underwrites were
at their zenith, we see a more exclusionary, binary definition of mas-
culinity: “The citizen is ‘pure’ anēr [man], inherently or permanently
devoid of femininity.”29 The topos of the beautiful death, which she
sees as emblematic of this period, is “a civic, abstract death that barely
touches the body of the citizen, for in the final analysis the citizen has no
body.”30 We reach a third and final phase with Plato and the new philo-
sophical male: unlike the hoplite citizen, the philosopher needs a body
but solely in order to renounce it in favor of the soul; in order to “sweep”
up the feminine body “into the philosopher’s quest for definition,”
Plato proposes “first to exclude, and second, almost simultaneously, by
means of a generalized metaphorization, to reappropriate what has been
rejected.”31 In other words, Plato tries to have it both ways: feminine cor-
poreality without compromising the impermeability of the male.
Page duBois’s Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations
of Women, published in 1988 and presented as a feminist critique from
within psychoanalysis, takes a similar approach. She too attempts to sit-
uate her analysis in the context of an ambitious historical argument, in
her case, an account of Greek representations of women’s bodies from
Homer to Aristotle. She argues that, before Plato, women were thought
of as a race apart from men; their bodies were conceived metaphorically,
as analogous to the fruitful earth.32 But, after Plato, woman is described
metonymically as a defective male.33 Male appropriation of the female
body emerges only with Plato. DuBois argues that Plato does this, in the
Phaedrus, Symposium, and Theaetetus, in order to “authorize” his monistic
metaphysical project, which needs to have one father-sun-god who is the
origin of all good. Whereas the presence of woman is lost entirely in
Aristotle, who defines her solely by her absence (her anatomical defective-
ness), Plato’s appropriation of the female reproductive role attempts to
displace woman but unwittingly retains a place for her. DuBois takes her
start from Derrida’s famous reading of the Phaedrus,34 in which writing is
a “supplement” needed to establish the centrality of spoken philosophy,

28
Loraux (1995) 37, 61, etc.
29
Loraux (1995) 143.
30
Loraux (1995) 37.
31
Loraux (1995) 143, 144.
32
DuBois (1988) 24, 28.
33
DuBois (1988) 3–4, 35, 171.
34
Derrida (1981).
14 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

a means of producing the “son” upon the inevitable death of “father”

truth. DuBois argues that woman is just such a supplement for Plato: she
is the “absence” that Plato (unconsciously) recognizes is needed to give
man “presence.”35 Aristotle, she argues, will feel no such need. DuBois’s
interpretation bears obvious affinities with that of Loraux: both see Plato
as a central figure in the transformation of Greek thinking about gender,
but whereas duBois believes that the boundary between male and female
is breached only with Plato, Loraux sees this as part of the story of Greek
gender from Homer onward.
The linguistically inflected psychoanalysis of Loraux and duBois is
more flexible than the traditional version employed by Kerenyi and
Burkert, which focuses ultimately on childhood sexual conflicts and
their phylogenetic echoes in a vague primordial past. As we have hinted
already, many deployments of male pregnancy myth and metaphor in
classical Greece seem not to originate in issues of sexual identity or in
social conflict between the sexes. Although Loraux and duBois them-
selves focus primarily on these issues, the broader psychoanalysis that
they employ is capable of explaining the more general way that texts and
the larger discourses of which they are a part make sense of the world
and the extent to which desire mediates that pursuit of meaning. My
approach differs from that of Loraux and duBois in two small but impor-
tant ways. First, I am interested not only in what the image of the preg-
nant male tells us about Greek conceptions of sex and gender but also
in how this image functioned as a way for the Greeks to figure paternity,
legitimacy of birth, authorship, intellectual filiation, and similar ideas.
Second, I focus more narrowly on the classical period and attempt to
situate the texts I discuss in a much more specific historical context than
those they attempted to describe.

Outline of the Book

The remainder of this book explores the development of male pregnancy
myths and metaphors during the period 470–350 b.c.e. and argues that
35
DuBois (1988) 173. On Plato’s engagement with femininity in the Symposium, see also
Halperin (1990) 137, 144–45, who argues that Plato does not simply “colonize” female
difference in order to claim femininity, in order to “have it”; rather “Socratic philoso-
phy must borrow her [Diotima’s] femininity in order to seem to leave nothing out and
thereby to ensure . . . the continual reproduction of its universalizing discourse in the
male culture of classical Athens.” But the effect, if not explicitly the aim, is to deny
female difference and thus silence women. We discuss other aspects of Halperin’s
reading of the Symposium in Chapter 6.
 Introduction 15

deployment of these myths and metaphors by different authors and in

different genres over the course of this period represents a coherent
“discourse.” The book does not address the rare instances of this motif
before the classical period, such as literary and artistic representations of
the birth of Athena that survive from the archaic period or the famous
Homeric simile that compares the pain felt by the wounded Agamemnon
to that experienced by a woman in labor (Hom. Il. 11.269–72).36 Nor
does it address postclassical instances, especially three alleged instances
of the couvade and a similar public rite practiced in the Cypriot city of
Amathous, all of which can be securely dated to the Hellenistic period
at the earliest.
The body of this book begins in Chapter 2, with a discussion of a
­revolutionary embryological theory, associated initially with Anaxagoras
of Clazomenae, which held that men alone contribute “seed” to the cre-
ation of a new life. This new theory presents a kind of male pregnancy
and parturition as scientific fact: the man’s ejaculation of seed, accord-
ing to this theory, represents the creation of a fully defined homunculus,
which thereafter needs only the space and nourishment supplied by the
mother to reach its full size. Ejaculation is, for all intents and purposes,
parturition. This masculinist embryology was accompanied by a broader
cosmology characterized by a heavenly quasi-metaphysical male princi-
ple that acts upon earthy female matter. We shall see that those who
developed this new embryology and its attendant cosmology were moti-
vated more by developments internal to pre-Socratic philosophy in the
fifth century, especially its metaphysical turn, than to any masculine gam-
bit within the contested domain of gender politics.
The myth of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus, the focus of
Chapter 3, represents another important strain of thought that is remark-
ably influential on the development of the male pregnancy discourse.
We begin with a provocative argument: that the myth of the thigh birth
either originates not long before 500 b.c.e. or first comes to mainland
Greece at about this time. This argument, speculative as it is, helps us to
focus on the historical conditions under which the myth became popu-
lar in the fifth century. Deployment of the myth, especially in book 2 of
Herodotus’s Histories and in Euripides’ Bacchae, reveals the contours of
a debate over how to rationalize the Greek pantheon, especially those

36
For an excellent discussion of this and thematically related similes in Homer, see
Loraux (1995) 34–37. I argue, in Chapter 3, that the myth of Dionysus’s birth may not
date much before the fifth century b.c.e.
16 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

interstitial figures, such as, differently, Dionysus and Heracles, who were
born of a divine father and mortal mother, a debate that probably began
in the late archaic world of Xenophanes of Colophon and Theagenes
of Rhegium. Euripides went even further and used this myth as a way to
explore contradictions within the new ideology of citizenship, initially
codified in Pericles’ citizenship law of 451, which restricted citizenship
to those young men whose parents were both Athenians.
Chapter 4 is where these different strains – monistic metaphysics, new
cosmological ideas from the East, rationalizing theology, and citizenship
reform – come together in what appears, for the first time, to be a coher-
ent “discourse.” The focus of this chapter is the development of the new
male pregnancy metaphor, which turns up for the first time in surviving
texts in the 420s b.c.e. We will explore the origins and deployment of
several different forms of the metaphor: those that describe the gener-
ation of thought, poetry, and even legislation as intellectual products to
which men may be said metaphorically to “give birth,” and an impor-
tant variant on the “birth of thought” metaphor, according to which a
teacher “impregnates” his pupil with knowledge or virtue. This variant,
associated with the Sophists in particular, was, as I argue in Chapters 6
and 7, the primary inspiration for and target of Plato’s male pregnancy
metaphors in the Symposium and Theaetetus.
We turn to Plato soon enough, but in Chapter 5 we consider first a
comical deployment of the male pregnancy metaphor in Aristophanes’
late play the Assemblywomen, in which the women of Athens take control
of the machinery of government, a plot that draws on some of the same
utopian political ideas that Plato draws on later in his Republic. Invocation
of the metaphor is brief – it occurs when the male protagonist Blepyrus,
dressed in his wife’s clothes, prays to the goddess of childbirth Eileithyia
to help relieve him of his constipation, to help him, in other words, to
“deliver” a turd – but this comic deployment of the metaphor, though
brief, functions as a male response to the women’s revolutionary aboli-
tion of paternity. Blepyrus’s strategy, as we shall see, has a long pedigree
in archaic and classical Greek culture. And his fantasy of anal birth as the
path to rejuvenation and even salvation may also ultimately have a back-
ground in Greek utopian philosophy.
In Chapter 6 we turn to Plato’s male pregnancy metaphor in the
Symposium. We begin with a detailed description of Diotima’s pregnancy
metaphor and pay close attention to the rhetorical strategy Plato adopts
in the course of introducing and developing the metaphor. This detailed
exegesis generates two urgent questions: What is it that the philosopher
 Introduction 17

gives birth to, and why does Plato shift from masculine to feminine
reproductive language over the course of Diotima’s account of intellec-
tual pregnancy? The former question leads us to show that Plato ends
up thinking of the philosopher’s intellectual progeny as “virtue,” which
he cultivates and perhaps remains “pregnant” with in his own soul; Plato
presents this as an alternative to the claim of some Sophists, which we
discuss earlier in Chapter 4, to “impregnate” their pupils with virtue. For
Plato, the philosopher gets virtue not from his teacher, but produces
it within himself, possibly under the fertilizing inspiration of the Form
of Beauty. The second question leads us to consider two different ways
in which Plato deploys the male pregnancy metaphor. In the speeches
before Diotima’s, he essentially appropriates pregnancy and parturition
by masculinizing it. But in the breathtaking speech of Diotima, intellec-
tual pregnancy is no longer a masculinization of the female role but an
empowering feminization of the male philosopher.
Chapter 7 is a discussion of the rather different pregnancy image of
Plato’s later Theaetetus. Plato here features not a feminized philosopher
who is the source of his own intellectual creativity, but an intellectual
“midwife,” who not only helps others to give birth to their ideas but also
has the power, like a new father, to decide whether the intellectual chil-
dren born as a result should be raised or exposed to die. Plato recog-
nizes that he can no longer resist sophistic relativism by appropriating
the Sophists’ own pregnancy metaphor, as he does in the Symposium; he
now attacks relativism – here, a version that claimed that all perceptions
and statements are true for those who make them – with a pellucid diag-
nosis of the origin of falsity and a demonstration of the power of the new
“paternal midwife” to expose these false “children.” Plato casts Socrates,
his erstwhile teacher, in this powerful new role, but hints at the same
time that this Socrates, who presides over the birth of ideas, is himself
trapped in the world of birth and becoming, a wistful acknowledgment,
perhaps, of how far Plato has developed, philosophically, beyond his
intellectual “father.”
 2

The New Father of Anaxagoras

The One-Seed Theory of Reproduction and Its Reception
in Athenian Tragedy

We begin our survey of images of male pregnancy and parturition in

­classical Greek literature with discussion of an epochal development
in classical Greek science: a new embryological theory pioneered by
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and three successors beginning in the mid-
dle of the fifth century b.c.e., which attempted to show that the father
made the most important contribution to reproduction, the “seed” of
new life and perhaps even soul, a theory that was easily understood to
mean that life, or at least the potential for life, was created the moment
that the father ejaculated, that it was the father, strictly speaking, who
“gave birth.”1 Nor was the new embryology an isolated development: it
was isomorphic with a new approach to cosmology more generally that
was inspired by Near Eastern myth, Pythagorean eschatology, and the
exasperating ontological arguments of a philosopher from Elea. Indeed,
what is striking about the new embryology and the new cosmology is that
they appear not to originate as interventions in sociopolitical debates
about the gender roles of men and women in Greek society.
The story of Anaxagoras’s new embryology has never been properly
told. Aristotle’s theory of reproduction – especially the idea that men
contribute form to the embryo and women, matter – has received a good
deal of attention from scholars,2 and so too have the reproductive theo-
ries of Hippocratic authors writing during the late fifth and early fourth

1
This idea is picked up by Plato in the fourth century: see, e.g., Symp. 206c1–6, Tim.
86c3–d2, 91d2–3. Most medical writers, by contrast, took a more gradualist approach to
fetal development, so that while new life was potentially present in the seed of the father
(and, for many medical writers, the mother), signs of life appeared and accumulated
over the whole course of gestation. See Hanson (2008).
2
See, e.g., Horowitz (1976); Morsink (1979); Saïd (1983); Cooper (1988); Dean-Jones
(1994) 176–99; Coles (1995); McGowan Tress (1999); and Henry (2007).

18
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 19

centuries.3 The goal of this chapter is to consider the embryological the-

ories of a somewhat earlier period, ca. 470–430 b.c.e., what we might call
the age of Anaxagoras. The scientific developments of this period are
relatively poorly understood. One reason is that no complete texts writ-
ten by scientific authors active during this period survive; we are there-
fore dependent upon brief quotations and summaries of their views by
later authors, the former generally incomplete and lacking in context,
the latter frequently distorting the author’s thought. Our imperfect
understanding of Anaxagoras’s embryology is also fueled, paradoxically,
by confusion about the extent and nature of its similarity to the the-
ory of reproduction articulated by the character of Apollo in Aeschylus’s
Eumenides, who attempts to defend Orestes against the charge of spilling
kindred blood by claiming that Clytemnestra is not in fact a biological
“parent” of the accused Orestes (658–60). The argument Apollo offers
there has generally been thought to reflect in some way the new theory
of Anaxagoras, but the exact nature of the relationship has been elusive
because of uncertainty about the precise claims of both Anaxagoras’s
theory and Apollo’s and about their relative chronology.4 We consider
this passage from the Eumenides in the final section of this chapter.
The one-seed theory of reproduction, which held that only the father
contributed “seed” to the embryo, was articulated originally, it appears,
by Anaxagoras, who was resident in Athens around the middle of the
fifth century,5 and was taken up subsequently by Hippon of Rhegium,
Philolaus of Croton, and Diogenes of Apollonia. Somewhat later came
the first formal two-seed theory, which held that women as well as men
contributed “seed” to the reproductive process, a theory closely associ-
ated with the doctrine of pangenesis, which held that this “seed” came
from all parts of the body, of both men and women. This two-seed the-
ory seems to have been developed after 430 b.c.e. first by Democritus

3
See, e.g., G. Lloyd (1983) 86–94; Dean-Jones (1994) 153–76; Hanson (2008).
4
Lesky (1951) 54; Rösler (1970) 74–87; and Sommerstein (1989) 206–8 believe that
the passage in Aeschylus does allude to Anaxagoras. For a dissenting view, see Kember
(1973) 9 and G. Lloyd (1983) 86. Peretti (1956), who provides the most complete study
of the question, is agnostic. Uncertainty about the publication date of Anaxagoras’s book
further complicates matters: Mansfeld (1980) 89–95 argues that the book was published
only in about 440 b.c.e., well after the Oresteia of 458, but other scholars, such as Lesky,
Rösler, Sommerstein, and Woodbury (1981), prefer a date before 458; Curd (2007)
132–33 n. 13 points out that even if Anaxagoras’s book was published after the Oresteia,
it is possible that Anaxagoras had presented his ideas publicly much earlier.
5
There is disagreement about when Anaxagoras resided in Athens: Mansfeld (1979)
and (1980) argue for ca. 456–37, Woodbury (1981) for ca. 480–450. See Curd (2007)
130–37 for a survey of the debate with up-to-date bibliography.
20 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

and then a number of Hippocratic authors, both probably reacting, at

least in part, to the one-seed theory of Anaxagoras and his successors.
Scholarly work on the two-seed theory, especially in Hippocratic authors,
has shown that it was not only innovative, coming remarkably, if super-
ficially, close to the perspective of modern genetics, but also, insofar as
it expressed a principle of gender equality, genuinely progressive.6 The
innovation of the one-seed theory is that it offered a solution to two phil-
osophical puzzles, one metaphysical and the other eschatological, that
demanded a single source for the origin of new life. And while the theory
is, on its surface at least, politically retrograde, it was itself revolutionary
just where the later two-seed theory was weakest: it posited, a century
before Aristotle, a metaphysical foundation for reproductive biology and
indeed paved the way for a fully masculinist metaphysics.

The New Embryology

It is almost certain that all Greeks in all periods believed that both men
and women contributed materially to reproduction, in spite of the rhe-
torical exaggeration evident in some texts, such as Apollo’s speech in the
Eumenides. For all theories, folk or scientific, had to explain two “facts”
of experience: many if not most children resemble their mother, at least
in part,7 and women cease to menstruate when they become pregnant.
Any theory that denied that women contributed “seed” (as the one-
seed theory did) would have acknowledged instead that the woman’s
contribution was menstrual blood,8 and that it was this blood that not
only nourished the fetus from conception until birth but had the abil-
ity, at least in part, to mold the infant in the mother’s image. Even some
Hippocratic authors who argued in favor of female “seed” retained a
major or even more important role for menstrual blood in the process of
conception and gestation.9 For many male writers, the denial of female
“seed” would have been purely empirical: the woman was not seen to
emit anything during sexual intercourse that corresponded to the male
ejaculate, though some may have wondered about the vaginal lubricant
that women produce when sexually aroused.10 What was empirically

6
See, e.g., G. Lloyd (1983) 86–88.
7
Hipp. Genit. 8, e.g., argues that it is not possible for a child to resemble only one
parent.
8
Dean-Jones (1994) 151.
9
Dean-Jones (1994) 153–55.
10
See nn. 29–31. For the Hippocratics, see Dean-Jones (1994) 155.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 21

undeniable was that women produced menstrual blood and that the
menstrual cycle had something to do with a woman’s ability to conceive.11
The claim that only males produced seed, then, need not constitute a
denial that women made a significant or even equally important material
contribution to reproduction. All Greeks during all periods subscribed
to what I would call a two-substance theory of reproduction, according
to which both men and women contributed some material substance to
the process. The only questions were whether the female’s substance was
contributed during the sexual act or at another time; whether it was the
same as or different from the male’s substance; and whether it, at what-
ever stage in the process it was produced and whatever its nature, ought
to be referred to by the term “seed.”

Folk Embryology of the Archaic Period

Evidence for folk beliefs about reproduction during the archaic period
is meager, but it suggests a belief that males and females contributed dif-
ferent substances.12 This evidence, such as it is, focuses largely on male
reproductive anatomy and physiology, whereas beliefs about the anatomy
and physiology of women must largely be inferred. One thing we learn
about folk beliefs during the archaic period is that the male reproductive
substance was thought to be located and possibly produced in the head
and knees. In the Works and Days, Hesiod warns that, at the height of
summer, “women are most lascivious, but men are most feeble, because
the Dog-Star dries up their head and knees” (586–87), which means that
men are both less interested in sex during this time and less able to pro-
duce fertile seed. This belief anticipates the later scientific theory of the
fifth century, associated in particular with Alcmaeon of Croton and later
Hippon of Rhegium, that seed was produced and stored in the head and
the spinal column, an approach that modern scholars refer to as the
myeloencephalogenetic theory of reproduction.13 In Hesiod, too, male
semen is probably thought to be related to and indeed derived from
cerebral and synovial fluid. This archaic folk view is probably reflected
in the myth of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus and in the myth of

11
Dean-Jones (1994) 170–71.
12
This evidence has never been systematically canvassed, though Haedicke (1936) 16–56
is a helpful overview of some aspects of the topic. Cf. also Onians (1951) 108–12,
118–22, 174–80, 483–93, who, however, pays little attention to chronology.
13
On the myeloencephalogenetic theory, see Lesky (1951) 9–30.
22 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the birth of Dionysus from his thigh.14 But what does this passage imply
about the reproductive anatomy of women: were they also thought to
produce a reproductive substance in the head, knees, or spine and to
secrete this substance during sexual intercourse?15 Although it is tempt-
ing to assume that the myeloencephalogenetic theory and its folk ante-
cedents imply a shared anatomy and physiology for men and women, the
theory was almost always invoked to describe an anatomy and physiology
that is largely if not exclusively male.16
A second feature of archaic folk belief about reproduction was the use
of the “seed” metaphor to describe the male’s reproductive secretion.17
This archaic version of the seed metaphor does not necessarily imply a
devaluation of the female contribution, as some versions of it will in the
classical period. For example, in none of the examples of the metaphor
from the archaic period is the female assimilated to a field or furrow.
They clearly assimilate the father to a farmer, but they fall well short of
attributing to him a mastery of the female soil and of implying that the
woman made no important contribution.18
A third and final feature of folk embryology in the archaic period is
the notion that fathers are related to their children by blood.19 What
kind of reproductive physiology, if any, does this imply? How does the
father’s blood come to be part of his child’s body? One possibility is
that this is a metaphor modeled on the very palpable blood connection
between mother and child (after conception, her blood ceased to flow
each month in the form of menses and was thought to be diverted to
the growing embryo, visible at birth in the umbilicus): while the mother
was understood to be quite literally consanguineous with her child – the
chorus of Furies from Aeschylus’s Eumenides could still, in 458 b.c.e.,

14
Onians (1951) 111, 178–83.
15
Cf. the later discussion of this issue in Ps.-Arist. Probl. 4.25, 28.
16
See n. 27.
17
Hom. Il. 20.303; Hes. Op. 735–36, frr. 1.16, 43a.53–54 MW. The injunction in Hes.
Op. 735–36 not to “plant descendants” (σπερμαίνειν γενεήν) after attending a funeral
but only after a festival in honor of the gods is directed at Perses specifically and men
generally, to judge from the larger context, including the advice on when to take a wife
at 695–705 and on sexual taboos at 727–36. Neither this passage nor any of the other
passages cited earlier in this note definitively proves that only men were thought to pro-
duce “seed”; but the fact that the seed metaphor is associated only with men in archaic
poetry nevertheless points to such a conclusion.
18
On this shift in the metaphor from the archaic to the classical period, see duBois
(1988) 65–85. Cf. Hanson (1992) 36–37, 40–41 on the woman-as-earth analogy in the
Hippocratics.
19
Hom. Il. 6.211, 19.105, 19.111, 20.241; Od. 16.300.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 23

claim that the child was connected by blood only to his mother (605–8) –
a merely symbolic blood connection was attributed to the father, a
metaphor for his social kinship with the child.20 A second possibility,
a variation on the first, is perhaps more persuasive: the very palpable
physiological blood connection between mothers and their children
inspired the hypothesis that the man’s semen was somehow analogous
to the woman’s blood, possibly even a form or a more refined distillate
of their own blood. This notion was given a formal scientific statement
in the second half of the fifth century,21 but an informal version was
likely in existence in some form much earlier. The parallelism between
male semen and female blood, for example, may lie behind the mythical
births that resulted from the castration of Uranus: in Hesiod’s version in
the Theogony, Uranus’s genitals and the semen contained within fell to
the sea and generated the goddess Aphrodite, whereas the blood from
these genitals fell to the earth and generated the Erinyes, Giants, and
Melian-ash Nymphs (182–200). This example is exceptional, because
both the semen and blood come from the male, and he is able to create
both Aphrodite and the more destructive figures without sexual inter-
course. But the fertile blood of Uranus probably works the same way
that the fertile menstrual blood of women was thought to work. The
fructifying power of a man’s blood still resonates in the classical period
when Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon, has Clytemnestra imagine that her
husband’s blood could fertilize her (1389–92).22
Archaic evidence for folk beliefs about the male role in the repro-
ductive process, then, suggests that male semen was thought to be com-
posed of some kind of warm, moist substance that resided in the head
and knees, perhaps somehow analogous to blood, most potent at cooler

20
There is certainly plenty of evidence from Greece, Rome, and elsewhere in antiquity of
the concept of consanguinity losing its literal meaning and being applied to more dis-
tant kin, even those related only by marriage. See Pârvulescu (1989) 77–78.
21
First articulated, as far as we can tell, by Diogenes of Apollonia (DK 64 A24, B6) and
later, more famously, by Aristotle (GA 726b1–5, etc.); cf. also Aet. 5.3.2 (attributed to
“Pythagoras”). Longrigg (1985) argues that Empedocles had already presented a form
of this idea, but I am skeptical. Even if Empedocles is one of those that Aristotle (De an.
405b2–6) thinks Hippon of Rhegium had criticized for “saying that soul is blood,” there
is no evidence that Empedocles thought that seed too was a form of blood.
22
The pomegranate in the Persephone myth probably also reflects the importance of
blood (the fruit’s red juice) and seed (the fruit’s many seeds) in reproduction. But how
does the pomegranate map onto the reproductive roles of Hades and Persephone? Do
the seeds refer to the seed of Hades, the red juice to the blood of Persephone, corre-
sponding to what I have described as the archaic two-substance theory of reproduction?
Or could we suppose that both blood and seed are the contributions of the male, given
that the fruit is administered to Persephone by Hades?
24 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

times of year, and sometimes assimilated metaphorically to the seeds a

farmer sows in his fields. There is no direct evidence for folk beliefs about
the role that women play in reproduction. But I think it is safe to assume
that Greeks of the archaic period recognized the resemblance between
newborn children and their mothers and believed that this was effected
by the woman’s body and bodily fluids during copulation or gestation
or both. And I think it is also reasonable to infer from references in
Homer to the consanguinity of fathers and sons and from the fertility of
male blood in Hesiod’s account of the castration of Uranus that female
blood itself was fertile and that this was thought to be the woman’s main
material contribution to reproduction. We cannot be sure how women’s
blood was thought to work in the archaic period – did it mix with male
semen during copulation, or did it only begin to play a role as the child
began to grow inside the womb? – nor for that matter do we know how
male semen worked or how it could have been produced by the body
out of blood or out of the same substance as blood. But it seems reason-
ably clear that women were thought to make a material contribution to
reproduction and that this contribution was blood.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
The one-seed theorists of the fifth century maintained this traditional
physiological division of labor. So what was so innovative about the new
theory? We begin with Anaxagoras, who is the earliest thinker to whom a
version of the formal one-seed theory has been attributed. Aristotle, our
earliest witness, tells us that Anaxagoras taught that the seed contributed
by the father determined the sex of the offspring:
For some say that this differentiation [of sex] occurs already in the seeds
(ἐν τοῖς σπέρμασιν), such as Anaxagoras and others among the natural phi-
losophers. [They say that] the seed (τὸ σπέρμα) comes from the male, and
the female supplies the place (τόπον), and the male [child] comes from
the right side and the female from the left, and, within the uterus, the male
[children] are on the right side, the female on the left. But others, such
as Empedocles, [say that sexual differentiation takes place] in the womb.
(GA 763b30–764a2 = DK 59 A107)

Aristotle appears to attribute two different views to Anaxagoras: the sex

of the offspring is determined by the male seed (sperma) alone, and
the woman plays no role in this;23 and a male child is produced from

23
Aristotle’s claim that Anaxagoras and others held that sex was determined “in the seeds”
should not be read as referring to male seed and female seed, because in the next
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 25

seed that comes from the right side of the father’s body, which appar-
ently falls naturally into the right side of the womb, a female child from
seed from the left side of the father’s body, which falls into the left side
of the womb.24 It is important to note that Aristotle does not say that
Anaxagoras denied females any material role in reproduction. When
he says that Anaxagoras held that the female provided only “place,” he
means to say only that the womb does not play a role in determining
whether the child will be a male or female but is merely the “place”
in which the already sexually differentiated paternal seed falls. He does
not, for example, attribute to Anaxagoras the view that the female does
not play a material role in determining the child’s resemblance to his
parents and more distant relatives.25
Indeed, Censorinus, a Roman grammarian writing in the third cen-
tury c.e., reports that Anaxagoras taught that the offspring most resem-
bled the parent “who contributed more seed (seminis)” (De die nat. 6.8 =
DK 59 A111). This seems to mean that Anaxagoras taught that while the
sex of the child was determined by the father’s seed alone (so Aristotle),
resemblance was determined by which parent’s contribution was greater.
Although Censorinus uses the term semen to refer to both the father’s
and the mother’s contribution, Aristotle makes it clear that it is the
father alone who produces “seed”; presumably Censorinus mistakenly
labels the mother’s menstrual blood “seed” because it plays an important
role in resemblance.26

sentence he makes it clear that seed comes only from the male. So the expression “in
the seeds” must refer to the “seeds” produced either by males collectively or possibly
by an individual male during a single ejaculation. The panspermia theory that Aristotle
discusses at GA 769a28–b3 has been claimed by some, e.g., Kember (1973) 12, to be
Anaxagoras’s, but Aristotle does not mention Anaxagoras by name, and the theory is not
confirmed by any other evidence for his teachings.
24
Cf. Kember (1971) 76–77; but cf. Peck (1942) 372 n. 1.
25
Lesky (1951) 12–13 and Lonie (1981) 66 argue, on the basis of Cens. De die nat. 5.3 =
DK 24 A13, that already Anaxagoras had presented a version of the theory of ­pangenesis.
But Arist. GA 723a6–17 states unambiguously that Anaxagoras’s embryology was not
pangeneticist; see also De Ley (1980) 145 n. 78. Clearly the testimony of Aristotle must
be preferred to that of Censorinus; on this point, see also following note.
26
Cens. De die nat. 5.4 = DK 24 A13 lists Anaxagoras as one who believed that seed was
contributed by the mother as well as the father. Scholars have noted the contradic-
tion between Aristotle and Censorinus, and, surprisingly, a number of scholars, forced
to choose between them, have adopted the report of Censorinus in preference to that
of Aristotle: so Wellmann (1929) 315; Peretti (1956) 254–55; Lanza (1966) 177–78;
Kember (1973) 1–5; Curd (2007) 227. But I think it is perverse to jettison the clear opin-
ion of Aristotle, writing less than a hundred years after Anaxagoras’s death, in favor of the
Roman dilettante Censorinus: so rightly Lesky (1951) 55; cf. also Blersch (1937) 47, 49;
Erhard (1942) 127. See further discussion of this passage of Censorinus in Appendix I.
26 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Hippon of Rhegium
Hippon of Rhegium was probably a generation younger than Anaxagoras
and, like many natural scientists and medical writers from Magna
Graecia, subscribed to a form of the myeloencephalogenetic theory of
reproduction, which held that seed was produced in the head and spi-
nal marrow, a theory that assumes anatomy and physiological processes
that are applicable largely, if not exclusively, to male bodies.27 So it is
perhaps not surprising to learn that Hippon subscribed also to a ver-
sion of the one-seed theory, although the details of it are not altogether
easy to reconstruct. Censorinus lists him as being among those who held
that “a child is born from the seed of the father alone” (De die nat. 5.4
= DK 24 A13), which would seem to make him a one-seed theorist in
the mold of Anaxagoras. But Aetius says that, according to Hippon,
“females no less than males emit seed (σπέρμα), but this does not con-
tribute to the creation of life (ζῳογονίαν) because it falls outside the
uterus” (Aet. 5.5.3 = DK 38 A13).28 This female emission that “falls out-
side the uterus” is probably vaginal lubricant. If it were emitted into the
uterus, as male seed was, women would presumably be able to conceive
a child without any contribution from a man.29 Aetius observes, perhaps
reflecting an argument made by Hippon himself, that “some women
frequently emit seed apart from men, especially widows” (ibid.).30 If
some women, such as widows, produce this “seed,” but do not conceive,
then this female “seed” cannot play a role in the creation of new life. If
Hippon did call this vaginal lubricant “seed,” as Aetius suggests, it was
likely under the influence of the new two-seed theory of Democritus and
some Hippocratic authors, which identified this lubricant as the female
contribution to reproduction and explicitly labeled it “seed.”31
Hippon’s explanation of sex determination (DK 38 A14) is more
obscure. Censorinus says that Hippon taught that female children are
27
See DK 38 A12 and fuller discussion in Appendix I.
28
Cf. Arist. GA 737a5, who says that the male’s highly concocted reproductive residue
alone contains the ζωτικὴ ἀρχή (principle of life).
29
Hipp. Genit. 4 observes that vaginal lubricant falls “sometimes into the womb . . . some-
times outside.” Some other scientific and medical writers from the classical period, by
contrast, thought that both the male and the female substances were deposited into the
vagina, outside the uterus, and that both were later drawn pneumatically into the uterus.
See, e.g., Ps.-Arist. HA 10.635b29–31, 636a6–7, 637a16–18.
30
Ps.-Arist. HA 10.635a34–b4 says that it is natural and indeed desirable that women emit
vaginal lubricant even when they are not having sexual intercourse with their husbands.
Cf. also Arist. GA 739a20–23; Ps.-Arist. HA 10.634b29–31, 635b32–37, 637b25–27.
31
On the role of vaginal lubricant in the two-seed theory, see Lonie (1981) 120.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 27

born from “thinner seeds,” male children from “denser seeds” (De die
nat. 6.4). Aetius provides two different accounts of Hippon’s theory.
At 5.7.3, he suggests that Hippon thought male children came from
­“compact and sturdy seed,” whereas female children were created from
“flowing and weaker seed.” But at 5.7.7, Hippon’s position is described
rather differently: “A male child [would result] if seed (γονή) should
prevail, a female child, if nourishment (τροφή) [should prevail].”32 This
testimonium suggests that Hippon, unlike Anaxagoras, believed that the
female did play a role in sex determination. And the female contribution
that played this role appears to be menstrual blood and not vaginal lubri-
cant. For when Aetius says that the sex of the child will be determined by
a battle between “seed” (γονή) and “nourishment” (τροφή), he is clearly
referring to an interaction between the father’s seed and the mother’s
blood, respectively, much as Aristotle will argue a century later.
But the other notices for Hippon’s theory of sex determination are
more ambiguous. These suggest that, according to Hippon, male chil-
dren result from “compact and sturdy seed” (Aetius) or “denser seeds”
(Censorinus), female children from “flowing and weaker seed” (Aetius)
or “thinner seeds” (Censorinus). Are we to understand these as refer-
ences to the father’s seed alone?33 If so, Hippon’s account echoes that
of Anaxagoras, who taught that the sex of the offspring was determined
by the father’s seed alone. But in that case, these other testimonia would
appear to be in conflict with Aetius 5.7.7, which gives menstrual blood
a role in sex determination. Alternatively, we may suppose that these
denser and thinner “seeds” are the male seed (γονή) and female blood
(τροφή), respectively. This is the interpretation I am inclined to adopt,
as it allows us to reconcile the different testimonia from Censorinus
and Aetius.34
It appears, then, that Hippon took notice of two female emissions. He
acknowledged the existence of vaginal lubricant, almost certainly influ-
enced by the role this female substance played in the two-seed theory

32
In both passages from Aet. 5.7, the doxa is attributed to “Hipponax,” which Diels is prob-
ably right to emend to “Hippon.” See DK 38 A14 and notes ad loc.
33
So Erhard (1939) 326.
34
If the weaker seed of Aet. 5.7.3 is in fact menstrual blood contributed by the female, it
seems quite apt to refer to it as “flowing” (ῥευστικόν). Cf. Hipp. Genit. 6, where men and
women alike are said to produce both stronger male seed and weaker female seed, the
mixing of which, in its various permutations, results in male and female children who
resemble their fathers and mothers to different degrees. On these terms, see generally
Lonie (1981) 128. But it is perhaps significant that the weaker seed of neither the father
nor the mother is described by the Hippocratic author as ῥευστικόν.
28 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

of Democritus and some Hippocratic writers; although Hippon may

have called this female emission “seed,” as the two-seed theorists did, he
denied that it played a role in the creation of new life. Much greater was
the role he seems to have given menstrual blood. Through its interaction
with male seed, it seems to have played a role in determining the sex of
the child. It probably also played a role in nourishing certain parts of
the growing embryo. Thus Aetius tells us that Hippon taught that “the
bones [of the infant] are from the male, whereas the flesh is from the
female” (5.5.3 = DK 38 A13), which probably means that the (white)
bones are formed by male semen, the (red) flesh by female menstrual
blood.35 Did Hippon call this menstrual blood “seed”? It is impossible
to answer this question with certainty, but it seems likely that the answer
is no. Aetius’s contrast at 5.7.7 between male “seed” (γονή) and female
“nourishment” (τροφή) is perhaps decisive. The other testimonia, which
do appear to label this female emission “seed” – if indeed their mention
of thinner and weaker seeds, which grow into female children, is “seed”
produced by the female and not by the male alone – have probably dis-
torted Hippon’s true position as a result of confusion with his teaching
on vaginal lubricant, which he might have called “seed,” or with the prac-
tice of some other thinkers who did label menstrual blood “seed.”36
Hippon of Rhegium, in sum, appears to have been a one-seed theorist
who departed from Anaxagoras in two small but significant ways. First,
he took formal notice of vaginal lubricant, which many thinkers in the
generation after Anaxagoras made central to their two-seed theory of
reproduction, and might have even been willing to call it “seed.” But
if so, it was in a qualified sense, for he insisted – and was perhaps the
first to do so – that only the male “seed” had the power to confer life to
the embryo. Second, he appears to have given another female contribu-
tion – menstrual blood – a role in the determination of the sex of the
offspring, something Anaxagoras had credited to the male contribution
alone. Both adjustments to the one-seed theory may have been made in

35
Walther Kranz bracketed this sentence in his revision of this text of Aet. 5.5.3 in DK
38 A13, presumably on the ground that it is inconsistent with Hippon’s position that
female “seed” does not play a role in conception because it falls outside the uterus.
But he did not consider the possibility, which I have argued for here, that while this
female substance does not play a role in conception, another female substance, men-
strual blood, did play its traditional role in nourishing the growing fetus.
36
Even Aristotle occasionally calls it seed (though in an “impure” form): see, e.g., GA
725b3, 728a26, 728b22, 737a28, 750b4, 766b14; and Balme (1990) 22. Cf. the
Talmudic Niddah 31a, which distinguishes the male’s “seed of the white substance” from
the female’s “seed of the red substance,” with Cilliers (2004) 347–50.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 29

response to arguments offered by Democritus and others on behalf of

the new two-seed theory of reproduction.

Philolaus of Croton and Diogenes of Apollonia

Another myeloencephalogeneticist from southern Italy, Philolaus of
Croton, active around 430 b.c.e.,37 apparently also taught that only
males contributed seed. According to Aristotle’s student Menon, whose
history of medicine is reported in the famous papyrus known as the
Anonymus Londinensis, Philolaus claimed that warmth is the primary
constituent of the human body because “seed (σπέρμα) is warm, and
this is what creates the living being (κατασκευαστικὸν τοῦ ζῴου), and
the place (τόπος) into which seed is deposited – this is the womb – is
rather warm and similar to it [seed].”38 This passage does not distin-
guish explicitly between male and female contributions, but its mention
of the womb as the “place” into which seed is deposited is reminiscent
of the way Aristotle characterizes his own one-seed theory as well as
that of Anaxagoras.39 Philolaus is indeed likely one of those of whom
Aetius is thinking when he reports that some Pythagoreans held that
females did not produce seed (5.4.2).40 Scholars have also credited
to Philolaus the following doxa, which Diogenes Laertius attributes
to anonymous Pythagoreans: “Seed (σπέρμα) is a drop of brain fluid
that contains warm breath (ἀτμόν) in it; when this [drop] is brought
into the womb, it produces icho r̄ , moisture, and blood from the brain
fluid . . . but soul and perception from the breath (ἀτμοῦ)” (Diog. Laert.
8.28 = DK 58 B1a [§28]).41 This would make Philolaus an adherent of the
37
Huffman (1993) 1–12.
38
DK 44 A27 = P. Lit. Lond. 165 §18.8.
39
Huffman (1993) 298–99. This interpretation seems more likely than one that would
have Philolaus suggesting that both men and women “deposit” warm seed into the wom-
an’s warm womb. For the language of “deposit” (καταβολή) in this testimonium, cf.
Paul Ep. Hebr. 11.11 with J. Irwin (1978).
40
Aetius attributes to “Pythagoras,” along with Plato and Aristotle, a distinction between
the immaterial dynamis of seed and the material substance that serves as its vehicle.
His being paired with Plato and Aristotle suggests that this was a distinction applica-
ble only to male seed. The passage cites this as the belief of “Pythagoras,” but it is well
established that the attribution to Pythagoras himself of scientific views is mistaken
and typically reflects the teaching of one or more later Pythagoreans. Kirk, Raven, and
Schofield (1983) 216, 341. Aet. 5.5.1, by contrast, attributes to “Pythagoras,” along with
Democritus and Epicurus, the view that women do produce seed; this position must
have been held by a different subset of classical Pythagoreans.
41
On the attribution of this doxa to Philolaus or someone from his circle, see Lesky (1951)
11 n. 3. But I believe Lesky 29 is wrong to interpret this passage as meaning that the
30 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

myeloencephalogenetic theory of reproduction, much like Alcmaeon of

Croton and Hippon of Rhegium, two other southern Italian thinkers.
He also shares another important view with Hippon: regardless of what
matter the female contributes, the male contributes life, or soul, itself.
As we shall see shortly, it is no accident that southern Italian myeloen-
cephalogeneticists sought to identify the contribution of one parent as
the vehicle for the transmission of life or soul.
Diogenes of Apollonia is the fourth and final thinker from the fifth
century we know subscribed to the one-seed theory (DK 64 A27). One
important contribution to the one-seed theory turns up first, as far as we
can tell, in the thought of Diogenes: he described semen as an aerated
form of blood, created when blood and the air that the body breathes in
are combined during sex (A24, B6 [Vindicianus]); presumably women,
who also have blood and breathe in air, do not produce fertile semen
because they become less agitated during intercourse.42 Diogenes’ the-
ory offers a mechanism to explain how fathers are consanguineous
with their children and thus makes explicit the analogy between male
­(aerated blood) and female (menstrual blood) reproductive secretions,
which was probably implicit for a long time.
Diogenes may have also addressed the issue of how the offspring
acquired soul. According to Aetius, “Diogenes [said that] fetuses are begot-
ten (γεννᾶσθαι) without souls (ἄψυχα), but nevertheless in warmth (ἐν
θερμασίᾳ). So as soon as the fetus is born, its innate warmth (τὸ ἔμφυτον
θερμόν) draws cold [air] into its lungs” (5.15.4 = DK 64 A28). There
are many problems with this testimonium: the text of pseudo-­Plutarch
Placit. 5.15.4 (the basis for Diels’s text of Aetius) is different from the
version of the same doxa in pseudo-Galen Phil. hist. 119 and different
too from the Arabic text of Aetius; and questions have been raised about
whether these reports describe the teaching of Diogenes of Apollonia or
that of the later Stoic Diogenes of Babylon.43 It is difficult to reconcile
this testimonium with our other evidence for the thought of Diogenes of
Apollonia: given that he taught that only the male produced seed, that

male contributes the warm breath and the female the brain fluid from which come ichōr,
moisture, and blood, and subsequently flesh, sinew, bone, hair.
42
This is precisely the explanation given at Hipp. Nat. puer. 20 for why men grow facial
hair, but women do not. On possible antecedents to Diogenes’ aeriform conception of
seed, see Longrigg (1985) and our discussion in n. 21.
43
For the Arabic text of Aetius with German translation and commentary, see Daiber
(1980) 228–29, 497–98. Tieleman (1991) argues that the testimonium describes the
thought of Diogenes of Babylon; Laks (1983) 167–70 prefers the traditional attribution
to Diogenes of Apollonia.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 31

air is the active ingredient of this seed, and that the soul itself is com-
posed of air (Arist. De an. 405a21–25 = DK 64 A20), the most obvious
account available to him to explain the transmission of soul is that it was
transmitted in the semen of the father, as it was in the theory of Philolaus
and Hippon and, as we shall see, probably also Anaxagoras. For this very
reason, I am inclined to agree with Teun Tieleman that this testimonium
describes the thought of Diogenes of Babylon rather than Diogenes
of Apollonia. If we were to accept it as a testimonium for Diogenes of
Apollonia, we would have to understand it to mean that the father’s seed
does not contribute soul itself but only the innate heat that will be the
basis of the infant’s breath – and thus new soul – after birth.44

Genealogy of the New Father: Intellectual Origins

of the One-Seed Theory of Reproduction
Why did this new one-seed theory of reproduction take the form that
it did? And why did it make its debut only in the second quarter of the
fifth century? We argue in this section that the new embryology origi-
nated as a solution to several problems within Greek science and philos-
ophy in the later sixth and early fifth centuries. It appears not to have
been intended, at the outset, as a contribution to social debates about
the respective roles of men and women in society, though it was later
­co-opted by participants in these purely sociopolitical debates.

The Metaphysics of Reproduction: Post-Eleatic

Genesis and the Transmission of Soul
Our exploration of the origins of and intellectual background to the one-
seed theory begins with consideration of what appear to be its two major
improvements on the traditional two-substance theory of folk science: a
new conception of “seed,” in which the simple agricultural metaphor of
the archaic period was invested with metaphysical significance; and an
emphasis on the “one,” a singular source of embryonic life and soul.
Anaxagoras turned the word “seed” into a technical philosophical
term to describe the potential for any given bit of matter, organic or
inorganic, to be transformed into every other form of matter. He seems
44
Other thinkers, e.g., Hipp. Nat. puer. 12, argued that the warmth that enables the child,
early during gestation, to draw his first breath comes from the mother’s body. For a
survey of different ancient theories of embryonic ensoulment, see Kapparis (2002)
39–52.
32 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

to have developed this concept in order to describe a cosmogony that

could overcome Parmenides’ claim that generation was logically impos-
sible because it involved the creation of “being” out of “nonbeing.”45
Anaxagoras’s solution, or at least attempt at one, was to posit at the begin-
ning an undifferentiated mass (“all things were together,” DK 59 B1)
that contained an infinite number of homogeneous substances, such as
flesh, bone, and gold, and probably also the four elements fire, air, water,
and earth.46 All things that are conventionally said to “come to be” in this
world are really, in a sense, just temporary combinations of these eter-
nal substances. These substances are not, however, discrete particulate
ingredients like Empedocles’ four roots: Anaxagoras insisted that “all
things contain a portion of everything” (B6), no matter how infinitesi-
mally small (B3), which means that every bit of substance can potentially
turn, almost seamlessly, into every other substance. So while Anaxagoras
posits an infinite number of Eleatic substances, the “everything in every-
thing” principle is, in a sense, monistic.
Anaxagoras appears to have called these generative homogeneous
substances “seeds.” For he tells us that the primordial “mixture of all
things” was a combination of “the wet and the dry and the warm and
the cold and the bright and the dark, and much earth was present and
seeds unlimited in number that were not at all similar to one another”
(B4b).47 Why did he use this metaphor to describe his quasi-­metaphysical
primary substances? He was almost certainly inspired, initially, by an
Eleatic ­puzzle about growth.48 A scholiast on a manuscript of Gregory
of Nazianzus reports that Anaxagoras argued, in the context of address-
ing the Parmenidean problem of genesis, that human semen (γονή)
must contain hair, nails, veins, arteries, nerves, and bones, “for how,

45
On Anaxagoras’s theory of substance as a response to issues raised by Parmenides, see
Graham (2006) 186–95, 197–200, 209–15; Curd (2007) 137–42, 153–77.
46
There is much scholarly disagreement about the precise contents of the primordial
­mixture. See the excellent review in Curd (2007) 153–71. The account I have given is
close to the compromise view endorsed by Curd 157.
47
For a clear statement of this expansive notion of “seeds,” see Vlastos (1950) 36–41,
though he thinks that these “seeds” are secondary entities formed of the primary
­opposites. Cf. Schofield (1980) 121–33, who attempts to limit the concept of “seed”
to botanical and zoological seeds, the basis only of Anaxagoras’s account of the origin
of more complex living things; see also Curd (2007) 171–77. But I think the reading
of Schofield is unnecessarily narrow. Are we then to suppose that Empedocles’ “roots”
(DK 31 B6) are the building blocks only of plants? The pre-Socratics’ use of biological
metaphors is well documented: see Baldry (1932); Wright (1995) 56–74.
48
Cf. Lucr. 1.159–417. On Eleatic growth puzzles in the fourth century b.c.e., see Sprague
(1981).
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 33

he [Anaxagoras] says, could hair come to be from not-hair, flesh from

­not-flesh?” (B10).49 Male seed, in other words, must contain tiny bits of
all parts of the body into which this seed will grow during the process of
gestation, with the result that human beings, who are composed of hair,
bones, and other parts of the body, do not emerge ex nihilo. This the-
ory of embryological development was probably also linked to a theory
of nutrition: bread and meat turn into hair and flesh and presumably
also seed, because they themselves also contain portions of all things.
Aristotle cites this very argument of Anaxagoras’s in order to support
his own claim that embryology must explain the origin of all parts of the
body from a single male seed, not, as the proponents of pangenesis held,
from many seeds contributed by each part of the body (GA 723a6–17).
Anaxagoras’s theory of substance eloquently explains how one sub-
stance, male seed, could be transformed into the various parts of a new
human being, presumably with the addition of blood “nourishment”
from the mother. But it does not really explain why the fetus had to orig-
inate from just one substance. Why could not two seeds, one male the
other female, together produce the parts of the new organism?50 Or why,
for that matter, could not food or even some inorganic substance like
gold be transformed into a new being, if in fact everything contains a
portion of everything?
One possible answer suggested by Anaxagoras’s three successors is that
while individual organs could perhaps be created initially by some combi-
nation of the father’s seed and mother’s blood and then gradually grow
thanks to additional infusions of the mother’s blood, the creation of soul
and life was a singular event that required a single cause. We noticed that
the contemporaries Hippon of Rhegium and Philolaus of Croton, both
myeloencephalogeneticists from southern Italy, not insignificantly the
epicenter of Pythagoreanism, linked the father’s contribution directly
with the creation of life. There is every reason to believe that the spark
of new life conveyed in the father’s seed was in fact soul. Hippon seems
to have argued that (male) seed, composed of water and brain fluid, was
the vehicle of soul.51 And Philolaus or someone from his circle was, as we
have seen, likely the author of the view that the brain fluid in male semen

49
Schofield (1980) 133–43 argues that this quotation in the scholiast to Gregory of
Nazianzus is not Anaxagorean. But most scholars disagree: see Curd (2007) 53–54 for
the current consensus.
50
The answer of Arist. GA 722b6–7 is that two seeds would produce two offspring,
not one.
51
Arist. De an. 405b2–6; Hipp. Ref. haer. 1.16 = DK 38 A3.
34 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

produces the blood and other bodily fluids of the fetus, whereas the
“warm breath” in male semen produces soul and ­perception. Probably
similar, too, was the view of Diogenes of Apollonia, who taught that air
was the active ingredient of both male seed and soul.
I have intimated that the views on ensoulment of Hippon and
Philolaus, both myeloencephalogeneticists from southern Italy, may
have been influenced by Pythagorean eschatology. This particular mar-
riage of eschatology and embryology is certainly well established by the
fourth century. For instance, Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggests that when it
is time for a disembodied soul to be reborn, the gods “plant” (φυτεῦσαι)
it “in the seed from which will grow a man” (εἰς γονὴν ἀνδρός, 248d2),
presumably an allusion to the reproductive seed emitted by his father.52
How does a wandering soul in search of a new body actually come to
enter the father’s seed? Aristotle in the Generation of Animals says that sen-
tient soul is present in the male semen naturally,53 whereas rational soul
(ψυχὴ νοητική, νοῦς) comes into male semen “from outside” (θύραθεν,
GA 736b13–28).54 Aristotle does not tell us precisely what the source of
this rational soul is, only that it is divine and that male semen is able to
convey it because it contains pneuma, which is akin to aithēr, the element
of which stars are made (GA 736b27–737a1); he apparently assumes the
reader’s adherence to the common belief that aithēr is also the substance
of which souls are made.55 His argument, then, is that male semen is
the most logical vehicle for the transmission of the soul because its fiery
heat, pneuma, is similar to the aithēr of which the soul itself is composed.
An explanation similar to this may have been offered by Hippon and
Philolaus as well.56
52
The translation is that of Rowe (1986) ad loc. We know that Plato believed that seed was
produced by the male alone: see n. 1.
53
The female menses contain, in potential form, nutritive (θρεπτική) soul but not sentient
(αἰσθητική) soul. GA 741a6–b7, cf. 737a27–29.
54
See Peck (1942) 168–69 n. a. Ps.-Gal. Ad Gaurum 2.2 reasonably wonders how this ratio-
nal soul comes to be consubstantial with the male seed and ultimately the embryo.
55
See DK 58 B1a (§28); Eur. Supp. 531–34, Hel. 1014–16.
56
Schibli (1990) 109–17 has argued that already Pherecydes of Syrus, a sixth-century
cosmologist who apparently believed in the immortality of the soul, had argued that a
preexisting soul entered the body of the newborn at conception along with the father’s
semen. Empedocles, another writer from Magna Graecia with an interest in escha-
tology, thought that the fetus breathed in its soul with its first breath, and so too did
some Orphics: see Aet. 5.15.3 with Tieleman (1991) 118–19; Arist. De an. 410b28–31.
The issue of how and when the embryo came to acquire soul continued to be the sub-
ject of fierce debate after Aristotle. The Stoics, who believed in a material soul, had
no use for souls entering the male seed or the embryo “from outside,” so they argued
that the material from which soul was made was contained naturally in semen itself,
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 35

Was Anaxagoras, too, concerned to account for the infant’s acquisi-

tion of soul? It is not possible to decide with any certainty. We know that
Anaxagoras believed in the immortality of the soul, and he is counted
among those who held that “mind” (νοῦς) entered the body “from out-
side” (θύραθεν, DK 59 A93), presumably in an embryological context.57
And we are told by Censorinus that “those following Anaxagoras” believed
that the parts of the growing fetus are differentiated by heat originating
in the aithēr (De die nat. 6.2 = DK 59 A109), which Anaxagoras prob-
ably thought came with the father’s seed.58 It seems likely, then, that
Anaxagoras did address the ensoulment of the fetus, though the details
of his theory cannot be recovered. But what little we do know suggests
that it was similar to Aristotle’s theory in the Generation of Animals: for
both Anaxagoras and Aristotle, it is the heat in male seed (aithēr for
Anaxagoras; pneuma, an analogue of aithēr, for Aristotle) that animates
the embryo, differentiating it into a fully developed newborn,59 whereas

which they usually identified as a distinctly material pneuma rather different from the
quasi-metaphysical quintessence of Aristotle. See generally Tieleman (1991) 120–21.
Later Numenius and other Neopythagoreans reverted to the Aristotelian position that
soul came “from outside” into the father’s seed at the moment of ejaculation, whereas
the author of the pseudo-Galenic Ad Gaurum, probably Porphyry, and a number of
Neoplatonists argued that the soul entered the body of the child only at birth. See
Ps.-Gal. Ad Gaurum; Congourdeau (2002); Scholten (2005) 403.
57
Tieleman (1991) 124.
58
Cens. De die nat. 6.2: “There are those who think that these things [sc. development
of the parts of the fetus] are brought about by nature itself, as Aristotle and Epicurus;
there are those who [think they are brought about] by the power of breath that comes
in with the seed (potentia spiritus semen comitantis), as the Stoics almost unanimously do;
and there are those who believe that there is heat originating in the aithēr present in
it (inesse), which can differentiate the limbs, those [that is] who follow Anaxagoras.”
The question is how to understand inesse: is this heat “present in” the fetus (the general
subject of the passage as a whole), or “present in” the seed (the specific context of the
immediately preceding sentence)? I think the latter interpretation is more likely (it is
very close to Aristotle’s understanding of pneuma), although obviously aithēr present in
the father’s seed will also become part of the fetus, where it performs its differentiating
function. Aristotle’s critique of those who suppose that the embryonic soul is made of
simple elemental fire (GA 737a1–8) rather than the superlunary quintessential pneuma
may be directed in part at Anaxagoras, whose aithēr – really just “fire” (so DK 59 A43, 71,
73) – would have been, for Aristotle, too material to perform this function.
59
I strongly suspect that the idea that the active ingredient of male seed was pneuma or
aithēr – the view of Diogenes of Apollonia, Hippon, Philolaus or some other classical
Pythagorean, Aristotle, and probably also Anaxagoras – was motivated in great part by a
desire to explain the origin and transmission of soul to the newborn. Hesiod’s descrip-
tion at Th. 190–91 of Uranus’s male seed as ἀφρός (foam) was meant to allude to an
etymology of Aphrodite’s name; the passage need not be taken as evidence that seed
was thought to be composed of pneuma or aithēr already in Hesiod’s time, much less that
aeriform male seed was the vehicle of soul.
36 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

nous, rational soul, comes in from outside. While it is possible that our
exiguous references to Anaxagoras’s ideas on ensoulment were influ-
enced by Aristotle and the Peripatetic doxographic tradition, it is also
quite probable that Anaxagoras did have some developed ideas about
ensoulment.
The one-seed theory pioneered by Anaxagoras and others seems,
then, to originate not in a highly charged sociopolitical debate between
men and women over who makes the more significant contribution to
reproduction, but as a natural by-product of two desiderata within the
history of ideas: a way to solve Parmenides’ objection to genesis and a
way to account for the embryo’s acquisition of a soul. The four thinkers
who subscribed to a form of the one-seed theory were just as much com-
mitted to two substances (male semen and female blood) as the Greeks
had always been, but for them only one substance could be “seed” in
the quasi-metaphysical sense that Anaxagoras was now proposing. From
this perspective, Aristotle’s embryology appears to have been somewhat
less original than has sometimes been thought: much of his theory was
anticipated by Anaxagoras, Hippon, Philolaus, and Diogenes. Aristotle
probably did not feel compelled to acknowledge these thinkers because
he felt that their theories were not teleological or metaphysical enough.
And it is indeed probably fair to say that Anaxagoras’s aithēr was not as
fully developed along teleological lines as Aristotle’s pneuma was,60 and
Anaxagoras certainly did not identify male seed as a formal ­“moving
cause” of reproduction, which is the central argument of Aristotle’s
Generation of Animals. But many of the formal features of Aristotle’s meta-
physical biology were already in place a century before.

A New Cosmology for a New Embryology

Anaxagoras’s embryological theory, according to which the male contrib-
utes the “seed” of life and the female the place and the blood nourish-
ment for this “seed,” is isomorphic with a larger cosmology, a gendered
hierarchical system in which the origin of the cosmos as a whole and of
human, animal, and plant life within it is explained in terms of a mas-
culine principle with metaphysical powers acting upon feminine matter,
father sky impregnating mother earth. This new cosmology, too, has a
larger intellectual genealogy, it too largely innocent of sexual and gender
politics: particularly influential, as we will see, were the monistic impulse

60
See n. 58.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 37

of the Milesian philosophers of the sixth century, the Pythagorean table

of opposites, and a new crop of myths from Egypt and the Near East that
featured, for the first time on Greek soil, a male creator god.
We begin with an attempt to reconstruct Anaxagoras’s larger cosmol-
ogy, which has received relatively little attention from scholars in com-
parison to his post-Parmenidean theory of substance.61 His account of
the origin of humans and animals seems to have made use of three mate-
rial elements. Diogenes Laertius says that, according to Anaxagoras, the
first generation of living beings came into existence “from the moist,
the warm, and the earthy,” and then subsequent generations came into
being “from each other,” that is through sexual reproduction (Diog.
Laert. 2.9 = DK 59 A1 [§9]).62 A report from Irenaeus suggests that
Anaxagoras thought that these three elements originated in different
parts of the cosmos: “Living beings (animalia),” he reports, “were created
by seeds (seminibus) falling onto earth from the sky” (Advers. haer. 2.14.2
= DK 59 A113).63 These seeds are almost certainly composed of heat and
moisture, the two most commonly mentioned ingredients in human and
animal semen or “seed” in classical science, and two of the elements in
Diogenes’ summary of Anaxagoras’s zoogony. The earth, which receives
these seeds, is the third and final element recorded by Diogenes.64
The testimony of Irenaeus, a second-century c.e. Greek from Asia
Minor who became a Christian bishop in Lyon, has been doubted by
some scholars.65 But I think Irenaeus probably does preserve genuine
Anaxagorean ideas. Irenaeus’s reference to “seeds” strikes a particularly
authentic note. We have seen that Anaxagoras had developed a broad
theory of “seeds” as the primary substances in nature, and we know that
he applied this abstract theory of “seeds” to anthropogony in particular.

61
Aristotle did not give serious attention to Anaxagoras’s cosmology and so Aristotle’s com-
mentator Simplicius, our source for nearly all of the direct quotations of Anaxagoras’s
work, did not discuss or quote from these parts of the work.
62
Cf. DK 59 A42 (§12), A67.
63
See Schofield (1980) 164 n. 44. It is very likely this anthropogony of Anaxagoras that
Lucretius has in mind when he complains, at 5.793, neque de caelo cecidisse animalia pos-
sunt; cf. also 2.1153–54.
64
Ingredients of semen in classical Greek science: see, e.g., Pherecyd. Syr. DK 7 A8 (fire,
pneuma, water); Hippon DK 38 A3 (water, fire?); Philol. DK 44 A27 (heat); Diog. Apoll.
DK 64 A24, B6 (aēr, heat, blood); Democr. DK 68 A140 (pneuma); Arist. GA 735a30–
736a3, 762a19–21 (water, pneuma = hot aēr, earth). Cf. also Ps.-Arist. Probl. 4.28 and
generally West (1971) 14.
65
Erhard (1942) 122 thinks this is an Orphic and Pythagorean idea, not an Anaxagorean
one. Lanza (1966) 182 thinks this is a misunderstanding of Anaxagoras’s teaching on
plants (more below).
38 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Thus he writes “it is necessary to believe that in all things that were being
compounded (συγκρινομένοις) [sc. in the process of creation], there
were present many different seeds (σπέρματα) of all things, which have
different shapes, colors, and flavors, and that humans were compounded
(συμπαγῆναι) [sc. from these seeds] and all the other living things that
have soul” (DK 59 B4a).66
Irenaeus’s statement that these seeds fell from heaven to earth is also
most likely authentic and corresponds to Anaxagoras’s notion of how
the universe is created through a transmutation of one element into
another. We know that aēr and aithēr, the name Anaxagoras gives to fire,
are the first two elements that separate off from the primordial mass, and
that later water emerges from aēr and earth from water (B2, 16).67 This
is indeed very similar to the cosmogony envisioned by Anaximenes (DK
13 A5–6), who established the basic cosmogonic framework followed
by most of his Ionian successors, including Anaxagoras.68 The cosmos
of Anaxagoras was thus generated, from the perspective of humans on
earth, from the top down, that is from aēr to water to earth.69 Anaxagoras
probably thought that human beings and animals were created through
a parallel process of transmutation. It is easy enough to account for two
of the three elements in Diogenes’ account of his zoogony: we can see
how water, one ingredient in animal seed, is formed from aēr and either
literally falls to earth or possibly is itself partly transmuted into earth. But
what is the origin of heat, the third element?70 Nothing in our testimonia

66
That humans were created after the physical cosmos was complete (including the earth,
which has to be in existence in order to receive the seeds of living beings) is implied
here but made explicit in other testimonia. See, e.g., Aet. 2.8.1 = DK 59 A67.
67
The fragment says that water emerges “from clouds,” but clouds are, for Anaxagoras,
composed of compacted aēr: see Curd (2007) 72. How Anaxagoras explained this
cosmogonic process of transmutation in a way that was consistent with his notion of
­“everything in everything” is not clear. But obviously aēr itself contains “seeds” of water
and earth.
68
Graham (2006) 78–79 provides a good discussion of the influence of Anaximenes’ cos-
mogony on Anaxagoras.
69
See Guthrie (1962–81) 2.301; Graham (2006) 214–15; cf. already Anaximen. DK 13
A5; Heraclit. DK 22 B31. It is misleading to say, as Curd (2007) 208 does, that what is
created is “an expanding geocentric system”; clearly Anaxagoras’s universe is geocentric,
but it is not created from the earth outward. Cf. also Bargrave-Weaver (1959) 78–80, 89,
who, however, thinks that aithēr or fire, aēr, water, and earth were created simultaneously.
Other scholars understand DK 59 B16 as referring not to cosmogony but to meteorolog-
ical phenomena: see, e.g., Curd (2007) 71–72.
70
Presumably in sexual reproduction that follows the original zoogony, the heat in seed
comes from the male’s body. See, e.g., Philol. DK 44 A27 (for whom heat is also supplied
by the mother’s womb); Diog. Apoll. DK 64 A24, B6.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 39

or fragments of Anaxagoras provides an answer to this question, but it

seems likely that the heat is somehow present in aēr, perhaps because
it contains a relatively high concentration of aithēr “seeds.”71 It seems,
therefore, that Irenaeus’s account of Anaxagoras’s anthropogony and
zoogony is reconcilable with that of Diogenes Laertius. But it seems likely
that what Anaxagoras had described as an Eleatic process of elemental
transmutation without emergence is rather misleadingly described by
Irenaeus as a quasi-mythical fertilization of earth by sky.
Anaxagoras’s account of the origin of plant life is very similar in
structure. According to Theophrastus, Anaxagoras taught that “the
aēr contains seeds of all things, and these are carried down together
(συγκαταφερόμενα) with moisture and generate (γεννᾶν) plants”
(HP 3.1.4 = DK 59 A117).72 Out of context, this might appear to be a
commonsense description of the role of wind in dispersing seeds and
of rain in bringing these wind-borne seeds from the air down to the
ground and causing them to germinate. But in that case it would be dif-
ficult to understand why the master botanist Theophrastus would bother
to report it. A careful consideration of the context of Theophrastus’s
report, however, yields a very different reading of this passage. Here,
at the beginning of book 3 of his Inquiry into Plants, Theophrastus is
discussing how plants propagate in the wild and argues that it is always
by means of seeds or roots, “even in the cases of spontaneous genera-
tion that the natural philosophers discuss” (HP 3.1.4). He then men-
tions Anaxagoras’s theory as one attempt to explain how plants can be
generated without seeds or roots being planted. So when Theophrastus
reports him as saying that the aēr contains “seeds of all things,” it seems
likely that he is speaking not of what we think of as plant seeds (for then
Theophrastus could not really call this a theory of spontaneous gener-
ation) but of the special substance “seeds” that Anaxagoras had devel-
oped to explain all apparent genesis and change in the universe without
running afoul of the Eleatic trap. Indeed, the phrase Theophrastus uses
here, “seeds of all things,” is the same as the one Anaxagoras himself uses
in the cosmogonic fragments B4a and B4b.

71
All things contain seeds of aithēr, but aēr clearly contains them in greater concentration
than do water or earth, which are colder (cf. DK 59 B15). Air and heat were typically
separate elements in both cosmology and embryology until the Stoics combined them
in their notion of pneuma. See Wright (1995) 63. But cf. already Arist. GA 736a1–3, who
labels the “warm aēr” in the male body pneuma, which is, for Aristotle, related to aithēr
and is the active ingredient in male semen.
72
Cf. Theophr. CP 1.5.2.
40 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Nor is the claim that “aēr contains” these seeds equivalent to saying
that “wind carries” them.73 The reference to aēr here probably alludes,
once again, to the transmutation of aēr into water and water into earth in
the original creation of the cosmos (DK 59 B16; cf. B15), a process that
accounts for the creation of all compound things on earth. Theophrastus
refers to Anaxagoras’s account of plant seeds as a theory of spontaneous
generation, but it was probably intended as a phytogony, an account of
how plants were first generated, before the first plant seed had come
into existence, and not as an account of plant reproduction.74
This reconstruction is supported by a reference to Anaxagoras’s
account of plant origins in an Arabic translation of a lost work by Nicolaus
of Damascus entitled On Plants, which draws in turn on Aristotle’s lost
On Plants: “The nutritive principle of plants comes from the earth and
their generative principle from the sun – Anaxagoras, however, main-
tains that their seeds are carried down from the air – and therefore a
man called Alcmaeon [of Croton] says that the earth is the mother of
plants and the sun their father” (Nic. Damasc. De plantis 1.2.44 Drossaart
Lulofs; cf. DK 59 A117).75 Nicolaus, probably drawing on Aristotle, sug-
gests that Anaxagoras taught a version of the idea that the nutritive prin-
ciple comes from the earth whereas the generative principle comes from
above, not from the sun itself, as Alcmaeon taught, but from the aēr. This
seems also to be what Theophrastus means when he says that Anaxagoras
said that seeds are carried down to earth from the aēr. It makes perfect
sense that Anaxagoras did not ascribe the generative principle of plants
to the sun, which, for him, was merely a rock that had become ignited in
its rotation through the heavens.76 And we have already seen, in our dis-
cussion of Anaxagoras’s cosmogony and zoogony, that it is likely aēr that
transmits etherial heat to earth.
This passage contains the first hint that Anaxagoras’s account of the
origin of human, animal, and plant life was not only cosmologically hier-
archical but also implicitly gendered. For Nicolaus (and probably also
Aristotle, his source) understands Anaxagoras to be working within the
same tradition as Alcmaeon, who described generation as coming from

73
Theophrastus’s idiom to convey the latter idea is ἀπὸ τῶν πνευμάτων ἀποφέρεσθαι,
as at HP 3.1.3. This role for the aēr in conveying seeds recalls the way Aristotle De an.
410b28–31 describes the Orphic notion that souls are carried to their new bodies at
birth by the wind.
74
On phytogony vs. spontaneous generation, cf. Lebedev (1993) 458.
75
The translation from the Arabic is that of Drossaart Lulofs and Poortman (1989) 140.
For a discussion of this crux and its history, see Kirk (1956) and Lebedev (1993).
76
DK 59 A1 (§12), 2, 19, 20a, 35, 42 (§6), 72, 73.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 41

father sun above and nourishment as coming from mother earth below.
Given that Anaxagoras located this generative principle for plants in the
aēr rather than the sun, we might more accurately describe his theory as
structured around an opposition between father sky and mother earth.
His account of the origin of human, animal, and plant life in eo tempore
would then be quite parallel to his account of sexual reproduction, in
which the father supplied the generative principle and mother the nour-
ishment. It is indeed quite easy to believe that Anaxagoras was among
those Aristotle has in mind when he writes in the Generation of Animals
“in cosmology (ἐν τῷ ὅλῳ) they describe the nature of earth as ‘female’
and ‘mother,’ but refer to the heaven (οὐρανόν) and sun and other such
things as ‘begetters’ and ‘fathers’” (GA 716a15–17).77
We may now consider one further likely element in Anaxagoras’s hier-
archical and gendered cosmology: the role played by Nous (Mind) in
imparting motion to the primordial mass, which contains “seeds” of all
kinds, leading to the creation of the entire world as we know it, includ-
ing, presumably, humans, animals, and plants. Anaxagoras thus clearly
anticipates Plato’s idea, developed in the Timaeus, of a male craftsman
who uses copies of the Forms to give shape to the female Receptacle and
Aristotle’s more narrowly biological conception of generation as male
form acting on female matter.78 Anaxagoras’s Nous functions very much
like a god. It is immortal (DK 59 B14) and has power over all living
things (B12). It first sets in motion the primordial mass, which causes
the constituents in the primordial mass to begin to separate and recom-
bine to form the parts of the physical cosmos (B12, 13). Nous is both
transcendent, in that it is not “mixed” into any other substance (B12),
and immanent, in that it is “present in” some things (B11), presumably
living things (things that possess a soul or a “mind,” B12), and “is very
much now present where all other things are” (B14). It seems also not
insignificant that Nous is masculine in gender. This is certainly one rea-
son that Euripides refers to this Anaxagorean Nous as “Zeus” (Tro. 886)
or simply as “god” (fr. 1018 TGF),79 and that the author of the Derveni

77
Lebedev (1993) 460 thinks Aristotle is referring primarily to Alcmaeon, but Aristotle’s
“they say” implies that a number of natural philosophers subscribed to such an approach.
Cf. the story that Anaxagoras used to point to the “heaven” (οὐρανός) as his “father land”
(πατρίς) (DK 59 A1 [§7]).
78
Plato and Aristotle criticized the role Anaxagoras gave to Nous as being insufficiently
metaphysical and not at all teleological. See citations at DK 59 A47. For good general
discussions of Anaxagoras’s Nous, see Guthrie (1962–81) 2.272–79; Schofield (1980)
11–12; Lesher (1995); Curd (2007) 192–205.
79
See also DK 59 A20c, 48.
42 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Papyrus identifies Nous not only with Zeus but also with his father
Cronus, his mother, and probably also his grandfather Uranus, who are
all, in a sense, manifestations of Zeus himself.80 The masculine nature
of Anaxagoras’s “demiurge” stands out even more clearly when we com-
pare the cosmogony that Parmenides presents in his “Way of Opinion,”
which begins when the goddess “thought into existence” (μητίσατο)
Eros first of the gods (DK 28 B13). In Parmenides, too, the cosmos is
set into motion by an exercise of mind, but for him it is the mind of a
goddess, not a god.
Hippon of Rhegium also presents a cosmogony that is both hierarchical
and gendered. According to Hippolytus of Rome, “Hippon of Rhegium
said that the first principles were water, which is cold, and fire, which is
warm. Fire, after it was begotten by water, conquered the power of that
which had begotten it and proceeded to create the cosmos” (Ref. haer.
1.16 = DK 38 A3). Structurally, this is similar to the mythical cosmogony
preserved by Hesiod, in which the female principle, Gaea, engenders
(parthenogenetically) the male principle, Uranus or Heaven, who then
mates with his mother, thus setting into motion the creation of the rest
of the gods (Th. 126–53). It seems that Hippon has borrowed an old
mythical narrative pattern, in which the male is born of the female and
then “conquers” her to create the universe, and adapted it to express
his theory that a male principle in the universe, characterized by heat,
mastered the cold and watery female principle in order to create the
cosmos.81 Hippon’s system is clearly hierarchical: fire is the highest of
the four elements. His system is also implicitly gendered: even though
fire and water, in Hippolytus’s summary, are both neuter in grammatical
gender, to the extent that they map onto the Uranus and Gaea of myth-
ical cosmogony, they represent the masculine and feminine principles,
respectively.

Mythical Versions of the New Cosmology

There are also three passages from Athenian tragedy that present the
creation of humans, animals, and plants in terms very similar to those of
Anaxagoras, as both hierarchical and fully gendered, which suggests that
these representations were possibly influenced by the new cosmology
80
See P. Derveni cols. XIV 7, XVI 10, 12, 13, 15, XXVI 1. These passages are discussed in
Chapter 4.
81
Arist. GA 737a1–8 criticizes this idea that fire can generate life, though he does not men-
tion Hippon by name. Cf. Peck (1942) 352–53 n. a.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 43

that turns up first, in our surviving sources, in the work of Anaxagoras.

Two of these passages are explicitly linked to Anaxagoras in the ancient
doxographic tradition, and while these attributions are not necessarily
reliable,82 they correspond very closely to what we know otherwise of
Anaxagoras’s thought. The first is a fragment from Euripides’ early play
Chrysippus. We learn from Aetius, who is perhaps reflecting, in part, a dox-
ographic tradition originating with Theophrastus, that both Anaxagoras
and Euripides, like the Epicureans, believed that “living beings are gener-
ated by an exchange [of elements] with one another” (Aet. 5.10.23 = DK
59 A112). This is presumably a reference either to Anaxagoras’s general
doctrine that the seeds of all homogeneous substances exist potentially
in all matter, so that all things in this world, animate and inanimate, can
be generated out of all other things, or, perhaps more likely, to his more
specific account of the origin of animal and plant life through a trans-
mutation of elements. Aetius then goes on to quote three lines from the
chorus of the Chrysippus to illustrate this teaching: “Nothing of the things
that exist ever dies; rather each thing, as it is separated from another,
takes on a different shape” (fr. 839.12–14 TGF = DK 59 A112).83
But the eleven lines that precede the lines quoted by Aetius also seem
Anaxagorean in inspiration, which is doubtless why Diels quotes them in
his edition of Anaxagoras’s testimonia:
There is greatest Gaea and the Aether of Zeus. He is the begetter (γενέτωρ)
of men and gods; she receives his wet drops of moisture (ὑγροβόλους
σταγόνας νοτίας) and gives birth (τίκτει) to mortals, and gives birth (τίκτει)
also to crops and to the tribes of beasts. For this reason she is not unjustly
called, by convention, the mother of all things. And the things that are born
from earth (τὰ ἐκ γαίας φύντ’) return back into the earth, and the things
that sprout from the seed of aithēr (τὰ ἀπ’ αἰθερίου . . . γονῆς) go back to the
pole of heaven. (Eur. fr. 839.1–11 TGF)

This poetic creation story from Euripides seems to track the accounts of
Anaxagorean anthropogony, zoogony, and phytogony that we encounter
in Theophrastus, Diogenes Laertius, and other later authors. The “seed”
comes from Zeus and contains hot aithēr and moisture; Gaea provides
the earthy element and the place of birth. The result is not only humans
and animals but also plants. When this passage says that “the things that
sprout from the seed of aithēr go back to the pole of heaven,” it clearly
means that at death our souls return to the realm of the aithēr where
82
See Guthrie (1962–81) 2.323–25.
83
Webster (1967) 112 thinks that the chorus may be consoling Pelops over the death of
his son Chrysippus by referring to the immortality of nature.
44 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

they originated.84 This passage, then, preserves both the hierarchical

nature of Anaxagoras’s accounts of the origin of animal and plant life
and its gendered nature (sky impregnates earth), although in Euripides’
poetic version the masculine and feminine principles are both fully
personified.
The second passage, also from Euripides, is the brief cosmogony he
puts in the mouth of the title character of his Melanippe Sophe, an account
that Diodorus Siculus (1.7.7) claims reflects the views of Anaxagoras:
The story is not mine, but [one I learned] from my mother, that Heaven
and Earth were once a single form (μορφὴ μία), and that after they were
separated from one another, they gave birth to all things and brought them
into the light, trees, birds, animals that the salty sea nourishes, and the race
of mortals. (Eur. fr. 484 TGF = DK 59 A62)

There are two key elements in this cosmogony: heaven and earth are sep-
arated, and they become the parents of all humans, animals, and plants.
A version of the first motif turns up already in Hesiod’s Theogony, but the
second is not attested in any surviving Greek text until the third quarter
of the fifth century.85
The final passage is a much-quoted fragment from Aeschylus’s Danaids,
produced in 463 b.c.e.: “Holy Heaven desires to penetrate the Earth,
and desire takes hold of Earth to achieve this marriage. Rain falls from
fair-flowing Heaven and impregnates the Earth, and she, for the bene-
fit of mortals, gives birth (τίκτεται) to fodder for sheep and Demeter’s
livelihood and the harvest from trees” (fr. 44.1–6 TGF). No surviving
ancient source associates this passage with the thought of Anaxagoras,
but it seems likely that Aeschylus knew of Anaxagoras’s teachings by the
time he wrote this play.86
Scholars have tended to regard this notion of sky impregnating the
earth as being much older than the fifth century and thus not an allu-
sion to classical science or philosophy.87 But is it? Certainly some motifs
that we find in these mythical cosmogonies from the classical period
84
See n. 55.
85
So correctly Cropp in Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995) 269–70, though he nevertheless
believes, in the absence of any evidence, that this second element is traditional. This
passage from the Melanippe Sophe is discussed further in Chapter 6.
86
The Suppliant Women, for example, the first play of this trilogy (of which Danaids is the
third play), seems to allude to a specifically Anaxagorean teaching about the flooding
of the Nile. So Rösler (1970) 66–69; Schofield (1980) 34. On the relative dating of
Anaxagoras and Aeschylus generally, see nn. 4–5.
87
See, e.g., Bailey (1947) 2.642; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983) 39; cf. Guthrie
(1957) 30.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 45

are attested in the archaic period. We may begin with Homer. Scholars
frequently point to the so-called hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera in Iliad
14, but this motif, if traditional, represents at best a fragment of an idea,
not a unified theory in which all life (plant and animal) comes from the
union of a single masculine and a single feminine principle. Nor are
we entitled to infer a cosmogony of the kind we encounter in Euripides
and Aeschylus from the Homeric line “Oceanus, genesis of gods, and
mother Tethys” (Il. 14.201, 302; cf. 246), which significantly occurs in
the context of this same scene from Iliad 14. It is also true that Homer
frequently refers to Zeus as “father of gods and men,” but “father” is
not to be taken literally in this context; in the Homeric poems, he is at
best the father of a majority of the gods who play a role in the action,
and the existence of an old tradition in which Zeus creates humankind
is doubtful.88
Hesiod, too, provides few parallels for the mythical cosmologies of the
classical period. In the Theogony, the union of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth
(Gaea) produces only a single generation of gods – the Titans, Cyclopes,
and the Hundred-Handers – not all plant, animal, and human life. And
there are plenty of examples in Hesiod in which Earth ­generates – the
cases of Uranus and Typhoeus, for example – without any seeds from
above.89 Perhaps closer to the classical paradigm is Pherecydes of Syrus,
whose Zas (Zeus) creates the earth and its rivers for his bride Chthonie
(a personification of the earth); but he does not, as far as we know, gen-
erate humans, animals, or plants by fertilizing either his wife or the
earth itself. Nor do the Milesian philosophers, Thales, Anaximander,
and Anaximenes, provide any analogies for this new father god. Thales
and Anaximenes seem not to have provided any account of the origin of
animal and plant life. Anaximander did present an anthropogony (DK
12 A30), but his account of the origin of men from heat, moisture, and
earth was, as far as we can tell, neither hierarchical nor gendered.

88
But cf. Hom. Od. 20.201–02: “Father Zeus, no other god is more destructive than you.
You do not have pity on men (ἄνδρας), even though you yourself create (γείνεαι) them.”
But surely this does not mean that Zeus created all men, only demigods such as Heracles
and Sarpedon. Burkert (2004) 45 takes this as a Near Eastern motif borrowed by the
Greeks during the Orientalizing period.
89
Guthrie (1957) 34 observes that in Hesiod, Hephaestus, the god of fire, creates Pandora
out of earth and water (Op. 60–61, cf. Th. 571), and that in another myth, Prometheus,
another fire god, creates human beings out of mud. This does somewhat resemble the
anthropogony of Anaxagoras and his tragic imitators, but it is not explicitly hierarchical.
The Hesiod myth, in any event, explains the origin only of women, not of men, animals,
and plants.
46 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

A New Male Creator Figure from the Near East

This notion that all life – humans, animals, and plants – was created
through the union of a single father god and a single mother god seems
rather to be an innovation of the late archaic or early classical period,
influenced by new myths and religious practices that came to Greece
from Egypt and the Near East,90 especially a new breed of myths featur-
ing, for the first time on Greek soil, a male creator figure.91
This development is first visible in Greece in Pherecydes of Syrus, whose
prose cosmogony features male creators at two stages. First, a static begin-
ning phase in which three gods – Zas, Chronus, and Chthonie – have
existed eternally (DK 7 B1) is interrupted when Chronus makes “from
his own seed (γόνου)” three elements – fire, pneuma, and water – which
are distributed, presumably in different proportions, into five nooks and
from which “arise another great generation of gods” (A8). The identity of
these gods and nooks is unknown, but Schibli plausibly argues that they
are primeval gods that correspond to different regions of the cosmos:
Uranus, Tartarus, Chaos, and, more speculatively, Aether or Aer, and
Night.92 It appears, then, that Chronus has used three elements made
out of his own semen to create the five major regions of the cosmos and
possibly also the gods who will preside over them.93 The second act of
creation is the work of Zas (Zeus), who, on the occasion of his wedding to
Chthonie, “makes a great beautiful robe and embroiders on it Earth and
Ogenus [Oceanus] and the halls of Ogenus” (B2). This has been taken,
correctly I believe, to be a mythical way to say that Zas created the earth
and its waters.94 Proclus must be referring to this creative activity on Zas’s
part when he tells us that Zas “turned into Eros when he was about to
­create (δημιουργεῖν)” (In Plat. Tim. 32c = DK 7 B3; cf. A11).95
We also encounter a prominent male creator figure in the Orphic
Theogony quoted and commented upon by the author of the Derveni

90
See, e.g., Lebedev (1993) 457–60; cf. West (1983) 104.
91
See West (1971) 28–36, (1994); Schibli (1990) 37–38; Burkert (2004) 63–65. Classen
(1962) provides a good survey of the topic, even though his goal is to argue that the
creator figure does not appear until Plato’s Timaeus, and there only as a by-product of
Plato’s philosophical rhetoric.
92
Schibli (1990) 38–49.
93
Cf. Critias 88 DK B18.2–3, who describes Chronus as “full . . . giving birth (τίκτων) to
himself.”
94
See esp. Schibli (1990) 51–57.
95
On the role played by Eros in cosmogonies in the archaic and classical periods, see
Schibli (1990) 57–61.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 47

Papyrus. This theogony, which has been dated to approximately 500

b.c.e.,96 was a short poem that focused on the rise of Zeus and his crea-
tion of a stable world order, although it alluded to earlier events in the
succession myth (Orph. frr. 5, 10 Bernabé) familiar from Hesiod and
other authors. There is indeed every reason to believe that the Orphic
poet subscribes to the same basic account of the first generations of gods
that Hesiod presents, even if he does not rehearse that account in extenso.
What is different in this Orphic version is that after Zeus took power
from his father Cronus (fr. 5), he received prophecies from both Night
(fr. 6) and Cronus (fr. 7), advising him to swallow an earlier more pri-
mordial god called the “firstborn” (prōtogonos) (frr. 8, 12). The result of
this swallowing was the reincorporation within Zeus of all of creation:
[A]nd inside him all the blessed immortal gods and goddesses grew
(προσέφυν), and so too all the rivers and lovely streams and all other things,
as many as had once existed, and he himself was alone then. (fr. 12)

It appears that Zeus eventually brought forth all these gods from his body
in a re-creation of the universe. He probably began with the love god-
desses Aphrodite Urania, Peitho, and Harmonia (fr. 15). Later he “[con-
trived (μήσατο) in turn] Gaea and broad Uranus [above], and contrived
(μήσατο) the great strength of broadly flowing Oceanus” (fr. 16.1–2),
embedded into the earth the “sinews of Acheloeus” (fr. 16.3), the source
of all the earth’s seas and rivers, and re-created the moon (fr. 17) and
probably other heavenly bodies.
There is also another late archaic or early classical theogonic tradition,
probably also Orphic, that features a male creator. Unfortunately, our
knowledge of this tradition comes from dim reflections in literary texts
from the Athenian stage. The most famous passage is a mock cosmogony
from Aristophanes’ Birds (414 b.c.e.). It starts off, like Hesiod, with four
primeval gods: Chaos, Night, Erebus, and Tartarus (693). Then Night
lays an egg in the recesses of Erebus, from which hatches Eros (694–97),
who presides over two stages of creation. First, he “mated with” Chaos
and “hatched” (ἐνεόττευσεν) the race of birds (698–99). Second, he
“mixed everything together” and thus created heaven, ocean, earth, and
the race of gods (700–2). Eros’s first act – hatching of the race of birds –
is clearly invented by the chorus of birds in order to justify their claim
to primacy over the gods. But other elements of this myth – including
the hatching of a cosmic egg – likely allude to preexisting mythical or

96
West (1983) 18.
48 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

philosophical traditions. The motif of the cosmogonic egg had almost

certainly been incorporated into one strand of Orphic tradition by this
time, though apparently not in the Orphic theogony quoted by the
author of the Derveni Papyrus.97 A cosmogonic creator Eros is familiar
already from Pherecydes, who has Zas turn into Eros before creating the
earth and oceans. Eros may also be behind the fructifying figure that
Zeus swallows in the Orphic theogony quoted in the Derveni Papyrus.
Surviving fragments from that poem refer to this figure only as the
­“firstborn” (prōtogonos), but in the later Orphic Rhapsodies this figure was
called not only Protogonos but also Eros as well as Phanes, Metis, and
Ericepaeus, and in that version at least, he is born from a cosmic egg.98
Perhaps even more directly influential on the cosmologies of
Anaxagoras, Hippon, and others was the fact that some of these new male
creators created parts or all of the cosmos with their own semen.99 So in
Pherecydes, as we have seen, Chronus creates fire, pneuma, and water
“from his own seed (γόνου),” three elements that eventually give rise to
the second generation of gods. There are a couple of hints of this idea in
the Derveni Papyrus as well. First, when the author of the papyrus comes
to comment on the line from the Orphic theogony that says “he [Zeus]
swallowed the reverend [sc. firstborn god], who first darted across the
aithēr” (αἰδοῖον κατέπινεν, ὃς αἰθέρα ἔκθορε πρῶτος, fr. 8 Bernabé), he
seems to interpret the line to be a reference to the castration of “firstborn”
Uranus, as though the line really meant something like “he [Zeus] swal-
lowed the phallus (αἰδοῖον) [sc. of the god] who first ejaculated (ἔκθορε)
the aithēr.”100 The Derveni author seems to think that it was the castrated
phallus of Uranus that “first ejaculated the aithēr” and that the aithēr so
ejaculated, now separated off from the other elements, is the origin of
the sun, which is composed of fiery aithēr.101 This would be a cosmogonic

97
On the role of a cosmogonic egg in classical Orphic myth, see West (1994) 289. For its
absence from the Derveni theogony, see Bernabé (2002a) 100.
98
Orph. frr. 96–97, 124–26, 139–41, 241 Bernabé and West (1983) 70. A similar cosmo-
gonic myth, which features Eros, Night, Protogonos (the same as Eros?), and possibly
Aether, appears to be invoked in Eur. fr. 758a TGF.
99
This motif seems also to have come to Greece from Egypt in the sixth century b.c.e.
The Egyptian cosmogony from Heliopolis, in which the first god Atun created from his
own semen the next pair of gods, Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), who are ultimately
the origin of the rest of the divine ennead, seems the most likely source of Greek bor-
rowing. For the myth, see Bickel (1994) 72–75, 145. For its influence on Greek myth,
see Burkert (2004) 71–72; cf. Burkert (1992) 14.
100
See P. Derveni cols. XIII.4–11, XIV.1–2.
101
See Brisson (2003) 25–26; Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou (2006)
198–99.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 49

event in its own right: the sun would be created, in the commentator’s
allegorical account, by the “seed” of Uranus. Second, later in the papy-
rus, the author quotes the word θόρνῃ (fr. 15 Bernabé) in the context of
discussing the Orphic poet’s account of Zeus’s re-creation of Aphrodite
Urania (col. XXI.1–10); some scholars have interpreted this to mean
that Zeus re-created Aphrodite “with his own seed,” which would make
this a doublet of the earlier (Hesiodic) birth of Aphrodite from the sev-
ered genitals of Uranus.102 It is not difficult to see how myths, inspired
by Near Eastern models, in which a male creator god creates all or part
of the universe with his semen made a one-seed theory of reproduction
persuasive and indeed almost inevitable.

General Monistic and Dualistic Impulses

We may consider one final source of inspiration for the new embryology
and new cosmology that we begin to see in the early fifth century: new
monistic and dualistic modes of explanation and the dialectical oscilla-
tion between them. It can be no accident that all four proponents of the
one-seed theory in the fifth century are what we might call “monists,” or
at least as monistic as any fifth-century pre-Socratics working in the wake
of Parmenides. The three younger thinkers are clearly monistic: water is
the single first principle for Hippon, fire or heat for Philolaus, and air
for Diogenes. I think we can make the same argument for Anaxagoras,
though his case is more difficult: not only does his cosmogony start with
“all things together” (DK 59 B1), but his complex theory of substance
holds that there are always seeds of everything in every bit of matter, no
matter how small, so that anything could, under the right circumstances,
be generated from any “single” portion of matter. We can, at the very
least, endorse the compromise classification of Guthrie, who describes
Anaxagoras’s system as a “half-way house” between Milesian monism and
atomistic pluralism.103 It should be no surprise that Anaxagoras, armed
with such a theory of matter, would have no need for “seed” produced
by both the father and mother, because all parts of a new organism
ought to be potentially present in the reproductive contribution of a
single parent.104 We will return in a moment to consider the reason that

102
See West (1983) 91; Jourdan (2003) 90; Bernabé (2004) 27–28 ad fr. 15; and
Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou (2006) 243–45. On θρῴσκω meaning
“ejaculate,” see n. 111.
103
Guthrie (1962–81) 1.6.
104
So already De Ley (1980) 145 n. 78.
50 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Anaxagoras opted to grant this singular role to the father rather than to
the mother.
Nor can it be any accident that Democritus, the originator of the the-
ory of pangenesis, the first formal two-seed theory we are aware of, was,
with his infinite number of atoms, a radical pluralist.105 It is perhaps
simplistic to divide the world of fifth-century science into monists and
pluralists, but the fact is that all the pre-Socratic thinkers attempted to
explain the manifest diversity of the physical world in which we live as
economically as possible, which is to say through as few first principles as
possible. It would appear that those thinkers who were on the more eco-
nomic end of the spectrum were more likely to come to the conclusion
that men alone produced seed.
But matters are perhaps not as simple as this. For monism, in its most
radical form, would have a difficult time explaining the empirically
observable results of human reproduction. A monistic embryology ought
to result in a kind of one-seed theory, in which this one seed is contrib-
uted by the male alone or by the female alone. A female one-seed theory
is, in fact, logically impossible: if the female were able to produce her
own seed, she would not need a male at all; children would then never
resemble their fathers, an outcome that runs contrary to experience. A
male one-seed theory is immune to this particular flaw: the male, even if
he alone produced seed, would still need the female to carry the child to
term; it would be this contribution by the female that would explain the
resemblance of children to their mothers. Embryology, then, can be only
so monistic: because resemblance to both parents must be accounted
for, a persuasive embryology must be at least formally dualistic. It is per-
haps for this reason that Parmenides, though he insisted there could log-
ically be only “one” being, felt constrained to posit “two forms” (μορφὰς
δύο), when it came time, in the Way of Opinion, to provide an account
of the genesis of the world as we know it.106 Similarly the Hippocratic

105
The doxographers also identified Parmenides, Empedocles, and Alcmaeon as propo-
nents of the two-seed theory, and while I am skeptical that any of them formulated a
formal theory of female “seed” (see Appendix I, where I argue they endorsed a ver-
sion of the traditional two-substance theory), their cosmologies are in fact pluralistic.
Parmenides, in the cosmogony of the Way of Opinion, posits “two forms” (μορφὰς δύο),
fire and night (DK 28 B8.53–59), whereas Empedocles posits four roots and the powers
of love and strife. Alcmaeon is difficult to classify in these terms, as very little survives
of his cosmology, but it is interesting that the most Diogenes Laertius can say about his
physical philosophy is that “most human things come in pairs” (8.83 = DK 24 A1).
106
Is the Anaxagorizing claim of Euripides in the Melanippe Sophe that originally Heaven
and Earth were “a single form” (μορφὴ μία, Eur. fr. 484 TGF) a response to Parmenides’
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 51

author of Nature of Man, in a somewhat later polemic against those phys-

ical monists who try to reduce all scientific explanation to the “one,”
averred that “generation cannot arise from a single substance” (3.1).
Those physical scientists who needed a dualistic model to explain embry-
ological or other natural phenomena had at their disposal the system of
opposites, which we see hints of already in the thought of Anaximander,
though it was perhaps not fully developed until around 500 b.c.e., the
time of Heraclitus.107 Even more influential on a number of scientific
practitioners in the early fifth century was a more hierarchical system of
opposites, such as the version codified in the so-called Pythagorean table
of opposites,108 which paired a clearly privileged set of terms (male, right,
hot, dry) with their unprivileged counterparts (female, left, cold, moist).
We see this new, implicitly gendered, system of opposites applied to the
issue of sex determination in embryology: for Parmenides and Anaxagoras,
the sex of offspring was determined by a right-left opposition, whereas for
Empedocles, it was determined by a hot-cold opposition.109
The embryology of Anaxagoras combined monistic and dualistic
modes of explanation. The result was a dualistic model in which “one”
of the two elements was privileged: thus he envisioned two substances, as
the Greeks always had, in order to explain resemblance to both parents,
but, in order to explain the transmission of soul, the singular spark of life,
he gave a privileged role to the father’s seed. This model, in which “one”
male principle acts metaphysically on female matter, could explain not
only the generation of individuals but also the cosmos as a whole. More
than a century later, Aristotle, in the Generation of Animals, in the con-
text of his larger argument against pangenesis, would claim that male
seed ought to come not from all parts of the body but only from the
one part that functions as “craftsman” (δημιουργοῦντος) and “builder”
(τέκτονος, 723b29–30). It should be perfectly clear by now that this is
not a chance colorful metaphor on Aristotle’s part but invokes a constel-
lation of ideas dating back to the middle of the sixth century, brought
together for the first time, to judge from the evidence that survives, by
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae.

insistence that cosmogony, at least in the Way of Opinion, had to begin with “two forms”
(μορφὰς δύο)?
107
Opposites already in the time of Anaximander: Kahn (1960) 159–63; G. Lloyd (1966).
Not until Heraclitus: West (1971) 84, 138–40.
108
It is attested first in Arist. Metaph. 986a22–26, but this is no reason to suppose that the
idea does not go back to the fifth century or even late sixth.
109
Lesky (1951) 31–37, 39–44.
52 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Rhetorical Embryology in Athenian Tragedy

We conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the reception of
some of these embryological debates in Athenian tragedy. What we find
in the plays of the three great tragedians of the fifth century is, perhaps
surprisingly, a rather traditional conception of reproduction, what I have
been referring to as the two-substance theory, in which men contribute
seed and women blood.110 There are a few exceptions – probable allu-
sions to both Anaxagoras’s new one-seed theory and the new two-seed
theory formulated by Democritus – but they come in highly charged
rhetorical contexts in which characters allude to contemporary science
in order to defend their claims to family inheritance and civic status.
And so it would appear that in tragedy, too, reproductive science is to a
great extent driven by concerns other than the competing sociopolitical
claims of men and women.
There are three probable references in tragedy to the new one-seed
theory of reproduction, all in plays focused on the house of Atreus. The
first is the famous passage from Aeschylus’s Eumenides that we alluded
to at the outset of this chapter. In this final play of the Oresteia tril-
ogy, performed in 458 b.c.e., the matricide Orestes is being hounded
by the Furies, whose duty it is to punish those who have shed kindred
blood, and upon his arrival in Athens, Athena and the newly consti-
tuted Areopagus hear his case. In the great debate of the play, the Furies
return time and again to their central charge that Orestes’ shedding of
the “kindred blood” (αἷμ’ ὅμαιμον, 653) of his mother means that he
should be debarred not only from the holy sacrifices and libations of
the city but from even living among civilized men. Apollo makes a num-
ber of arguments in defense of the accused Orestes, but the most ten-
dentious is his claim that “the so-called mother is not [in fact] a parent
(τοκεύς) of the child (τέκνου), but is [merely] the nurse (τροφός) of the

110
Consider use of the words ὁμόσπορος (of the same seed) and the pair ὅμαιμος and
σύναιμος (of the same blood). In the large majority of cases these words are used to
describe the relationship between siblings (two brothers, two sisters, a brother and
­sister, etc.). But in a few cases these words are used to describe a cross-generational rela-
tionship. In these cases, ὁμόσπορος always describes a patrilineal connection: Soph. OT
460 (cf. 260); Eur. Med. 596. Meanwhile, ὅμαιμος and σύναιμος are nearly as consistent
in describing a matrilineal connection: Aesch. Eum. 653; Soph. OC 330; cf. Aesch. Supp.
225, 402, 449, 474, 651, where the word is invoked by the Danaids and their allies to
suggest that for the girls to marry their paternal first cousins would be tantamount to
committing incest with men related by (maternal) blood.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 53

newly sown (νεοσπόρου) embryo. The one who ejaculates (ὁ θρῴσκων)

is the one who ‘gives birth’ (τίκτει)” (658–60). Technically, Apollo hews
to the traditional two-substance theory: the father is imagined to con-
tribute semen (ὁ θρῴσκων, 660),111 which is also described as a kind
of “seed” (νεοσπόρου, 659); the mother contributes not only a place
for the embryo to grow but probably also the blood that enables it to
grow, which is implied by the term τροφός (659).112 While this division of
reproductive labor is wholly traditional, implicit already in Hesiod, as we
have seen, I think it is likely that Aeschylus put this argument in Apollo’s
mouth because the issue of male and female contributions to reproduc-
tion had recently been raised by the sophisticated one-seed theory of
Anaxagoras, the “scientist-in-residence” at Athens in the 470s and 460s,
who had argued that only the male produces the metaphysical “seed” of
new life.113
Apollo’s formulation of the two-substance theory is indeed far from
a neutral statement of the different contribution of the two parents
to reproduction: it clearly minimizes the role of the mother and exag-
gerates the role of the father. For example, he casually alludes to the
­mother’s blood (τροφός), which helps the fetus to grow and presum-
ably also molds it in her own image, but does not explicitly mention this
formative blood, presumably because the blood the son shares with his
mother is the centerpiece of the Furies’ case against Orestes. Instead, he
limits his description of the mother’s role to a series of empty metaphors
(from agriculture, hospitality, arboriculture). Apollo reserves most of his
creative energies for an exaggerated description of the role played by the
father. He accomplishes this partly through a careful choice of vocabu-
lary, most significantly through his pointed use of τοκεύς and τίκτει rather
than γονεύς and γεννᾷ, which are metrically equivalent to the former
pair but semantically associated much more closely with the male role.114
His use of these words, along with their cognate τέκνον, ­refashions the
“one who ejaculates” into “one who gives birth.” The father becomes a
pregnant mother.

111
The word θρῴσκω (ejaculate) and its cognates were not used in Greek texts to describe
menstruation. Compound forms of -ίημι were typically used to describe the emission
of female “seed” in authors who believed in its existence: see, e.g., Hipp. Genit. 2, 4, 6;
Ps.-Arist. HA 10.634b30, 33, 637b28.
112
Sommerstein (1989) 196, 208.
113
On the dates of Anaxagoras’s stay in Athens and the publication of his book, see nn. 4–5.
114
See Appendix II. The first syllable of τίκτω (<*τιτκω) is always treated as long by posi-
tion in tragedy, the κ and τ being separately pronounced. Cf. West (1982) 17.
54 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Apollo’s other rhetorical strategy is to invoke the mythical model of

Athena, whom he mentions in the next sentence:

And I will offer you a proof (τεκμήριον) of this argument. One may become
a father without a mother. Near at hand is evidence: the daughter of
Olympian Zeus. She was not nursed (τεθραμμένη) in the darkness of the
womb, but is the sort of sapling to which not even a goddess could give birth
(τέκοι). (662–66)

This is the point at which Apollo exceeds the limits of the traditional
two-substance theory: if one can be a father without a mother, then we
may wonder if even the female’s blood and womb are necessary to repro-
duction. Apollo appeals to myth to hint at an even stronger position
than he was willing to express in the language of human embryology and
manages to flatter the presiding judge in the bargain. And it may not be
only the parthenogenetic birth of Athena that Apollo alludes to here.
His accumulation of words with the *τεκ- root hints also at a possible folk
etymology of τεκμήριον (proof): if this evidence is “born from the thigh
(μηρός),”115 it perhaps hints at the myth of Dionysus’s birth from Zeus’s
thigh, another mythical model for the pregnant male.
Euripides invokes the old Apollonian embryology in two plays in
which he treats the story of Orestes. In the Electra (ca. 420 b.c.e.), the
old man suggests that a lock of hair left at the tomb of Agamemnon
might belong to Orestes, because it resembles Electra’s own hair. “Most
features of the body,” he avers, “are naturally (πεφυκέναι) similar in those
who share the same paternal blood (αἷμα ταὐτὸν οἷς ἂν ᾖ πατρός)”
(522–23).116 This passage contains a couple of interesting features. First,
Electra rejects the lock of hair and the patrilineal physiology the old
man invokes to explain its significance and embraces instead a scar on
Orestes’ face, a token that would not be proof of the genetic kinship of
brother and sister. We may see this as a twofold rejection, on Euripides’
part, of Aeschylus’s presentation of the myth in the Oresteia: he would be
rejecting Aeschylus’s choice of token of recognition (the lock of hair)
as lacking the emotional resonance and dramatic immediacy of a scar,
in whose crevices the Euripidean sister can trace her loving fingers, and
rejecting too Apollo’s old-fashioned Anaxagorean embryology. Which
leads us to a second important feature of this scene: whereas Apollo in
the Eumenides had conceded that the child was related by blood mostly if

115
For the role of the thigh and knee in making oaths, see Onians (1951) 109.
116
These lines are suspected by some modern editors: see apparatus in Diggle (1981–94).
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 55

not exclusively to his mother, which he argued was inferior to the “seed”
contributed by the father alone, the old man of the Electra emphasizes
the paternal blood kinship between Orestes and Electra, which might
indicate awareness of the newer and more modern one-seed theory of
Diogenes of Apollonia, who claimed that male seed was a highly refined
form of blood.117
In the later Orestes (408 b.c.e.), the one-seed theory is invoked by
Orestes himself, in his debate with Tyndareus. Whereas the great debate
in Aeschylus’s Eumenides pitted the Furies against Apollo, in Euripides’
play it pits Tyndareus, father of Clytemnestra, against Orestes and (to a
lesser extent) Menelaus, son and brother, respectively, of Agamemnon.
Tyndareus, seeking to press the blood claims of his daughter, naturally
emphasizes the mother-son bond. He also chips away at the father-son
bond, which will be the centerpiece of Orestes’ defense. When Tyndareus
criticizes Menelaus for even speaking with the matricidal Orestes,
Menelaus reminds him that Orestes is his brother’s son. Tyndareus
retorts acidly, “Does this man here [Orestes] really descend (πέφυκε)
from that man [Agamemnon], given that he was born (γεγώς) with
the [sc. matricidal] qualities he has?” Menelaus says, “He does indeed
descend (πέφυκεν) [from Agamemnon]” (482–84). When it is Orestes’
turn to respond to the arguments of Tyndareus, he resorts to a familiar
argument:
My father sowed (ἐφύτευσεν) me, whereas your daughter [merely] gave
birth to (ἔτικτε) me, she, a field that received the seed (σπέρμ’) from
another. There could never be a child without a father. Therefore I cal-
culated that I should rather ally myself with the true author of my birth
(γένους ἀρχηγέτῃ) than with the woman who [merely] offered nourish-
ment (τροφάς). (552–56)

Euripides once again has the Aeschylus passage in mind, and here too
he presents a variation on the old Apollonian embryology. He does not
claim that a child can be born without a mother (as Apollo did in the
Eumenides, holding up Athena as proof), but his claim that a child cannot
be born without a father perhaps hints at the same extreme position.118
Nor does Orestes deny that the female’s contribution can justifiably be
designated by the term τίκτω, as Apollo does in the Eumenides.

117
See n. 21.
118
Lines 554–56 (“There could never be . . . nourishment”) are deleted by some modern
editors. For a defense of at least 555–56 (“Therefore I calculated . . . nourishment”), see
Willink (1986) 175.
56 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

What is perhaps most important is that Euripides presents the old

Anaxagorean embryology of Aeschylus in the context of a dispute
between clans, prosecuted entirely by their male representatives. Both
Tyndareus and Orestes make arguments – the latter’s explicitly embryo-
logical – that vindicate the claims of their kinship group. It is not a battle
between male and female but one between agnate and cognate. May we
read the debate in the Eumenides in similar terms? One could argue that
that debate is not primarily a cosmic contest between the male (repre-
sented by Apollo) and the female (represented by the Furies), but rather
a debate over the relative strength of agnate and cognate ties. The Furies
make the strongest “scientific” argument available in favor of the cog-
nate tie: the child is related by blood to his mother alone. Apollo appeals
to the new “science” of Anaxagoras to suggest that the agnate tie is the
one that defines the child ontologically. Maybe Apollo’s Anaxagorean
embryology in the Eumenides is not part of a “dynamics of misogyny,”
after all.119
Kinship is also arguably more important than gender in the one appar-
ent reference in Attic tragedy to the new two-seed theory, in Euripides’
Ion (ca. 412 b.c.e.). When Xuthus returns to Delphi from the oracle
of Trophonius, whom he had consulted for advice concerning his and
his wife’s childlessness, Creusa asks, “What oracle do you bring from
Trophonius about how your and my seed for children may be mixed
together (παίδων ὅπως νῷν σπέρμα συγκραθήσεται)?” (405–6). This
seems to assume knowledge of Democritus’s new theory that explic-
itly identified both male and female contributions as “seed,”120 and
the allusion to Greek science is authenticated by use of the technical
term for “mixture.”121 At this point in the play, Creusa is anxious that
she and her husband become able to have a child together: because she
is an ­“heiress,” it is particularly important that any son she might gain
have her own blood coursing through his veins, if he is to inherit the
throne of her father Erechtheus,122 and for this reason she will naturally
be attracted to an embryological theory that gives substantial weight to

119
For this phrase and the interpretive approach it implies, see the classic essay of Zeitlin
(1996) 87–119.
120
So already Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1926) 104.
121
On the language of “mixture,” see, e.g., Parm. DK 28 B18 (but see our critical discus-
sion of this fragment in Appendix I); Hipp. Genit. 5, 6, 12. The word νῷν, a dual geni-
tive dependent on σπέρμα, makes it clear that Creusa is referring to both her and her
husband; I have rendered it by “your and my.”
122
On the legal status of the “heiress” in Athens, see Chapter 3, n. 68.
 The New Father of Anaxagoras 57

the female contribution. Of course, we spectators also know that Creusa

already has a son of her own blood, the temple attendant Ion, and that
his parentage is subject to a cruel asymmetry: he is in fact the biological
son of Creusa and an absent Apollo, but will be known at Athens as the
biological son of the immigrant Xuthus alone. Her explicit invocation
of the two-seed theory earlier in the play may represent an anticipatory
(from our perspective as spectators) hedge against the official denial of
her biological connection to her son.
The notion that Euripides used her allusion to the two-seed theory
to characterize Creusa and her sociopolitical interests is strengthened
by the fact that two other passages of the play present Xuthus alone as
sowing the seeds of childbirth. Hermes, in the prologue, says of Xuthus
that, “although he has sown seeds in the marriage bed for many years
(χρόνια σπείρας λέχη), he is childless – and Creusa too” (64–65). Here
clearly Hermes represents the interests of the father, his paternal half
brother Apollo. Later, during the recognition scene between father and
son, Xuthus explains that he must have fathered Ion on a Delphian girl
at a festival of Dionysus and Ion responds “so that is where I was sown
(ἐσπάρημεν)” (554), almost certainly a reference to the father’s role
alone, given that he is speaking here to his father.
 3

The Thigh Birth of Dionysus

Exploring Legitimacy in the Classical City-State

The myth of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus also appears to
have had rather little to do with debates about the proper roles of men
and women in reproduction or in society more generally. This myth,
which seems to have made its debut only in the late sixth or early fifth
century, was invoked instead in the context of debates of a rather differ-
ent sort, most notably theological debates about the status of demigods
and political debates in Athens over increasingly restrictive definitions
of citizenship. In this chapter, we explore the role played by this myth in
these two debates through a close analysis, respectively, of a passage from
Herodotus’s discussion of Dionysus and other demigods in book 2 of the
Histories and numerous passages from Euripides’ Bacchae, the two earliest
complete literary texts that mention the thigh birth.

Historicizing the Birth of Dionysus

The myth of the thigh birth is generally assumed to be of hoary antiq-
uity, an assumption no doubt based, at least in part, on the supposedly
“primitive” quality of the story. The attempts of some scholars to identify
an origin for the myth in a prehistoric adoption ritual or in some kind of
prehistoric initiation ritual involving imagery of “castration and death”
or “a wounding of the father god” are ingenious and indeed attractive.1
1
Prehistoric adoption ritual: Farnell (1896–1909) 5.110; Cook (1914–40) 3.79–98;
Bachofen (1948) 629–47. Prehistoric initiation ritual: Kerenyi (1976) 275–77; Burkert
(1985a) 165. Two other notable interpretations may be mentioned. Astour (1965) 195
suggests the myth arose as a misunderstanding of the West Semitic phrase yōṣe’ yerēkô, lit.
“sprung from one’s thigh,” a phrase that came to mean simply “offspring.” Boardman
(2004) 105–6, meanwhile, speculates that the myth might have been a narrative extrap-
olation from an iconographic tradition that depicted the infant Dionysus standing on
the thigh of a seated Zeus.

58
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 59

But no scholar has ever, as far as I am aware, attempted to prove that the
myth was in existence before the fifth century.
In fact, our five earliest secure references to the myth, in art or liter-
ature, come, as we shall see, from the fifth century b.c.e., and indeed
begin only in the middle of the second quarter of the century. It is there-
fore worth considering the possibility that the story of Dionysus’s birth
from the thigh of Zeus is not, after all, an old myth, but one that came
crashing onto the shores of mainland Greece in the early fifth or, at the
earliest, the late sixth century b.c.e., though of course a form of the myth
may have existed long before in some isolated pocket of the Greek world,
possibly in northwestern Asia Minor. Indeed, the early fifth century wit-
nessed a dramatic surge of interest in all aspects of the birth of Dionysus,
including his first birth from Semele and his conveyance to the nymphs
of Nysa for rearing, which means that we must attempt to understand the
thigh birth in the context of increased interest in the birth of the god
more generally.
This chronological argument about the dating of the myth of the thigh
birth is not ultimately essential to our discussion of the role that the myth
played in debates about the theological status of demigods or about the
definition of citizenship; for an older myth could still be pressed into
new uses by fifth-century writers such as Herodotus and Euripides. But if
the chronological argument is at all persuasive, it suggests the possibility
that the myth was developed, at least in part, as a way to think through
newly pressing social issues surrounding mixed birth that arose in a dis-
tinct form only in the fifth century.
There are five artistic or literary references to the myth that are both
unambiguous in their reference to the myth and reasonably datable:
1. An Attic red-figured lekythos by the Alcimachus Painter (ARV  2
533.58 = Boston 95.39), ca. 460 b.c.e.,2 which shows Zeus sitting on
a rock, the head of Dionysus apparently emerging from Zeus’s thigh.
Zeus appears to be pressing his thigh to facilitate Dionysus’s emer-
gence. Hermes is the only other figure on the vase: he stands holding
his signature kerykeion in one hand and Zeus’s scepter in the other.3
2. Stesimbrotus of Thasos FGrH 107 F13 = Et. Mag. s.v. Dionysus,
ca. 425 b.c.e.,4 probably from his work entitled On Initiatory Rites:

2
On the date, see Gasparri and Veneri (1986) 478 no. 666; Arafat (1990) 187 no. 2.11.
3
Arafat (1990) 46.
4
For his date, see Matthews ap. Janko (1997) 72 and n. 94. On the nature of this work,
see Burkert (1986).
60 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Διόνυσος· οἱ μὲν Διόνυξον αὐτὸν ὀνομάζουσιν, ὅτι σὺν κέρασι

γεννώμενος ἔνυξε τὸν Διὸς μηρόν, ὡς Στησίμβροτος. (Dionysus:
Some call him Dionyxus because, while he was being born, he
scratched [ἔνυξε] the thigh of Zeus [Διός] with his horns. Such is
the account of Stesimbrotus).5
3. Herodotus 2.145–46, ca. 425 b.c.e., which suggests that Dionysus,
son of Semele, was a mere mortal who lived only a thousand years
before his own time, named after the much older god of the same
name. Because this mortal Dionysus was whisked away to Nysa after
he was born from the thigh of Zeus, his mortal life and death were
not known to the Greeks (as Heracles’ were), and he was easily
assimilated to the much older god Dionysus.
4. Euripides’ Bacchae 94–98, 242–45, 286–97, 524–29, 405 b.c.e., in
which the chorus of Asian bacchantes or their male fellow cele-
brant (Dionysus in disguise) mentions the thigh birth as an arti-
cle of faith on three separate occasions, and the sophistic Tiresias
presents an allegorical interpretation of it.6
5. An Apulian red-figured volute krater (RV Ap 1.35.6 = Taranto
8264), ca. 400 b.c.e.,7 that depicts the emerging infant from the
midriff up. Zeus’s thigh may be swollen.8 The newborn is being
welcomed by a veiled goddess and the central group is surrounded
by other gods.9
There are four additional sources that should be considered: three are
securely datable to the fifth century b.c.e. but may not refer to the thigh
birth of Dionysus; the final one is more likely to be a reference to the
thigh birth but its dating is uncertain:
6. Pindar fr. 85 SnM = Et. Mag. s.v. Dithyrambus, pre-440s b.c.e.:
Πίνδαρος δέ φησι λυθίραμβον· καὶ γὰρ Ζεὺς τικτομένου αὐτοῦ
ἐπεβόα ‘λῦθι ῥάμμα, λῦθι ῥάμμα’ (And Pindar uses the form
λυθίραμβος10 [sc. for the standard διθύραμβος]. For Zeus, when he

5
See also Schol. Vet. Hom. Il. 14.325.
6
There is perhaps a hint of the thigh birth already in the reference to Dionysus as
­“twice-born” at Eur. Hipp. 560–62.
7
Gasparri and Veneri (1986) 479 date this vase to the end of the fifth century b.c.e. or
the beginning of the fourth.
8
So Arafat (1990) 47.
9
On the identity of the veiled goddess, see Olmos (1986) 692 no. 72 (Hera); Arafat
(1990) 47 (Eileithyia or nymph); cf. Gallistl (1981) 244.
10
The form Pindar actually used was probably λυθίραμμος, which is what Snell-Maehler
print as fr. 85 and is what the lexicographer himself gives later in the entry. Cf. also
Et. Gud. s.v. Dithyrambus.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 61

[Dionysus] was being born, cried out “release the stitching [sc. on
my thigh], release the stitching!”). While the lexicographer assures
us that Pindar used this word, most likely an obscure dialectical
variant,11 to refer to either the god himself or the hymn sung in his
honor, there is no reason to believe that Pindar was invoking the
etymology provided by the lexicographer or was alluding to the
story of Dionysus’s birth in any way.
7. Aeschylus fr. adesp. 317a TGF, pre-456 b.c.e.: ν]εότικτα δ’ ὑπὸ
μηρο[ῦ (recently born from the thigh), preserved in Demetrius of
Sparta’s commentary on Epicurus, which could be a reference to
the birth of Dionysus.12
8. A fragmentary red-figured krater by the Painter of the Athens
Dinos (ARV  1 796.3 = Bonn 1216.19), ca. 425,13 which seems to
show the infant Dionysus from the waist up, stretching out his arms
toward a female figure, possibly a nymph. He is situated somewhat
beyond the seated figure of Zeus and is not clearly emerging from
Zeus’s thigh.14
9. Diodorus 3.66.3 + P.Gen. 3.118, ca. 500–450 b.c.e. (?), which pre-
serve hexameters that Diodorus tells us were composed by “the
poet in the hymns,” lines that most scholars assign to the begin-
ning of the first Homeric hymn (to Dionysus):
Some say that you were born (γενέσθαι) in Dracanon, others in windy
Icarus, others that you, divine child, eiraphiōtēs, were born in Naxos,
others that you were born beside the deep-eddying river Alpheius,
{that Semele, pregnant, gave birth to you for Zeus who delights in the
thunderbolt,}15 and others say that you, lord, were born in Thebes.
But they are lying. The father of men and gods gave birth to (ἔτικτε)
you far from men, in order to deceive white-armed Hera. There is a
high mountain called Nysa, covered with trees, far from Phoenicia,
near the streams of Egypt. No mortal man can get there by ship, for
there is no harbor.

11
This is perhaps akin to the variant Ὀλυσσεύς (or Ὀλισεύς) beside the more common
Ὀδυσσεύς, on which see generally Chantraine (1968–80) 775–76 s.v. Ὀδυσσεύς.
12
Puglia (1988) 220–22 has argued that this line came from Aeschylus’s Semele.
13
Arafat (1990) 187 no. 2.12.
14
Arafat (1990) 46–47. Two vases that show what appears to be an infant Dionysus on the
lap of Zeus probably depict a postpartum scene: see Arafat (1990) 47–50, 187–88 nos.
2.13–14. The eponymous neck amphora of the Diosphos Painter (ca. 490 b.c.e.) has
been thought to depict the thigh birth by Kerenyi (1976) 279–80, Loeb (1979) 34–35,
and Gallistl (1981) 244, but I am skeptical. I am even more skeptical of the argument
of Condoléon-Bolanacchi (1984) that a seventh-century relief amphora from Tenos
depicts the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus.
15
This line is omitted in P. Gen. 3.118 and in some manuscripts of Diodorus. See Hurst
(1994) 319.
62 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

There are two difficulties with using these lines in a discussion of the his-
torical appearance of the myth of the thigh birth. First, the poem does
not actually say that Dionysus is born from the thigh of Zeus. There is
no mention of any thigh, though the epithet εἰραφιώτης was sometimes
etymologized in much later texts as referring to the thigh birth of the
god.16 Nor is it clear that “gave birth” is the correct translation of ἔτικτε;
this verb, at least in the archaic period, frequently denoted the tra-
ditional male role in reproduction,17 which means that it is possible that
we should translate “begot” instead. If Semele was not mentioned in the
original version of this hymn, as some scholars think,18 then the poet’s
point was perhaps not to contrast Semele’s parturition with Zeus’s, but
Zeus’s begetting of Dionysus in Dracanon, Icarus, and elsewhere (false
stories) with Zeus’s begetting of Dionysus in far-off Nysa (true story). On
balance, I am inclined to believe that the poet does allude to the birth of
Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus, but the allusion is far from certain.
A second, and ultimately insoluble, difficulty is the date of this hymn.
If lines from this poem were quoted by Herodorus of Heraclea,19 then
the hymn must be earlier than 400 b.c.e. or so. But it is nearly impossible
to pin down a more specific date, especially given that there are so few
lines to go on, and the early dates proposed by some scholars are almost
entirely baseless.20 I will limit myself here to the suggestion that the pri-
amel with which our fragments for the hymn begin, in which the poet
rejects the claims put forward by others that Dionysus’s birth took place
in Dracanon, Icarus, Naxos, Elis, and Thebes before asserting that the
birth took place in Nysa, near the border between Phoenicia and Egypt,
suggests the self-conscious, polemical treatment of variations in Greek
myth that we do not really see until the late sixth or early fifth century.
I would argue that the polemic here is much closer in spirit to Pindar’s
critique of some versions of the Pelops myth in Olympian 1 than it is, for

16
E.g., Hesych. s.v. Εἰραφιώτης.
17
See further discussion of the semantic range of τίκτω in Appendix II.
18
See n. 15 together with the arguments of West (2001) 8–9.
19
See Schol. Ap. Rhod. 2.1211 with the critical discussion of Allen, Halliday, and Sikes
(1936) lxxii–lxxiii.
20
West (2001) 3–4 argues for a date in the early to middle seventh century, but his
argument is based on two questionable premises: (1) that a hexameter version of the
myth of Dionysus’s (and Hephaestus’s) procession to Olympus, preserved on papyrus
(P.Oxy. 670), was the Dionysus myth that served as the long mythical section of the first
Homeric hymn (so already Merkelbach [1973]); and (2) the depiction of this same
myth in Alcaeus (fr. 349 PMG) and on the François Vase must have had a Homeric hymn
as a model.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 63

example, to the stately priamel at the beginning of Sappho 16 PMG.

Although we will probably never know for certain, I am inclined to think
that this hymn was composed during the early fifth century.21

Before we examine in greater detail this evidence for the thigh birth,
especially the passages from Herodotus and Euripides’ Bacchae, we first
consider a more general argument: that this apparent sudden prolifer-
ation of representations, in literature and vase painting, of Dionysus’s
birth from the thigh of Zeus in the middle of the fifth century indicates
the arrival of a genuinely new myth (new, at least to Greeks of the main-
land) and is not an illusion created by the absence of surviving evidence
for the myth from earlier periods. First of all, Dionysus is depicted on
hundreds of vases from his first appearance around 580 until 470, many
of them representations of myths;22 and Dionysus also turns up many
times in archaic poetry from Homer to Pindar, most frequently as a
patron of the symposium, but sometimes also in connection with myth,
such as his encounter with King Lycurgus and his role in releasing Hera
from the booby-trapped throne built by Hephaestus.23 Although most of
these archaic and early classical depictions in literature and vase paint-
ing do not seem to allude to mythical narratives, enough of them do to
suggest that the absence of the thigh birth before 470 is not part of a
larger absence of Dionysus himself from mythical narratives in Greek art
and literature of the archaic period.
Furthermore, there appears to have developed rather suddenly
around 500 b.c.e. a keen interest in the birth of Dionysus more gener-
ally, particularly his birth from Semele. It is true that Dionysus’s geneal-
ogy as the son of Zeus and Semele is well established by the time the Iliad
(14.323–25) was committed to writing.24 And the only myth about the
god recounted in the Homeric poems – Lycurgus’s threats to the young
god and his nurses (Il. 6.130–40) – is a tale that takes place not long
after his birth. But there is no evidence of interest in these adventures of

21
Cf. already Càssola (1975) 14–16, who discusses features of the hymn suggestive
of a compositional date in the later sixth century; he is followed by Zanetto (1996)
213–14.
22
Carpenter (1986).
23
On Dionysiac myth in archaic literature, see generally Privitera (1970).
24
We find the same genealogy also at Hes. Th. 940–42; Alc. 346.3 PMG; Pind. Ol. 2.26;
Hdt. 2.145–6; Eur. Bacch. passim. But cf. Sapph. 17.10 PMG, where the mother of
Dionysus is called Thyone (perhaps already assimilated to Semele; but cf. Panyassis fr. 8
Bernabé, where she is clearly not); Praxill. fr. 752 PMG, where his mother is identified as
Aphrodite; and Eur. fr. 177 TGF, where his mother is Dione (conflated with Thyone?).
64 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Dionysus and his nurses during the rest of the archaic period25 and not
a single mention of any role for Zeus in giving birth to Dionysus until
around 460. In vase painting, although Dionysus was frequently repre-
sented from around 580 onward, it is not until the beginning of the fifth
century that we begin to see natal and perinatal scenes (e.g., his being
handed off to nymphs to be nursed), and most of these are in fact clus-
tered in the middle of the century.26
New interest in the birth of Dionysus in the fifth century, especially his
first birth from Semele, is even more pronounced in literature, especially
in genres closely associated with the god, such as dithyramb, tragedy, and
comedy. We may begin with dithyramb. Although dithyramb in the archaic
period appears not to have been associated specifically with birth of the
god,27 this association had become so prominent by the classical period
that Plato could define dithyramb simply as the “birth of Dionysus” (Leg.
700b4). And, indeed, three dithyrambs or fragments thereof from the
first half of the fifth century do appear, at first glance anyway, to lend some
support to this popular association. A dithyramb Pindar wrote for Thebes
(frr. 70b+81 SnM), which has as its main theme the descent of Heracles
into Hades, begins with a programmatic statement about Pindar’s view
of the dithyrambic genre, followed by a description of the gods celebrat-
ing the festival of Dionysus and an account of the god’s birth in Thebes.
Another dithyramb of Pindar’s (frr. 75+83 SnM), this one written for the
Athenians, describes Dionysus as a “child born of a father above and a
Theban woman.” And the fifth dithyramb of Bacchylides concludes its nar-
rative of the myth of Io with an account of her bringing her child Epaphus
to Egypt, “whence Cadmus, the son of Agenor, in seven-gated [Egyptian]
Thebes, engendered Semele, who bore Dionysus, the rouser of the bac-
chantes and lord of garland-bearing dances” (19.46–51). This narrative
links Dionysus not just to Cadmus, the son of Agenor, but implicitly to
Agenor’s Egyptian genos, which goes all the way back to Io.
We also know of a famous – or infamous – dithyramb from the late
fifth century or early fourth century by Timotheus called the Birthpangs

25
See Carpenter (1986) 82 n. 25. H. Hom. 26.1–10 describes the nymphs of Nysa, but its
date is uncertain.
26
Carpenter (1997) 54.
27
See Pickard-Cambridge (1962) 1–7; cf. Hordern (2002) 10–13. A later folk etymology
suggests that Dithyrambus is the god who “has passed twice through the gates [sc. of
birth]” (δὶς θύραζε βεβηκώς): so Et. Mag. s.v. Dithyrambus; Et. Gud. s.v. Dithyrambus.
This folk etymology may have influenced some composers of dithyramb to mention the
birth of Dionysus – the first or the second – at some point in the poem.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 65

of Semele (fr. 792 PMG), which seems to have offered a melodramatic

portrayal of Semele groaning in the throes of labor. The historian
Callisthenes, writing in the mid-fourth century, tells us that one ­member
of the audience, the cithara player Stratonicus, chortled, upon hearing
Timotheus’s piece, “If she were giving birth to a building contractor
(ἐργολάβον) instead of a god, what kinds of sounds would she emit?”28
This anecdote, our best evidence for the nature of Timotheus’s piece,
suggests that the poem was unusually emotional and seems to imply also
that it contained a lengthy passage in which the male choristers spoke in
the voice of Semele herself.29 And it seems that Timotheus heightened
the drama of the Semele story by having her struck with the thunderbolt
during labor, and not before she had come to term, as most versions of
the myth imply.
The god’s birth, especially his birth from Semele, was a popular sub-
ject also in fifth-century tragedy and comedy, and this may be what
Diodorus Siculus means when he says that this story of his first birth
had “filled” the theaters of Greece (1.23.8).30 Aeschylus wrote a Semele
or Water-Bearers (frr. 221–24 TGF), which seems to have told the story
of Semele’s pregnancy and ended, most likely, with her death by the
thunderbolt of Zeus. Little survives from the play itself, but we are fortu-
nate to have a scholiast’s description of one memorable scene from the
play: “Aeschylus showed her [Semele] pregnant and inspired [sc. by the
god within her] (ἐνθεαζομένην), and likewise showed the women who
touched her belly becoming inspired too” (Schol. Ap. Rhod. 1.636a =
Aesch. fr. 358 Mette).31 Sophocles wrote a Water-Bearers, which probably
dealt with the same theme, and we know of classical tragedies entitled

28
Callisthenes FGrH 124 F 5 (§27) = Athen. 352a.
29
See Hordern (2002) 249 on what he characterizes as the “strong mimetic elements” of
the piece. It is possible, however, that Stratonicus was commenting not on the words of
Timotheus’s poem or the manner in which the choristers sang them, but on the elabo-
rate and emotionally charged music that the aulos player performed in accompaniment.
In that case, Stratonicus, himself a cithara player, would be polemicizing against a man
who composed for a rival instrument and in a different genre. This may also be the point
of Dio Chrysostom’s (77/78.32) later comparison of a greedy Alcmaeon stuffing his
mouth with gold dust from Croesus’s treasury to “the flute-player playing the Birthpangs
of Semele.”
30
Might Plato’s complaint at Rep. 395e2 that Athenian tragedians sometimes showed on
stage women in the throes of labor refer to some of the numerous Semele plays from
the fifth century? For some other plays that may have featured women in the throes of
labor, see Chapter 5.
31
For further discussion of the play’s contents, see Gantz (1980) 154–58. Aesch. fr. adesp.
317a TGF should perhaps be added to this play: see n. 12.
66 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Semele also by Diogenes of Athens, Spintharus of Heraclea, and Carcinus

the Younger of Athens.32 These tragedies focused on Semele and proba-
bly culminated with her death (offstage), but one or more of them may
have hinted, possibly through a prophecy issued by a deus ex machina, at
the survival of the infant Dionysus and possibly even his second birth
from the thigh of Zeus.
Comedies from the later fifth century and the fourth century also
treated the theme. We know of a Semele or Dionysus by Eubulus and a Birth
of Dionysus by Polyzelus, Anaxandrides, and probably also Demetrius.33
We are in the dark about the contents of these plays entitled Birth of
Dionysus: Did they focus on the birth from Semele or the birth from
Zeus or possibly both? A Birth of Athena by Hermippus from the end of
the fifth century almost certainly dealt with the birth of Athena from
the head of Zeus, so it is not impossible that the birth of Dionysus from
Zeus’s thigh was treated in comedy as well, though there is plenty of
humor in the Semele story.34 Ctesilochus’s fourth-century painting of the
thigh birth, which, according to Pliny, featured Zeus “wearing a head-
dress and groaning like a woman amid the goddesses who were serving
him as midwife” (Plin. Nat. 35.140), may have been influenced by a com-
edy depicting Zeus in labor.
The goal of this section has been to situate the myth of the thigh birth
in a fifth-century historical context. We have seen that the earliest cer-
tainly datable artistic and literary depictions of the myth come from the
second quarter of the fifth century. And we have seen that interest in the
birth of Dionysus generally, including his untimely birth from the incin-
erated body of Semele, surges during precisely this same period, which
suggests that popularity of the thigh birth is related to this more gen-
eral interest in Dionysus’s birth. Dionysus was known as the son of Zeus
and Semele since the time of Homer.35 But why did keen interest in the

32
Soph. frr. 672–74 TGF  ; Diogenes of Athens fr. 1 TGF  ; Spintharus test. 1 TGF  ; Carcinus
II frr. 2–3 TGF.
33
Eubulus frr. 93–95 PCG; Polyzelus frr. 6–7 PCG; Anaxandrides test. 5 PCG; Demetrius
I test. 2 PCG. Winkler (1982) argues that these comedies were not about the birth of
Dionysus; but see Nesselrath (1995) 3 n. 8, 4–5.
34
See Nesselrath (1995) 4–5 for some ideas. He suggests (11) that one function of these
plots about the birth of gods was to explore the theme of illegitimacy, a theme taken
up in a different way in New Comedy. But there was naturally also plenty of humorous
material in the story of the thigh birth. Cf. Lucian Dial. deor. 12. Indeed, Lucian Salt. 39
tells us that, in his day, mime featured the second birth of Dionysus just as prominently
as the first birth.
35
Though heterodox genealogies did exist: see n. 24.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 67

details of his birth appear only after the turn of the fifth century? And
why, more specifically, did there appear at this time a new myth about
his birth from the thigh of his father? What cultural conditions made the
appearance of this myth possible or even inevitable?

Dionysus’s Legitimacy as God

One stimulus was theological in origin: a new sense of urgency to resolve
the apparent contradiction of a god born of a mortal woman, a contra-
diction that begins chafing at the scruples of pious Greeks only toward
the end of the archaic period, perhaps under the influence of the
rational criticism of myth pioneered by Xenophanes of Colophon and
Theagenes of Rhegium. The story of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh
of Zeus offers one solution to this problem, for it represents Dionysus
as having been born from the body of a god, after all, that of his father
Zeus. Dionysus can now claim that both his father and his “mother” are
gods. If this formulation recalls the new definition of Athenian citizen
under Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 – which required that one’s father
and mother both be Athenians – it is no coincidence. Later in this chap-
ter, we explore how Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus was brought
into the orbit of debates over the new restrictive definition of Athenian
citizenship, especially Euripides’ exploration of this connection in the
Bacchae. But we turn first to the role of the thigh birth in theological
speculation during the fifth century, especially in Herodotus’s idiosyn-
cratic account of the origin of the cult of Dionysus and of Greek religion
more generally.

Dionysus the Demigod: A Theological Problem

The divinity of Dionysus and other demigods had become a problem by
the fifth century. Sophocles, in an unknown play, has a character say, “You
are referring, I see, to Thebes and its seven gates, the only place where
mortal women give birth to gods” (fr. 773 TGF), a reference probably to
both Heracles, who earned immortality through his labors, and Dionysus,
a god from birth.36 And we may recall that Pindar, in his Athenian dithy-
ramb, pointedly observes that Dionysus is a “child born of a father above
and a Theban woman” (fr. 75.11–12 SnM). But Dionysus’s mixed birth,

36
Another pair of Theban demigods, Amphion and Zethus, sons of Zeus and Antiope,
appear never to have had a claim to divinity.
68 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

noted as a paradox by Sophocles and Pindar, was acutely problematic

for others. It inspired some classical Greeks to suppose that the son of
Semele was a mortal. Philochorus, writing in the fourth century, seems
to refer to a tradition about the grave of Dionysus at Delphi.37 He point-
edly calls this grave that of “Dionysus son of Semele,” a figure presum-
ably different, in his mind, from the divine son of Zeus. Herodotus will
make a similar distinction between a mortal Dionysus, the son of Semele,
and the divine Dionysus, the son of Zeus. This controversy over whether
the son of Semele was a god or a man appears to be alluded to also by
Euripides in the Bacchae, who has the god appear to the Thebans, ini-
tially, in human disguise.38
Dionysus’s mixed birth was probably felt, already in the second half
of the sixth century, to be a paradox that required some kind of resolu-
tion. There appear to have been two major approaches to resolving this
problem. One was to upgrade Dionysus’s mother to divine status. We
encounter a deified Semele first, in surviving literary sources, in a pas-
sage from Hesiod’s Theogony (940–42), a passage almost certainly added
during the second half of the sixth century,39 where Semele’s divinity is
stated outright. And, in art, there is the altar-pedestal of the cult statue
of Apollo at Amyclae, which dates from the middle of the sixth century,
which, according to Pausanias, depicted Semele and Dionysus in the
company of other gods, almost certainly on Olympus (3.19.3).40 But
there was another way to secure a divine mother for Dionysus: give the
role of mother to a true goddess in place of the mortal Semele. A new
Orphic myth, well established by the early fifth century, made Dionysus
the son of Persephone and Zeus, a clear alternative to the traditional
genealogy that made Dionysus the son of Semele and Zeus, but one that
could and sometimes did accommodate the more traditional one.41 The

37
Philoch. FGrH 328 F 7ab; the god was apparently thought to have died there at the
hands of King Lycurgus. But cf. Casadio (1991) 363, who thinks that the Dionysus bur-
ied at Delphi is the same figure as the god Dionysus, but there imagined as a kind of
eastern dying-and-rising god. Cf. also Henrichs (1975) 111–23, who has argued that
there are hints of a mortal Dionysus also in the thought of Prodicus of Ceos.
38
Cf. Norwood (1908) 108–09; Verrall (1910) 2–5.
39
West (1966) 398.
40
Pausanias tells us that near the group of Dionysus and Semele are gods who “carry to
heaven (οὐρανόν) Hyacinthus and Polyboea” (3.19.4), which suggests that Dionysus,
Semele, and other gods are already there.
41
New myth: Graf (1974) 66–78; Graf and Johnston (2007) 68–70, 74; cf. West (1983)
93–98, who has identified at least two strands of the Persephone genealogy in existence
in the classical period. On attempts to reconcile the Persephone and Semele myths,
see n. 83.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 69

appearance of new genealogies that solved the theological problem of

the god’s maternity may have been fortuitous, but it is also possible that
they were contrived for precisely this purpose.42
A second solution was for Dionysus to be born a second time from the
body of his father, a myth attested for the first time in surviving sources,
as we have seen, in the second quarter of the fifth century. This ought
to be an alternative solution to the divinization of Semele or identifica-
tion of Persephone or some other goddess as his mother. If so, we would
expect not to encounter a divine or divinized mother and the birth from
Zeus’s thigh in the same account of Dionysus’s birth. And that is pre-
cisely what we find in the sixth and fifth centuries. Texts from this period
that mention the divinity of Semele lack the thigh birth: the late pas-
sage from Hesiod’s Theogony we have mentioned already and two allu-
sions to Semele’s immortality in the first half of the fifth century by the
Boeotian poet Pindar (Ol. 2.26; Pyth. 11.1). The converse is also true:
the three literary texts from this period that clearly mention the thigh
birth – the passages from Stesimbrotus, Herodotus, and Euripides listed
at the beginning of this chapter – either explicitly insist on Semele’s
mortality (Herodotus, Euripides) or are silent (Stesimbrotus). The first
Homeric hymn (to Dionysus), which probably also alludes to the thigh
birth and may well date from this period, probably did not, in its original
form, mention the divinity of Semele or indeed mention her at all.43 The
apparent mutual exclusivity of these two myths – Semele’s deification and
Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus – does not necessarily explain the
sudden popularity of myths about Dionysus’s birth beginning in the late
sixth century, but it does provide one plausible context, namely attempts
to rationalize the Greek pantheon by defining the requirements (e.g.,
mother and father who are both gods) for godhead.

The Mortal Dionysus: A Complex Argument in Herodotus

This is precisely the context of Herodotus’s reference to the thigh birth,
possibly the earliest surviving literary reference to the myth. It comes in
a passage from book 2 of the Histories in which he contrasts Greek and

42
For other possible factors, see Graf and Johnston (2007) 70–73. We encounter a sim-
ilar phenomenon in the case of Heracles, who, according to Diodorus Siculus, had to
undergo a ritual rebirth from Hera in order to be counted a god. See n. 104.
43
See West (2001) 8–9, who is probably correct to delete lines 19–21 Allen, which men-
tion Semele “whom they call Thyone,” as an interpolation. It is likely that she was not
mentioned in line 5 either: see n. 15.
70 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Egyptian traditions about the gods, focusing in particular on the Greek

phenomenon of gods born of mortal women. The details of Herodotus’s
brief account of the myth are not particularly interesting. What is aston-
ishing – and yet has gone almost entirely unnoticed by scholars44 – is that
Herodotus believes that this Dionysus, the son of Semele, belonged to
a group of figures who “were born men (ἄνδρας) but bear the names
of . . . gods who were born earlier” (2.146.1). Herodotus still believes in
the existence of a god named Dionysus, but this is not the same figure
as the mortal son of Semele. And it is this mortal Dionysus, according to
Herodotus, who was said to have been stitched into the thigh of Zeus.
Now we have just argued that one of the functions of the story of the
thigh birth was to prove the divinity of the son of Semele. How is it that
Herodotus comes to link the story to the mortal Dionysus rather than
the divine Dionysus?
Herodotus’s discussion of the mortal Dionysus and his alleged birth
from the thigh of Zeus is embedded in a rather complex digression about
the relative antiquity of Greek and Egyptian gods, which is itself a digres-
sion from his lengthy account of Egyptian history. Herodotus’s belief
that Egyptian culture is much older than Greek culture leads him to con-
clude that most of the Greek gods were borrowed from Egypt, and in this
section he uses the priestly historical records kept in Egyptian Thebes,
which he claims to have consulted, to account for some of the differences
between the ancient Egyptian gods and their later Greek forms. The dif-
ference that he focuses on at 2.145–46 is the fact that some gods that are
placed in the youngest generation within traditional Greek theogonies,
such as Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan, are found among the older genera-
tions of gods in their “original” Egyptian context (2.145.1). The abso-
lute figures he provides for the age of the Egyptian gods are staggering:
the Egyptian Dionysus (Osiris), the youngest, first appeared 15,000 years
before the time of Amasis; Egyptian Heracles (Shu), 17,000 years before
Amasis; and Egyptian Pan (Mendes), even earlier (2.145.2 with 2.43.4).
By contrast, the Greek Dionysus, the son of Semele, is said to have been
born only 1,000 years before Herodotus’s own time; Heracles, the son
of Alcmena, 900 years before; and Pan, the son of Penelope, 800 years
before (2.145.4).45

44
A notable exception is Zographou (1995) 200 n. 58, 202 n. 68. Cf. also A. Lloyd
(1975–88) 3.114, who suspects that Herodotus “is tilting at a current doctrine of the
duality of Pan and Dionysus.”
45
The text was emended by Wilamowitz so as to make the son of Semele appear 1,000
years before Herodotus’s time rather than 1,600 years: on the crux, see Stein (1883)
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 71

Herodotus explains this gap between Egyptian and Greek theogonies

as a function of when the Greeks adopted these gods: gods adopted from
Egypt at an early date are placed among the earlier generations of gods
within Greek theogonies, whereas gods adopted later are placed in a
younger generation within these same theogonies (2.146.2). The easi-
est way to accommodate later adoptees, such as Heracles, Dionysus, and
Pan, within the Greek system of genealogy is to place them in the later
generation of demigods. This creates not only the theologically awkward
situation that mortal and divine demigods are combined together in the
same group but also the possibility of confusing god and mortal at this
period of history. This is in fact precisely what Herodotus thinks hap-
pened to these three figures: because the Egyptian gods who went by
these names were incorporated in the Greek age of demigods, they were
easily confused with Greek mortals of the same name.
It will be helpful to quote from the text at length, as the logic of
Herodotus’s argument is difficult to follow:46
One is free to follow whichever of these two traditions [sc. about the dat-
ing of the gods] one will believe. My own opinion about it has been given.
For if in fact these figures – Dionysus the son of Semele and Pan the son of
Penelope – had, like Heracles the son of Amphitryon, become known and
grown old in Greece (εἰ μὲν γὰρ φανεροί τε ἐγένοντο καὶ κατεγήρασαν καὶ
οὗτοι ἐν τῇ Ἑλλάδι, κατά περ Ἡρακλέης ὁ ἐξ Ἀμφιτρύωνος γενόμενος καὶ δὴ
καὶ Διόνυσος ὁ ἐκ Σεμέλης καὶ Πὰν ὁ ἐκ Πηνελόπης γενόμενος), one would
have said that these others too [sc. Dionysus and Pan] were born men but
bear the names of those gods who were born earlier (καὶ τούτους ἄλλους

163 n. 14 and A. Lloyd (1975–88) 3.112. Herodotus’s conclusions about the relatively
late date of Dionysus, Heracles, and Pan, whom most Greeks of his day accepted as
“gods,” accord well with conventional Greek belief about these figures: the myths about
Dionysus feature him constantly having to prove his divinity; Heracles, in myth, is shown
having to earn his immortality; and Pan had only recently left Arcadia to spread to the
rest of Greece and indeed Herodotus himself gave an account of Pan’s recent adoption
in Attica (6.105). On the arrival of Pan, see Garland (1992) 47–63; cf. Aesch. fr. 25b
TGF, who distinguishes between two Pans, one the son of Cronus, the other the son of
Zeus, although there is no evidence that Aeschylus thought that one of these was a mor-
tal. Asclepius might have been another candidate for Herodotus’s analysis, but this son
of a god and a mortal woman was not fully recognized as a god until the fourth century
b.c.e. Three writers from the first half of the fifth century, Acus. FGrH 2 F18, Pind. Pyth.
3.57–58, and Pherecyd. FGrH 3 F35, for instance, still take the death of Asclepius as a
given. Cult of the god Asclepius began to spread from Epidaurus in the fifth century
and arrived at Athens only in 421/420, almost certainly after Herodotus’s Histories were
completed, otherwise we might have expected him to include Asclepius in this analysis.
See IG II2 4960 (the so-called Telemachus Monument) and Garland (1992) 116–35.
46
The difficulty has led some commentators to suppose a problem with the text: see, e.g.,
Powell (1935) 78–80; Legrand (1936) 169 n. 2.
72 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

γενομένους ἄνδρας ἔχειν τὰ ἐκείνων οὐνόματα τῶν προγεγονότων θεῶν).

But as it is, the Greeks say that as soon as Dionysus was born, Zeus stitched
him into his thigh and brought him to Nysa, which is located in Ethiopia,
above Egypt, and they are not able to say where Pan went after he was born.
It has become clear to me that the Greeks learned the names of these later
than those of the other gods. They set their genealogy from the time when
they learned [their names]. (2.146.1–2)

Many scholars believe that Herodotus seeks to distinguish, within this

class of Egyptian gods adopted (later) into the Greek age of demigods,
between Heracles, who was incorporated as a mortal hero, and Dionysus
and Pan, who were incorporated as gods.47 But I do not think that
Herodotus means to suggest that Dionysus and Pan differ from Heracles
in their divinity. First of all, if Herodotus thinks that the sons of Semele
and Penelope are gods, it is difficult to understand how he could refer
to their aging (κατεγήρασαν), even in a counterfactual condition.48
Second, these scholars ignore the geographical element in the contrast:
Herodotus is insisting that the (mortal) sons of Semele and Penelope
did not grow old (and die) in Greece, as Heracles did, not that they did
not grow old and die at all. This is the reason that Herodotus points out,
in the next sentence, that Dionysus was carted off after birth to Nysa,
far from Greece, and that it is not known “where Pan went after he was
born,” geographical details that would be superfluous if this were not
the basis of their difference from Heracles. What Herodotus is actually
attempting to do here is contrast the Greek treatment of three pairs of
homonymous figures: the mortal and divine Heracles were not confused
because the mortal Heracles grew old and died in Greece, but the mortal
Dionysus and Pan did become confused with the primordial gods of the
same name, because the Greeks did not know any stories about the aging
and death of these mortals.

47
Stein (1883) 164; How and Wells (1912) 239; Waddell (1939) 242. This interpretation
assumes, correctly in my view, that οὗτοι anticipates the subject “Dionysus and Pan,”
κατά περ introduces a contrastive parenthetical, and καὶ δὴ καί resumes the subject
“Dionysus and Pan.” It is somewhat awkward Greek, but not extraordinary. A. Lloyd
(1975–88) 3.113–14 argues that οὗτοι refers back to the primordial Egyptian ­models
for Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan and that the κατά περ phrase describes all three Greek
manifestations of them. But to see κατά περ as governing all three figures erases the
very distinction Herodotus is at pains to draw between Heracles, on the one hand,
and Dionysus and Pan, on the other: Dionysus and Pan do not grow old in Greece,
and only Dionysus and Pan are mentioned in the next sentence, which describes their
­disappearance. The problem with the majority view is that it skates over the contrast in
the difficult second sentence at 2.146.1 (εἰ μὲν γὰρ . . . θεῶν). So rightly Lloyd.
48
The immortal gods do not age: see, e.g., Hom. Il. 17.444, Od. 5. 218; h. Hom. 2.242,
5.218–38.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 73

In order to follow Herodotus’s complex argument, one must recall his

analysis of the Heracles doublets earlier in book 2 (2.43–45), and indeed
he explicitly refers the reader back to that earlier discussion here.49 In
the earlier passage, Herodotus explains that the Greeks recognize both a
god named Heracles, whom they adopted from the Egyptians, and a mor-
tal hero of the same name. He begins his analysis thus: “The Egyptians
did not take the name [of Heracles] from the Greeks, but rather the
Greeks took it from the Egyptians, and it was those Greeks who gave
the name ‘Heracles’ to the [sc. mortal] son of Amphitryon” (2.43.2).
Herodotus does not in this passage distinguish explicitly between divine
and mortal Heracles, but in the next section he states quite clearly that
the Egyptian god Heracles traveled from Phoenicia to Thasos “five gen-
erations before Heracles the son of Amphitryon was born (γενέσθαι) in
Greece” (2.44.4). This leads him to a very clear statement of the duality
of Heracles the god and Heracles the mortal: “Those Greeks seem to me
to adopt the most correct course who have established two Heracles tem-
ples, and sacrifice (θύουσι) to one as an immortal Olympian, and bring
offerings (ἐναγίζουσι) to the other as a dead hero (ἥρωι)” (2.44.5).50 It
is this duality that he refers to later at 2.146.1, when he says of Dionysus
and Pan that “these others too were born men but bear the names of
those gods who were born earlier,” a phrase that attempts to apply the
unambiguous duality of Heracles also to the more problematic cases of
Dionysus and Pan.
The duality of these figures – not only the obvious case of Heracles but
those of Dionysus and Pan as well – is also implicit in the larger context
of this digression. In the digression, Herodotus seeks both to emphasize
the extraordinary antiquity of Egyptian history and to chide his prede-
cessor Hecataeus, who not only did not appreciate the scope of Egyptian
history but also had the arrogance to claim, during his own visit to Egypt,
that he was descended from a god in the sixteenth ­generation. It is indeed
Hecataeus’s claim to be descended from a god that motivates the entire
digression at 2.142–46. After a brief review of the extent of Egyptian his-
torical records for the succession of high priests, Herodotus concludes
that according to Egyptian tradition “no god has assumed human form”

49
The phrase δεδήλωταί μοι πρόσθε in 2.145.2 clearly refers to the Heracles discussion
earlier.
50
See Mikalson (2003) 187. But cf. Zographou (1995) 198–199, who thinks that while
Herodotus at 2.145–146 distinguishes a mortal and divine Heracles, here at 2.44
he refers to two different manifestations of the divine Heracles, the god proper and
the hero, who he believes is a degenerate form of the Egyptian god Heracles.
74 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

(θεὸν ἀνθρωποειδέα οὐδένα γενέσθαι, 2.142.3).51 This leads, in the next

section, to his account of how Hecataeus’s claim to be descended from a
god was rejected by the Egyptian priests of Zeus at Thebes “because they
did not accept his claim that a human being had been born of a god”
(2.143.4).52 And this leads, finally, to Herodotus’s discussion of the gap
between the Egyptian gods Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan and the figures
that go by that name in Greece. The latter, according to Greek genealo-
gies, lived only twenty-four to thirty generations before Herodotus’s time
(if we assume, as Herodotus does, three generations for each century):
Is this any more believable than Hecataeus’s claim that there was a god
in his family only sixteen generations back? The conclusion Herodotus
means us to draw is that Greek myths about demigods born of a union
of a divine and mortal parent must also be false, in spite of what “the
Greeks say,” and their absence in Egypt is the only proof he needs. This
is the thrust of the entire digression at 2.142–46.
So what are the implications for the status of the Greek figures known
as Dionysus and Pan? Are they really gods or are they mortals? Herodotus
could have concluded that these are gods from Egypt whose natures
have merely become distorted in the process of transmission, notably in
their placement within the later heroic generations of Greek genealogy,
which makes them the divine sons of mortal women, an impossibility in
their Egyptian homeland. But this is not what Herodotus actually says.
He seems rather to think that the son of Semele and the son of Penelope
are different enough from their Egyptian forebears that it makes more
sense to say that they are different figures and that the Greek demigods
have been named after the Egyptian gods and are not continuations of
them. Indeed, he explicitly tells us that he thinks that the duality of
Heracles is the better model for understanding Dionysus and Pan. If
the mortal sons of Semele and Penelope had aged (and died) in Greece
like Heracles did, everyone would realize that “these others too [sc.
like Heracles] were born men but bear the names of those gods who
were born earlier.” Herodotus feels that he can come to this conclu-
sion through historical investigation alone, even without the benefit of

51
At least not during the last 11,340 years (2.142.3); before that time, the gods ruled on
earth and “lived among humans” (2.144.2).
52
See also Hdt. 2.50.3: “The Egyptians do not believe at all in heroes.” But cf. Hdt.
1.182.1–2, which describes a custom in Egyptian Thebes in which a mortal woman
sleeps in the temple of Zeus and refrains from intercourse with men during that time.
This passage does not imply actual intercourse between god and mortal woman but at
most a kind of hieros gamos.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 75

having witnessed Dionysus and Pan grow old in Greece. Other Greeks at
this time were also attempting to eliminate the category of divine demi-
gods by insisting either that the mothers of these gods were divine or
that the demigods were mortal; Herodotus’s contribution to the debate
is an argument drawn from Egyptian history.
The fact that Herodotus provides all three figures in this passage
with decidedly mortal lineages lends further support to our claim that
Herodotus thinks of the sons of Semele and Penelope as mortals who
bear the names of gods. When he first introduces the Greek version of
Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan in this passage, he identifies them solely by
their matronymics: “Dionysus who is said to be the son of Semele the
daughter of Cadmus”; “Heracles the son of Alcmena”; and “Pan the son
of Penelope” (2.145.4). We may recall, in this context, that Philochorus
identified the mortal Dionysus, buried at Delphi, as the “son of Semele,”
presumably in contrast to the divine Dionysus, the son of Zeus. Herodotus
also explicitly denies or distances himself from the claims of Greek myth
that their fathers are gods. So, for instance, after he first introduces “Pan
the son of Penelope,” he adds the parenthetical observation, “he is said
by Greeks to have been born the son of her and Hermes.” In the next
section, he refers to the Greek – and clearly mortal – Heracles as “the son
of Amphitryon” and makes no mention whatsoever of Zeus as his father
(2.146.1). And regarding Dionysus, finally, he observes that the story of
Zeus’s stitching him in his thigh and bringing him to Nysa is something
that “the Greeks say” (2.146.2). Herodotus believes that the problem
with these figures is not that they have mortal mothers, but that they do
not have divine fathers: these are not the same as the Egyptian gods of
the same name, but imposters.
Herodotus’s startling conclusion, if our reconstruction is correct,
raises two important questions. First, how does he imagine that the mor-
tal and divine Dionysus came to be conflated? Second, what does it mean
for him to associate the myth of the thigh birth with the mortal, imposter
Dionysus?

Cadmus and the Theological Sophists:

How to Do Things with Myth
Let us consider first the likely process whereby Egyptian god and Greek
mortal became conflated. We recall that the god Dionysus came to
Greece from Egypt at a much later date than most of the other gods
did, and earlier in book 2 Herodotus tells us that this happened in the
76 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

generation of Cadmus, the father of Semele. He invokes the old tradi-

tion that it was the seer Melampus who introduced the rites of Dionysus
to Greece: Melampus introduced “the name of Dionysus, the sacrifice,
and the phallus procession,” but he did not understand all features of
the cult “exactly” (ἀτρεκέως), and it was left to later sophistai to explain
it “more fully” (μεζόνως) (2.49.1). Herodotus says at first that Melampus
“learned [the rites] from Egypt” (πυθόμενον ἀπ’ Αἰγύπτου), but a few
sentences later he reports that he “learned the traditions concerning
Dionysus from Cadmus the Tyrian (πυθέσθαι . . . παρὰ Κάδμου) and
those who came with him from Phoenicia to the land that is now called
Boeotia” (2.49.2–3). Herodotus probably means us to understand
that Melampus’s immediate source is the Tyrian immigrant Cadmus,
but the information comes ultimately from Egypt.53 There was indeed
probably a rival tradition, contemporary with Herodotus, according to
which Cadmus brought his family and its ancestral rites and myths to
Greece not from Phoenicia but from Egypt itself. At the very least, some
authors already in the early fifth century knew that the Cadmeids traced
their ancestry to Egypt,54 and the representation of Cadmus himself as
an Egyptian, which we encounter in later sources, may reflect classical
tradition.
But how did the god brought to Greece by Cadmus (and spread to
Argos and elsewhere by Melampus) come to be confused with what
Herodotus believes is the mortal grandson of Cadmus? The process
must have been similar to what happened in the case of Heracles, about
whom Herodotus says, as we have seen, that the Greeks who brought the
Egyptian divine “name” Heracles to the Greek mainland were the same
people who assigned it to the “son of Amphitryon” (2.43.2),55 presum-
ably Alcmena and Amphitryon, in a nod to their Egyptian heritage.56 It
is difficult to avoid the probable conclusion that, in Herodotus’s mind,
Cadmus or one of his kinsmen named the mortal son of Semele after
the Egyptian god Dionysus within a generation of Cadmus’s immigration
to Boeotia.

53
Zographou (1995) 199–202 argues that the Melampus tradition that Herodotus is
drawing on had the seer learn about Dionysus in Egypt itself; the role played by the
Phoenicians, he suggests, is a Herodotean innovation.
54
See, e.g., Bacchyl. 19.39–51.
55
On Herodotus’s notion of Greeks borrowing the “names” of Egyptian gods, see Burkert
(1985b).
56
Cf. Zographou (1995) 198: “certains ont donné au fils d’Alcmène et d’Amphitryon,
d’origine égyptienne, le nom du dieu, pour qui’il symbolise manifestement la prove-
nance égyptienne de l’Héraclès-dieu.”
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 77

This notion that Cadmus was responsible for confusing his mortal
grandson with the god of the same name, perhaps hinted at by Herodotus,
is more explicit in Euripides. We will defer most of our discussion of
Euripides’ Bacchae until the next section, and will restrict ourselves here
to the role Euripides gives to Cadmus. Whereas in Herodotus Cadmus is
responsible for bringing the god Dionysus to Thebes, in Euripides he is
credited with the attempt to identify his (mortal?) grandson as a god or
perhaps even with the god. In the prologue, Dionysus himself tells us that
Cadmus was accused by the sisters of Semele of making up the story that
the father of Semele’s child was not some mortal man, but Zeus himself:

My mother’s sisters, who ought least have done so, denied that Dionysus
sprang from (ἐκφῦναι) Zeus, and said that Semele, bedded (νυμφευθεῖσαν)
by some mortal man, attributed the violation of her bed to Zeus – Cadmus’s
clever idea (σοφίσμαθ’) – and they proclaimed loudly that this is the reason
Zeus killed her, namely because she falsely claimed to have married [him]
(γάμους ἐψεύσατο). (26–31)

This accusation against Cadmus is given some credibility later when we

hear Cadmus remind Pentheus of the social advantages to be gained
from worshiping the son of Semele as the god worshiped by the Lydian
bacchantes: “For even if this god does not exist, as you say, you ought to
say he does. Just go along with the convenient lie (καταψεύδου καλῶς)
that he is the son of Semele, so that it will appear that she gave birth to a
god and honor will attach to our whole family” (333–36). Of course, the
audience, from its omniscient perspective, realizes that Cadmus cannot
justly be accused of inventing the story that Semele was impregnated by
Zeus, for most Greeks believed this as an article of faith.
The story of the thigh birth is also linked, in the Bacchae, to doubts
about the divinity of Semele’s child. The thigh birth is mentioned on four
different occasions within the play; the second of these is an account that
Pentheus reports hearing from the stranger, who the audience knows is
the god in disguise:

He [the stranger] says that Dionysus is a god, he says that he [Dionysus] was
once stitched in the thigh of Zeus, even though he was in fact incinerated in
the blazing thunderbolts along with his mother, because she falsely claimed
to have married Zeus (Δίους γάμους ἐψεύσατο). (242–45)

Pentheus here aligns himself with the criticism voiced by the sisters of
Semele and implicitly endorsed by Cadmus himself: for Pentheus, too,
Semele was killed because she lied about having an affair with Zeus (a lie,
as we have seen, credited to Cadmus), and he uses the same phrase in
78 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the same place in the line that they did (γάμους ἐψεύσατο, 31, 245). But
Pentheus makes explicit the assumption (merely implied in the earlier
passage) that the child was killed along with its mother, and he pres-
ents the stranger as mentioning the story of the thigh birth in order to
counter precisely this objection. What happened to the child? He was
whisked away in the thigh of Zeus, exactly as in Herodotus, although for
the stranger in Euripides’ play the thigh birth proves Dionysus’s divinity,
whereas for Herodotus it is what made it possible for the Greeks to con-
fuse the mortal son of Semele with the god of the same name.
Now the story of the thigh birth is never attributed by Euripides to
Cadmus, the alleged author of Zeus’s paternity, but it is not difficult to
see that it serves his propaganda perfectly: not only does it exonerate the
tainted Semele, but it exalts the whole family by showing how the child,
whom they are claiming, out of convenience, to be a god, could have been
saved from the thunderbolt. This may be one way to read the allegorical
interpretation of the thigh birth a few lines later by Tiresias, Cadmus’s
consigliere (286–97). The intention of the myth – to explain how the child
was saved – is noble, but it will need to be rationalized in order to be per-
suasive to enlightened Greeks of Cadmus’s (or Euripides’) day. We will
discuss Tiresias’s interpretation, the third of four references to the thigh
birth in the play, in some detail in the next section. For the moment, we
may recall Herodotus’s suggestion that, after the initial introduction of
the cult of Dionysus by Cadmus and Melampus, later sophistai came along
and explained the traditions of Dionysus “more fully” (2.49.1). We have
seen that, in Euripides, sophismata regarding the birth of Dionysus are
explicitly attributed to Cadmus, and “explaining [the rites of Dionysus]
more fully” is precisely what Tiresias does in 286–97.
Cadmus’s role is even more pronounced in the later account of the
birth of the son of Semele given by Diodorus Siculus in his discussion
of Egyptian history, which is similar in a number of respects to that of
Herodotus and Euripides but makes the mortality of the son of Semele,
adumbrated in the two fifth-century authors, quite explicit. Diodorus’s
account of Egypt has long been felt to draw extensively from the work of
Hecataeus of Abdera, who was writing toward the end of the fourth cen-
tury b.c.e., and so Diodorus, at least here, is likely to be reflecting some
authentic classical traditions.57 In the version he reports, Cadmus and

57
On Diodorus’s dependence on Hecataeus of Abdera, see FGrH 264 F25 and Jacoby’s
note ad loc. But cf. Bernabé (2002b) 91–92, who thinks Diodorus here is reflecting a
Euhemerist tradition.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 79

his family live in Egyptian Thebes, where his daughter Semele, violated
by an unknown man, gives birth to a premature baby that resembles the
Egyptian god Osiris (= Dionysus). Cadmus, following Egyptian tradition,
treats the baby as an epiphany of Osiris but then goes one step further
and claims that the father of the child is Zeus: this lie is meant both to
flatter the Egyptian Osiris (= Dionysus), by suggesting that he is the son
of the great Egyptian god Amun (= Zeus), and to remove the stain of vio-
lation from his daughter Semele (1.23.4–6).
At some point the god and the mortal son of Semele became conflated:
How did this happen? And how did the Greeks come to believe that the
events leading up to Dionysus’s birth took place at a much later period
and in Boeotian Thebes rather than Egyptian Thebes? Diodorus sug-
gests that an active role both in eliminating the temporal and geograph-
ical gap and in conflating the two Dionysuses was played by the figure
of Orpheus, who, generations later, out of a desire to flatter Cadmus’s
descendants in Boeotian Thebes, transferred the location of the birth
of the god Dionysus from Egyptian to Boeotian Thebes and the date of
his birth from remote antiquity to more recent times. And he made the
birth of this Dionysus, the son of Semele and Zeus, now a conflation
of god and mortal, the central myth of a new Dionysian mystery cult
he had established. (1.23.7).58 In Diodorus’s account, then, an Egyptian
Cadmus is responsible for suggesting that Semele’s mortal child was in
fact authored by Zeus, whereas it is Orpheus who explicitly identified the
mortal son of Semele with the god and relocated the birth narrative to
Boeotian Thebes. While Diodorus does not mention the thigh birth in
this passage, this is not to be expected, since he is focusing on Egyptian
traditions about Dionysus.59
The role played by Orpheus in the account of Diodorus, and likely that
of his classical source Hecataeus of Abdera, is similar to the role played
in Herodotus’s account by the “later sophistai,” who “explained more
fully” the rites of Dionysus (2.49.1).60 This can be no accident. There

58
If Diodorus appears to have given Orpheus too large a role in inventing the myth of
Dionysus’s Theban birth, note that already Herodotus gave individual poets a large role
in setting the “names” and genealogy of gods imported from elsewhere (2.53). Against
this background, the fascinating recent theory of Graf and Johnston (2007) 66–93, who
argue that the myth of Dionysus’s birth from Persephone and Zeus was the work of a
bricoleur working in the late sixth century b.c.e., is entirely plausible.
59
Diodorus does mention the thigh birth later at 3.64.5 and 5.52.2.
60
It is perhaps significant that Herodotus uses the word sophistēs of only two specific ­persons
in the Histories, the wandering Athenian sage Solon (1.29.1) and the religious master
Pythagoras, who is the alleged teacher of the Thracian shaman Zalmoxis (4.95.2) and
80 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

was an Orphic poem from the fifth century that treated his birth from
Persephone,61 a genealogy that, as we have seen, helped vindicate the
god’s divinity, and the Orphic poem commented upon by the Derveni
author, which Walter Burkert has characterized as “Egyptianizing,”62
may well have dealt with the birth of Dionysus.63 Whatever historical
sophistai Herodotus might have had in mind, he is clearly also thinking
of religious and intellectual figures of his own day, such as the orpheo-
telestai and exegetes like the author of the Derveni Papyrus. It is likely
that Euripides’ Tiresias, himself an allegorical interpreter of the myth of
Dionysus’s birth, is modeled on the same kinds of fifth-century figures.

The Thigh Birth in Herodotus

Herodotus was probably not the first to suggest that the son of Semele,
like other figures born of mortal mothers, was not originally a god. But
there are two features of his argument that are innovative. First is the
way that he uses Egyptian “evidence,” especially the absence of demi-
gods in Egyptian religion, to strengthen a case that had certainly been
made before.64 Second, whereas it is likely that in other writers, includ-
ing Euripides, the thigh birth functioned as a proof of Dionysus’s divin-
ity, in Herodotus it is evidence of a cover-up, the very thing that it made
it possible for Greeks to conflate the later homonymous mortal with the
primordial god. If in Herodotus the thigh birth makes possible a false
identification of the god with Semele’s son, in Euripides the thigh birth
is offered by the stranger and also by the chorus of Asian bacchantes
as proof of this very identification, paradoxical as it might be. In either
event, by the end of the fifth century, the thigh birth had become a

is, in Herodotus’s mind, closely linked with Orphic teachings (2.81). Cf. Thomas (2000)
283–85.
61
Steph. Byz. s.v. Agrai with Graf (1974) 66–78; see also Graf and Johnston (2007)
73–80.
62
Burkert (2004) 95–98.
63
So West (1983) 94–98. Cf. Orph. fr. 59 (I) Bernabé (from Philodemus On Piety): “The
first [birth of Dionysus] is the one from his mother, the second the one from the thigh
of Zeus, the third when he [Dionysus] came back to life after being dismembered by
the Titans and Rhea put his limbs together again. Euphorion agrees with this account
in his Mopsopia, and the Orphics altogether dwell on it.” But we cannot be sure that
Philodemus’s source here was classical.
64
Also noteworthy is Herodotus’s use of sophisticated techniques of argumentation
made popular by the new teachers of rhetoric (see Zographou [1995]; Thomas [2000]
274–82) and his familiarity with the theological speculation of sophists like Protagoras
and Prodicus (see Burkert [1990] 25–27; Scullion [2006] 200–2).
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 81

marker of the debates over the divinity of the son of Semele, the mortal
princess from Thebes.

Dionysus as Heir and Citizen: Defects of Paternity

and Maternity in the bacchae
The thigh birth is explicitly invoked, as we have seen, on four different
occasions in Euripides’ Bacchae: the first and last references come in the
mouth of the chorus of Lydian bacchantes (94–98, 524–29); the second
is Pentheus’s report of the claim of the Lydian “stranger” that the god
was born from Zeus’s thigh (242–45, quoted previously); and the third
comes when Tiresias attempts to provide Pentheus an allegorical inter-
pretation of this strange myth (286–97). It is striking that the story of
the thigh birth is vouched for in the play only by the Lydian chorus and
its leader, the Lydian “stranger.” Dionysus himself, when he speaks in
propria persona as the god, never claims to have been born from the thigh
of his father.65
Why does Euripides focalize the myth in this way? He himself may have
believed that the myth was, as a historical matter, of Lydian or Phrygian
provenance, and possibly also that the worship of Dionysus more gen-
erally came from the East. He may also have used the myth as a way
to develop the character of the Asian worshipers of Dionysus: it is just
the sort of story one would expect from superstitious foreigners, not
rationalistic Thebans, who, as we shall see, can accept it only when it
is explained allegorically. But I think that Euripides also associates the
myth with the Lydian bacchantes because it helps them to make the
kinds of arguments they need to make in order to promote the worship
of their god. Specifically, it helps them paper over defects in the god’s
birth: not only the kinds of theological defects we discussed in the previ-
ous section but also social defects that could compromise the god’s status
as a Theban “citizen.”
The defects in Dionysus’s birth are at least partly a function of struc-
tural weaknesses within the house of Cadmus.66 The most important
is Cadmus’s failure to have produced a male heir, a diagnosis that
Cadmus himself offers toward the end of the play: Dionysus, he laments,
“destroyed the whole household (δόμους), and me in particular, I who
have no male children of my own (ἄτεκνος ἀρσένων παίδων γεγώς)”

65
So already Verrall (1910) 33–34, 53.
66
On this theme in Euripides generally, see Seaford (1990).
82 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

(1304–5). Pentheus might call Cadmus “father” (1322), but he is in no

real sense the son of the great dragon slayer. It is notable that Euripides
here eschews the genealogy standard by the fifth century, which even
he himself followed in an earlier play, that made Polydorus, the father
of Labdacus and great-grandfather of Oedipus, a son of Cadmus.67 All
versions of the myth from the classical period agree that the house of
Cadmus was doomed; one of Euripides’ innovations in the Bacchae is to
focus on genealogical defects as a proximate cause of its fate.
In Athens, the solution to the problem faced by a man in Cadmus’s
position was either to adopt, while still alive, a son who would inherit his
property upon death (an option available only if the man had no daugh-
ters either) or to allow his property to pass intestate to an “epiclerate”
daughter (“heiress”) who, married off to a kinsman, would hold the prop-
erty in trust until a son (grandson of the original decedent) was born to
her and her husband.68 The solution adopted by Cadmus in the Bacchae
is a form of the epiclerate solution: Agave was married off to Echion, a
“kinsman” of sorts, and they served as placeholders for Cadmus’s grand-
son Pentheus, until the young man came of age. This is why the kingship
passed directly from Cadmus to Pentheus. Cadmus’s solution deviates
from normal Athenian practice only to the extent that this epiclerate
succession took place while Cadmus was still alive, a concession to fixed
elements of the myth and the dramatic needs of Euripides’ plot.
A second structural defect that besets the house of Cadmus is the lack
of a larger local descent group. The heiress is supposed to be married
off to a kinsman, but Cadmus and his daughters have no real kinsmen.
Echion and his four “brothers” are not the children of any father or
mother; they are men sown in the earth by Cadmus from the teeth of
the slain dragon. Are these men children in the same sense as those pro-
duced through sexual reproduction? The Cadmeids finesse this problem
by leveling the distinction between true offspring and sown ­offspring.
So toward the end of the play Agave, for instance, fresh from the hunt,
boasts that Cadmus “planted (σπεῖραι) by far the best of all mortal daugh-
ters” (1234–35). The image of planting seed was a common metaphor
for the father’s role in reproduction at least since the archaic period, but
Agave here clearly also alludes to the quite literal planting of the Sown
Men, a myth alluded to several times earlier in the play.69 Describing

67
E.g., Hes. Th. 978; Hdt. 5.59; Soph. OT 267–68; Eur. Phoen. 7–8.
68
See generally, Harrison (1968–71) 1.82–96; MacDowell (1978) 95–98, 99–101.
69
See lines 264, 1274, 1314–15; cf. also 1025–26, deemed an interpolation by many
editors.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 83

the daughters of Cadmus as being metaphorically sown has the effect of

elevating Echion and the other Sown Men, who were literally sown by
Cadmus, to the same social status.
These two defects are hinted at, already in the prologue, in Dionysus’s
description of the women of Thebes as “the female seed (θῆλυ σπέρμα)
of the Cadmeians” (35). This phrase refers not exclusively to the daugh-
ters of Cadmus – they are mentioned separately two lines later – but it
probably reminds the audience nevertheless that Cadmus has produced
only daughters, only “female seed.” And by designating all the women of
Thebes as “Cadmeian,” Euripides hints that Cadmus is a kind of parent
of all.70 Cadmus’s self-sufficiency as a parent is indeed emphasized: he
produces the Sown Men without the help of a mother; and Harmonia,
the mother of his daughters, is conspicuously absent from the action.
The problem with the house of Cadmus is that there is no effective cir-
culation of women and women’s “genetic” material. Cadmus’s attempt at
self-sufficiency, especially to the extent that his strategy depends so much
on offspring “sown” in the earth, is ultimately doomed to failure.71 We
may be invited to wonder whether Zeus, another self-sufficient father,
will be any more successful.
Now Richard Seaford has argued that one of the most important
themes in Athenian tragedy was the dissolution of the autonomous
royal or aristocratic household in favor of a more democratic polity
held together by one or more religious cults accessible to all citizens.
The plots of tragedy, according to Seaford, often represent the diseased
state of the self-sufficient royal household in the form of the excessive
control it attempts to maintain over its female members, control often
manifested in the form of extreme endogamy or even incest. It is the god
Dionysus, especially at Thebes, who is the primary “enemy of familial
introversion,” the champion who “removes females from the enclosure
of their homes to the sexually dangerous mountainside.”72 Dionysus’s
triumphant return to Thebes in the Bacchae, he argues, is designed to

70
The phrase “female seed” would probably also have invoked, in the minds of some
viewers, at least, debates during the second half of the fifth century about whether
women as well as men contributed “seed” to the reproductive process. See discussion in
Chapter 2.
71
One major problem with autochthony is that it writes women out of the process of
reproduction, substituting “mother earth” for human mothers. See Loraux (1993)
9–11, 64–66. Euripides shows in the Bacchae what happens when men try to reproduce
through the earth, without women: a figure like Echion and his equally earthy son
Pentheus. On the theme of autochthony in this play, see also Segal (1997) 128–40.
72
Seaford (1994) 214, 258 and 206–220, 257–62 generally.
84 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

bring about the destruction of the royal household so that a democratic

Thebes, glued together by the cult of Dionysus, can rise from its ashes.73
I would propose that Euripides adds something very interesting to this
basic Dionysian plot paradigm: he asks us to think of Dionysus not only
as a foe of the introverted royal family at Thebes but also as a member
of this very family, come to claim his rightful inheritance. Dionysus is an
avenging god, but also a rival heir to Pentheus; Semele is the mother
of a god, but also another epiclerate daughter of Cadmus. I think that
Euripides is genuinely interested in the birth and legitimacy of Dionysus,
partly as a contrast to the counterclaims of his cousin Pentheus, but also
partly as a contrast to a different kind of legitimacy that Dionysus him-
self claims: his demand to be worshiped as a god. In other words, I think
Euripides is interested in the ideological tensions and contradictions
that result when the conventional story of the Thebans’ resistance to
Dionysus as a god is juxtaposed to the more prosaic, but perhaps equally
resonant, resistance on the part of the royal family to accepting Dionysus
as a legitimate member of the family and citizen of the polis.74
This, I argue, is why the issue of Dionysus’s birth, and particularly his
birth from Zeus’s thigh, mentioned on four separate occasions, plays
such a large role in the play. In the remainder of this section, we explore
the four passages in which the thigh birth is invoked and pay special
attention to the way that this myth functions as a remedy for defects in
Dionysus’s birth.

Bacchae 88–104: Maternal Uncertainty

Defects in the god’s birth are put into sharp relief in the very first lines
of the play when Dionysus, at the tomb of his mother, announces “I have
come (ἥκω), the son of Zeus, to this land of Thebes, Dionysus, whom the
daughter of Cadmus once bore, Semele, midwifed by fire from heaven.
I have changed my appearance from god to mortal and am now present
here at the streams of the river Dirce and the water of the river Ismenus.
And I see the tomb of my mother” (1–6). The boldness of the setting
has not been fully appreciated. Many tragic plots are centered around
the return of a son, now grown to manhood, to claim his patrimony and
be recognized as the successor to his father, and many of these tales of

73
Seaford (1994) 255, 258–59, (1996) 44–52.
74
See Goff (2004) 160–226 on the theme of citizenship in the Bacchae, especially from the
perspective of women.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 85

return are actually set at the tomb of the father.75 Paradigmatic is the
scene at the beginning of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, where Orestes
begins “Chthonic Hermes, who watches over my father’s kingdom, be a
savior and ally to me in my humble entreaty, for I have come (ἥκω) into
this land, or rather I return. And at this tomb mound here I publicly
bid my father to listen, to hear me” (Choeph. 1–5). The opening scene
of the Bacchae presents a reversal of the stock scene of the son’s return:
Dionysus comes to claim his inheritance not at the tomb of his father but
at the tomb of his mother. Dionysus has no Theban father, so his social
status as Thebes will depend entirely on his descent from his mother, a
member of the royal family.
But no sooner has Euripides presented Dionysus in the prologue as
the son who returns to claim his matrilineal rights against the quite
reasonable (from a mortal’s sociopolitical perspective) objections of
his cousin and aunts than he introduces some actual confusion about
the identity of Dionysus’s mother. At the end of the prologue, in which
Dionysus refers to Semele as μήτηρ four times (6, 9, 26, 41), the god
calls on the Asian bacchantes to lift up their Phrygian drums, “the inven-
tions of mother Rhea and me” (Ῥέας τε μητρὸς ἐμά θ’ εὑρήματα, 59), a
line that intriguingly juxtaposes μητρός (mother) and ἐμά (mine), even
as it stops short grammatically of identifying Rhea as the actual mother
of Dionysus. In the parodos, which begins a few lines later, the great
mother comes to play an increasingly prominent role. The chorus, in
the first strophe, praises those who practice “the rites of the great mother
Cybele” (τά τε ματρὸς μεγάλας ὄργια Κυβέλας, 78–79) and later, in the
second antistrophe, recalls how the Corybantes invented the drum and
placed it “into the hand of mother Rhea” (128–29) and how the Satyrs
obtained this same drum “from the mother goddess” (131) and intro-
duced it into the trieteric rites of Dionysus.
It is in this context, between the reference to great mother Cybele
in the first strophe of the parodos and the references to mother Rhea
in the second antistrophe, that the chorus presents the first of four
accounts in the play of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus:
“Zeus . . . received him [sc. from the body of the incinerated Semele].
He concealed him in his thigh and stitched it closed with golden pins, in
order to hide from Hera. And when the Fates brought [his pregnancy]
to completion, he gave birth (ἔτεκεν) to the bull-horned god” (94–100).
What is striking is that this first account of the thigh birth comes at the

75
For this basic plot structure, see Winkler (1985) 33–36.
86 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

very moment in the play where doubts about the maternity of Dionysus
are sown by the chorus’s references to other mothers (Cybele, Rhea), both
of them divine mothers who might be more credible as a mother for the
god. Meanwhile, Semele, whom Dionysus himself claims as his mother,
is also mentioned in the parodos, framed by the great mother Cybele on
one side and mother Rhea on the other, but she is strikingly downplayed.
The chorus must surely be referring to Semele when it sings, in its first
account of the thigh birth, “at the hurtling of Zeus’s thunderbolt, his
mother gave birth to him as a cast-off of her womb and she left behind
her life at the lightning stroke” (90–93). Certainly neither divine mother
could be said to die in childbirth; but Semele is not named here. When
she is named, at the beginning of the second strophe, it is merely as the
nursling of Thebes (105), not as the nurturing mother of Dionysus.76
The chorus returns to this hint of an alternative mother for Dionysus
later in the play, in the fourth stasimon, when it condemns any mor-
tal who becomes violent “regarding you, Bacchus, and the mystic rites
of your mother” (περὶ <σέ>, Βάκχι’, ὄργιά τε σᾶς ματρός, 998).77 “Your
mother” has generally been taken to refer to the cult Semele shared with
her divine son in Thebes, Athens, and elsewhere.78 I wonder, however,
whether the word orgia is entirely appropriate to the cult practices in
honor of Semele, and whether at least the phrase ὄργια ματρός here
might not recall the phrase used earlier of the great mother (τά τε
ματρὸς μεγάλας ὄργια, 78–79), for whom orgia are quite expected.79
I think this phrase from the fourth stasimon at the very least reinvokes
the confusion about who is the mother most closely associated with the
cult and myth of Dionysus.
There are several likely reasons for this proliferation of possible moth-
ers for Dionysus in the play. First, as we have seen already, there was con-
fusion surrounding the genealogy of Dionysus in the classical period.
The oldest extant genealogy, known to Homer and Hesiod, made him

76
Cf. already Verrall (1910) 41. In the phrase Σεμέλας τροφοὶ Θῆβαι (105–6), Σεμέλας is
clearly an objective genitive, the object of Thebes’s nurturing. But the juxtaposition of
Σεμέλας and τροφοί could perhaps hint at Semele herself as a nurse of Dionysus rather
than as his mother. Cf. the demotion of Thyone (Panyassis fr. 8 Bernabé) and probably
Hipta (Orph. fr. 329 [I–II] Bernabé) from mother of Dionysus to nurse. For a similar
demotion of Leto, see Hdt. 2.155–56 and Mikalson (2003) 181.
77
I follow the minimally supplemented text of Diggle (1981–94).
78
See e.g., Seaford (1996) 150, 229.
79
On the term orgia in a Dionysiac context, see Versnel (1990) 134–37. The cult of Semele
at Thebes appears in fact to have been rather minor: see Schachter (1981–94) 1.187–88,
191; 3.30. But see Casadio (1991) 364–67.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 87

the son of Zeus and Semele. The other main genealogy, which is found
especially in Orphic sources and seems to have appeared first dur-
ing the late sixth or early fifth century, made him the son of Zeus and
Persephone.80 In addition to these two dominant genealogies, there
were others that identified Dionysus’s mother as one of the other “great
goddesses.” This is perhaps the context in which to understand the claim
of Praxilla of Sicyon, writing in the fifth century, that Aphrodite was the
mother of Dionysus, or the claim of one of Euripides’ characters in the
fragmentary Antigone that the god’s mother was Dione.81 There are also
hints of Phrygo-Lydian genealogies that would have made him the son
of Cybele or the more obscure Hepat.82 These variant traditions led, as
we have seen already, to an “analysis” of Dionysus into multiple figures:
Herodotus and Philochorus, for instance, separated a mortal Dionysus
from the divine Dionysus. But the different genealogies stimulated uni-
tarian approaches to the god as well. Some Greeks insisted that it was
the same Dionysus who was born first from Persephone and then, after
being dismembered by the Titans, from Semele.83
And some may have applied this unitarian approach to the figure of
Dionysus’s mother and insisted that Semele and Persephone were effec-
tively the same goddess. The revival of the cult of the Mother of the Gods
at the end of the sixth century led to her assumption of a broader mater-
nal personality as the “Mother” that could subsume all other mother
goddesses, including Gaea, Aphrodite, Meter, Demeter, Persephone,
and Cybele.84 A line from an Orphic hymn in existence already in the
fifth century addresses her as “Demeter Rhea Ge Meter and Hestia Deio”
(Orph. fr. 398 Bernabé), and the author of the Derveni Papyrus, who pre-
serves the line, adds Hera to this list of equivalent goddesses (P. Derveni
col. XXII.7). Even if neither Cybele nor Rhea nor the Mother of the
Gods had ever been named as the actual mother of Dionysus before the
composition of the Bacchae, it would still probably have struck the aver-
age listener as perfectly natural to describe the great mother as a sort of
“mother” of Dionysus, for she was, after all, the mother of all.85

80
See n. 41.
81
See n. 24.
82
See n. 103.
83
Rudhardt (2002) 493–95; Graf and Johnston (2007) 73–80.
84
See Roller (1996) 307–13; Versnel (1990) 108. As a result of her partial identification
with Gaea, the Mother of the Gods became regarded by some as the mother of human-
kind as well.
85
A maternal role for Cybele may have been suggested also by the role played by Rhea-
Cybele in the Orphic version of the Dionysus myth, where it falls to her to gather the
88 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Second, the figure of Cybele, the great mother, would have resonated
with specific elements of the play’s plot. The numerous mentions of the
great mother in the prologue and parodos would have reminded some
Athenians of their recent adoption of the “foreign” cult of Cybele, an
event that puts Pentheus’s resistance to Dionysus in the Bacchae into his-
torical perspective and indeed makes it appear, from this perspective, not
altogether unreasonable.86 And references to this lion-borne “mountain
mother” of Phrygia also prepares the audience for the wild and destruc-
tive behavior of Theban mothers later in the play, especially Agave, who
thinks, until the very end, that the prey she has killed is not her own son
but rather a lion (1142, 1196, 1215, 1278, 1283; cf. 990).87
Third, and most important for our purposes, this proliferation of
mothers throws into doubt Dionysus’s primary claim to membership in
the Theban royal family: that he is the son not just of any mother but
of the mortal Theban princess, Semele. These references are under-
standable in the mouth of the Lydian chorus: it is theologically more
committed to Dionysus’s being the son of Zeus; either it is less interested
in the identity of his mother (especially a Theban mother) or it takes a
broader, more cosmopolitan view of the one mother goddess that tran-
scends all other mothers, especially given that the all-subsuming Mother
of the Gods hails from its own Phrygo-Lydian homeland.
The chorus’s brief account of the thigh birth in the middle of the
parodos – the first reference to it in the play – can be understood not
only as evidence of the greater importance the Lydian chorus places on
Dionysus’s divine paternity but also as a kind of counterbalance to the
confusion about Dionysus’s mother: the god’s maternity may be in doubt,
but his paternity is not. The element of a child’s parentage that is nor-
mally in doubt, if any part is, is the identity of his father, and many cul-
tures have developed rituals to help fathers exorcise doubts about their
paternity, including the ritual known to anthropologists as the couvade,
in which a father fends off the paternal claims of other men by a stylized
performance of childbirth from his own body. Here in the Bacchae we

parts of the dismembered Dionysus prior to his rebirth: cf. Graf and Johnston (2007)
75–76. Cf. also Pind. fr. 70b SnM, from a dithyramb, which shows the god Dionysus
in the company of the great mother (8–10), but seems also to refer to his birth from
Semele (30–32). In that case, we see Dionysus associated with the great mother theolog-
ically, with Semele mythically.
86
See esp. Versnel (1990) 96–103, 156–205.
87
The mountain mother is shown in Athenian iconography, already in the late sixth cen-
tury, either sitting next to a lion or holding a lion in her lap. See Roller (1996) 306. On
Agave the lion-killer, see Gould (2001) 236–38.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 89

have a mythical version of the couvade, with Zeus in the role of parturient
father. But what is in doubt in the parodos is the identity of Dionysus’s
mother, not his father. We might say, then, that Euripides has the Lydian
bacchantes present this first account of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh
of Zeus, consciously or not, as a hedge against the (in this unusual case)
instability of motherhood.

Bacchae 519–36: Paternal Uncertainty

The fourth reference to the myth of the thigh birth also comes in the
mouth of the chorus. In the second stasimon, the chorus sings, “For you
[the river Dirce] once took the infant of Zeus in your waters, when Zeus,
the birth-giver (ὁ τεκών), seized it from the immortal fire into his thigh,
and cried out the following: Come, Dithyrambus, come into this male
womb of mine. I reveal this as the name to call you at Thebes, Bacchus”
(521–29). This reference to the myth, I argue, also comes as a response
to doubts about Dionysus’s parentage: but whereas the chorus’s first
reference to the myth comes in the context of uncertainty about the
identity of his mother, which the Lydian bacchantes exploit in order to
focus attention on the theologically more important fact of the divinity
of the god’s father, in this case the chorus mentions the thigh birth in
order to respond to doubts raised by Pentheus and the other Cadmeids
about the identity of Dionysus’s father, these of sociopolitical rather than
­theological import.
These doubts are raised for the first time just before the second stasi-
mon, during Pentheus’s initial interview with the god in disguise. When
Pentheus asks the conventional first question posed to a guest, “First, tell
me who you are by birth (ὅστις εἶ γένος)?” (460), Dionysus responds,
“You know by hearsay, I suppose, of flowery Tmolus . . . I am from there.
Lydia is my fatherland (πατρίς)” (462, 464). This is a strange response
to Pentheus’s question about his genos. Instead of providing the name of
his father, the stranger gives the name of his fatherland, Lydia, although
Pentheus surely suspects that the stranger, his father, and his fatherland
are all Lydian. But it is likely that Euripides also wants us to wonder
whether this vague genealogy applies to the god Dionysus as well as the
stranger: while in this first colloquy with Pentheus Euripides maintains
a distinction between the Lydian stranger, Dionysus’s alter ego, and
the god Dionysus himself, the two are, played as they are by the same
actor, in a sense one and the same. That Pentheus’s questions about the
­family origin of the stranger are really ultimately about that of Dionysus
90 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

himself is indeed made clear as Pentheus’s interview continues. When

the stranger tells Pentheus that “Dionysus the son of Zeus” sent him
from Lydia to Greece to introduce the god’s rites (466), Pentheus asks
“is there some Zeus there who fathers (τίκτει) new gods?” (467).88 The
questioning has turned to Dionysus’s genealogy after all. The question,
however innocent, emphasizes the alien status of the god who comes to
Greece from Lydia; the stranger responds by insisting, “no, but in fact
he is the one who yoked Semele in marriage here [in Thebes]” (468).
The stranger explicitly invokes the language of marriage, in contrast to
the more temporary sexual union claimed by the sisters of Semele. The
Lydian stranger and the Lydian chorus understand what Pentheus does
not: the introduction of Dionysus to Thebes is really a return of the god
to his place of birth.
A Lydian paternity for Dionysus continues to linger in the background
during the second stasimon, which comes just after this dialogue, where
the chorus refers to the Macedonian river Lydias, one of the haunts
of the god, as a “wealth-giving father” (ὀλβοδόταν πατέρ’, 571–72).89
There has been some controversy about whether the river Lydias is even
appropriate in this geographical context, and some have suggested that
the Apidanus, mentioned in the same context in the earlier Hecuba
(451–54), would be more appropriate.90 But it is easier to suppose
that Euripides has deliberately introduced the unexpected Lydias as a
riparian “father” precisely because he wants to reinvoke the tension in
Dionysus’s paternity,91 asking the audience to wonder if he is perhaps
more Lydian than Theban after all.
The doubts that Pentheus raises in his interview with Dionysus in
disguise as a Lydian stranger reflect, consciously or not, his material
­interests: to keep this foreign god out of the city and to keep the bastard
son of Semele, his cousin, out of the family. There is no reason to deny
that the former is the primary focus of the play; but this does not mean

88
Eumel. fr. 18 Bernabé had apparently presented Zeus himself as having been born in
Lydia. In fifth-century poetry, τίκτω was used mostly of the female role, in prose, almost
exclusively of the female role. See further discussion in Appendix II. We are probably
meant to understand Pentheus here to be using τίκτω in the archaic way to refer to
the father’s role, but obviously there is also an ironic allusion to the story of the thigh
birth.
89
Because rivers inundate and fertilize the surrounding land, they were frequently desig-
nated patēr and played a broader kourotrophic role in the life of the young. See Burkert
(1985a) 174–75.
90
See Dodds (1960) 147; Seaford (1996) 194–95.
91
Cf. Verrall (1910) 157.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 91

that the god’s civic legitimacy at Thebes and within the royal family is not
an important secondary theme.
The resistance of the royal family to Dionysus’s recognition as a legit-
imate son of Semele turns largely on social defects in the child’s birth.
The family’s primary objection is that Semele did not have a legitimate
husband: even if one is willing to assume that Semele’s child survived the
thunderbolt, she was not “yoked” to a Theban man in marriage. The sis-
ters of Semele make this point when they allege that Semele was ­“bedded
(νυμφευθεῖσαν) by some mortal man” but “falsely claimed to have mar-
ried [Zeus] (γάμους ἐψεύσατο)” (28, 31). They effect a double contrast
here: between Semele’s real human ravisher and her fantasy divine rav-
isher, and between a casual sexual encounter (νυμφεύομαι) and a more
socially recognized union (γάμος).92 It bears emphasizing that Dionysus
is recognized as the son of Zeus by no one in the play except Dionysus
himself (1, 27, 42, 243, 466, 581, 859, 1341–42, 1349) and his Lydian
bacchantes (417, 522, 550, 603; cf. 94–95). No other characters in the
play acknowledge him as the son of Zeus except in decidedly cultic for-
mulations: Tiresias, the ritual expert, acknowledges that “we must serve
Bacchus the son of Zeus” (366), and the Theban women, now under
the ecstatic influence of the god, call upon “Iacchus . . . the son of Zeus,
Bromius” (725–26). These other characters apply the title “son of Zeus”
to the cultic personalities of Bacchus, Iacchus, and Bromius, but not,
significantly, to the mythical figure of Dionysus the son of Semele. Only
Cadmus makes the connection between the son of Semele and the
son of Zeus (333–36), but this claim is, as we have seen, opportunistic
and cynical.
The sisters also have another objection in their arsenal. They could
claim that even if Zeus were the actual father of Semele’s child and even
if he had been joined to her in marriage, he would run afoul of another
basic requirement of classical marriage: local endogamy. Perhaps not
all cities went to the extreme that Athens did in the second half of the
fifth century in requiring both parents to be Athenian,93 but certainly it

92
Sometimes νυμφεύομαι does designate a formal “marriage” (γάμος): see, e.g., Eur. Alc.
316–17, Med. 1336–41. But there are also many passages in which it denotes something
less: see, e.g., Eur. Andr. 403 and Tro. 1139 (concubinage of war captive), Supp. 455 (droit
du seigneur), Ion 1371 (rape at the hands of a god). Clearly νυμφεύομαι here at Bacch. 28
cannot refer to a socially recognized marriage because the sisters do not even know the
identity of Semele’s “husband” (ἐκ θνητοῦ τινος).
93
On the restriction of citizenship in classical Greek poleis generally, see Arist. Pol.
1278a27–34.
92 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

would be going too far to claim a god as a legitimate husband: Zeus is the
most exogamous husband imaginable.
The Lydian chorus, in the second stasimon, comes to Dionysus’s res-
cue by amplifying the stranger’s claim to Pentheus that Zeus “yoked
Semele in marriage here” (468), at Thebes. But its strategy is to affirm
not the connection between the god Dionysus and the Theban princess
Semele (earlier, as we have seen, it throws this connection into doubt)
but that between the father Zeus and Thebes. The chorus thus offers
additional evidence for Dionysus’s legitimacy – evidence that the stranger
did not mention earlier to Pentheus – that places his birth, or at least key
elements of it, in Thebes (521–29, quoted previously). Tradition located
Zeus’s parturition – the emergence of the twice-born Dionysus from the
father god’s thigh – at Nysa, a mythical place, possibly near Egypt, far
from the watch of Hera. This, in Herodotus’s view, was how the mortal
son of Semele escaped notice that he was mortal: shortly after his birth
at Thebes, he was whisked off to Nysa and never seen again. But tradi-
tion had not settled on the place where the infant Dionysus was first sewn
into the thigh of his father. Euripides attributes to the chorus a twofold
­strategy. The first part is to deemphasize the central role played by Nysa in
Dionysus’s birth myth. Euripides does not ignore the importance of Nysa
altogether: Nysa is mentioned in the epode of this same stasimon, along
with Parnassus, Pieria, and the Macedonian rivers Axius and “father”
Lydias, as places sacred to Dionysus. But Nysa’s central role in Dionysus’s
birth is suppressed: Nysa is merely “beast-nourishing” and a place where
“you [Dionysus] lead your worshipers with the thyrsus” (556–58).
The second part of the strategy is to suggest that important events
surrounding the birth of the god did in fact take place at Thebes, even
if the father was not a Theban and not formally married to the Theban
princess. This is precisely the strategy one finds in Athenian forensic
speeches designed to respond to challenges to a man’s status as an
Athenian citizen. The orators attempt to counter such allegations by
showing evidence that one’s father had performed certain rituals, espe-
cially at ceremonies sponsored by his phratry and deme, throughout
the young man’s life.94 In the Bacchae, the chorus demonstrates that the
child is a Theban because the father, Zeus, formally named the child
(Dithyrambus) at Thebes, a perinatal ritual by which the Greek father
claimed a child as his own.95 This ordinary ritual claim to paternity is

94
See Scafuro (1994).
95
On the Greek naming ritual, see Garland (1990) 94–95.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 93

supplemented in this exceptional case by the commencement of Zeus’s

pregnancy, a literalized couvade, once again at Thebes.96
The chorus not only makes an argument to the recalcitrant Thebans
for why they should accept Dionysus as a native son engendered and
named in Thebes by his father Zeus but also goes further than anyone
else to disqualify Pentheus as a counterclaiming heir, also a rhetorical
strategy familiar from inheritance speeches delivered by the Attic ora-
tors. In the antistrophe that answers to the strophic account of Dionysus’s
being named and sewn into the thigh of the father at the Theban river
Dirce, the chorus emphasizes the irregularities of Pentheus’s birth:
Pentheus, offspring of a snake (ἐκφὺς δράκοντος), reveals his chthonic birth
(χθόνιον γένος), [Pentheus] whom chthonic Echion planted (ἐφύτευσε), a
wild-eyed monster, not a mortal man, but like a murderous giant who fights
the gods. (538–44)97

This invective on the chorus’s part disqualifies Pentheus on two grounds.

First, and most obvious, he is not even a human being, but a monster, like
a god-fighting giant. Second, the chorus effectively assimilates Pentheus
to Echion in suggesting that he too was born “from the earth,” not of
human parents joined in marriage. The chorus, in effect, invokes the
chthonic origins of the father Echion in order to disqualify Pentheus
on the same grounds. The effect is to suggest that Pentheus has no real
father, mortal or otherwise: Echion’s absence in this play is indeed strik-
ing. We are reminded once again of the darker side of autochthony as a
theory of descent.98

Bacchae 242–45, 286–97: Mother Hera and Citizen Dionysus

The other two references to the thigh birth in the Bacchae (the second
and the third) come between the parodos and first stasimon, during
Pentheus’s conversation with Cadmus and Tiresias. First Pentheus reports
that he heard from the Lydian “stranger” that Dionysus “was once stitched
into the thigh of Zeus” (243). Then, a little later, Tiresias responds to
Pentheus with an interpretation of the myth in more rational terms:
And you laugh at him because he was stitched in the thigh (μηρῷ) of Zeus?
I will explain to you how this may be understood. When Zeus seized him

96
Zeus also supervises the child’s ritual bath in the river Dirce, though this was not a ritual
normally performed by Greek fathers.
97
Cf. also 989–91, 995–96 = 1015–16.
98
See n. 71.
94 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

from the lightning fire and introduced the baby to Olympus as a god,99
Hera wished to expel him from heaven, but Zeus developed a counterstrat-
egy of the sort a god is capable. He broke off a part of the aithēr that sur-
rounds the earth and gave this as a hostage (ὅμηρον), removing Dionysus
from the hostility of Hera. But, in time, mortals said that he was stitched in
the thigh (μηρῷ) of Zeus; they changed the word, because a god had given
Hera, another god, a hostage (ὡμήρευσε) and thus they created the story.
(288–97)

We have seen that the Lydian chorus mentions the thigh birth in the
parodos in order to contrast the uncertainty of Dionysus’s maternal
descent with the certainty surrounding his – theologically more impor-
tant – descent from a divine father and again, in the second stasimon,
as evidence that Zeus performed at Thebes many of the actions a new
father is expected to perform to demonstrate his paternity. In this pas-
sage, Tiresias, a representative of contemporary practitioners of the new
sophistic methods of allegorical myth interpretation,100 argues that the
story of Zeus’s giving birth to Dionysus from his thigh (μηρός), a story
vouched for in the play only by the Lydian chorus and its Lydian leader,
is a garbled version of what actually happened, which was that Zeus gave
Hera a hostage (ὅμηρος) of aithēr in order to facilitate Dionysus’s entry
to Olympus as a god. His interpretation, which elides the thigh birth
altogether, paradoxically reinscribes, as we shall see, the same arguments
for the god’s civic legitimacy that are promoted by this very myth.
It is worth paying closer attention to the role of Hera in the account
of Tiresias and in the myth of Dionysus more generally. Hera had
been central to Dionysus’s acceptance as a god at least since the early
archaic period, especially in the Greek East. Her role is clearest in the
story, told already by Alcaeus, about how Dionysus was first admitted to
Olympus. The myth recounts how Hera, after giving birth to her son
Hephaestus, became disgusted by his disfigured form and cast him out
of Olympus. Hephaestus soon got his revenge by sending her, as a gift, a
throne booby-trapped with hidden bonds. Predictably, she took the bait
and became trapped. When Ares failed in his attempt forcibly to bring
Hephaestus back to release his mother, Dionysus came to her rescue:
he got Hephaestus drunk and easily brought him back to Olympus to

99
For a defense of the manuscripts’ reading θεόν (as a god), see Dodds (1960) 107;
Seaford (1996) 177.
100
Musso (1968); Roth (1984); Papadopoulou (2001) 26–30. On the contributions of the
Sophists to allegorical interpretation, see generally Richardson (1975); on the use of
etymology, see Baxter (1992) 124–39.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 95

release her. The result was that Dionysus, until then barred by Hera, was
admitted to the company of the gods on Olympus.101
There is reason to suspect that Hera, in agreeing to Dionysus’s entry
to Olympus, functions as a sort of adoptive mother. In the archaic Lesbos
of Alcaeus and Sappho, we encounter Dionysus as part of a trinity with
Zeus and Hera, which was worshiped throughout the island (Alc. fr.
129.1–9 PMG; Sapph. fr. 17 PMG). Scholars have suggested that Hera
functions here as a form of the great goddess, with Zeus as her ­paredros
and Dionysus a “divine child.”102 An Anatolian predecessor to this trin-
ity probably centered around the great goddess, originally Cybele or
Hepat and later Rhea-Demeter or Hera. In Orphic tradition, Hipta, a
version of the Anatolian great goddess Hepat, was the figure who first
received the newborn Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus, perhaps part of
Orphic tradition already in the fourth century b.c.e.,103 a role quite sim-
ilar to that played by Hera in Tiresias’s exegesis. Hera’s role as a divine
“mother” who has veto power over the sons of Zeus and mortal women
who would be counted among the Olympian gods is attested also in the
case of Heracles.104
Now there was another Dionysiac myth in which a child – this time
Dionysus’s mother Persephone – was saved when Zeus gave the great
mother a hostage, and it is possible that this story served as the inspi-
ration for Tiresias’s “hostage” etymology in the Bacchae. The tale, pre-
served by Arnobius, begins with Zeus’s rape of his mother, Ceres/Brimo,
in the form of a bull. In order to allay her anger, he gives her the testicles
of a ram, as though his own, as a “hostage” (pignoris) to ensure her kindly
treatment of the unborn Persephone.105 Persephone is born and the
cycle is repeated: Zeus mates now with Persephone, this time in the form
of a snake, which results in the birth of Dionysus. This story is structur-
ally similar to Tiresias’s version of the Dionysus myth: here Zeus propiti-
ates his mother with a hostage of testicles so that the child Persephone,
mother of Dionysus, can be saved; there Zeus propitiates his sister, the
mother of some of his children, with a hostage of aithēr so that a child,

101
Alc. fr. 349 PMG; Pind. fr. 283 SnM; Paus. 1.20.3; Hyg. Fab. 166. It has been sug-
gested that this was the subject of the myth in the fragmentary first Homeric hymn (to
Dionysus): see n. 20.
102
See, e.g., Privitera (1970) 34–35.
103
So West (1983) 96, 106–7.
104
See Diod. Sic. 4.39.2–4 with detailed discussion in Leitao (2007) 266–68. Cf. the story
told by Herodotus 4.180.5 about Zeus’s “adoption” of Athena, discussed in Chapter 5.
105
Arnob. Adv. nat. 5.21 = Orph. test. 589 (III) Bernabé. The connection was made first
by Gallistl (1981) 241.
96 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

this time Dionysus himself, can be saved. It is not certain that this myth
was in existence at the time of the Bacchae, but Zeus’s mating with his
mother was recounted already in the Orphic theogony quoted in the
Derveni Papyrus, and his mating with Persephone in the form of a snake
may have been as well.106
While the issue of how Dionysus came to be accepted as an Olympian
god was a preoccupation already in the archaic period, Euripides’
Tiresias goes a step further and presents this issue of divine legitimacy in
the language of civic legitimacy, especially in the terms of Pericles’ citi-
zenship law of 451 b.c.e. We may begin at lines 289–90 where Tiresias
says that “when . . . Zeus . . . introduced (ἀνήγαγεν) the baby to Olympus
as a god, Hera wished to expel (ἐκβαλεῖν) him.” We are presumably
meant to understand either that Tiresias believes that Dionysus’s god-
head is not fully established until he is accepted by Hera on Olympus
or that he is following a version of the story in which the son of Semele
was not born a god, but was later made a god by his father. As alien as
this may sound to us, we do well to recall the results of our close reading
of Herodotus 2.145–46, which suggest that some enlightened Greeks
of the classical period did deny that the son of Semele was a god. This
may be the context in which to understand the hypothesis for the play
written by Aristophanes of Byzantium, no uninformed reader, which
began “Dionysus, after he had been made a god (ἀποθεωθείς), . . . led his
mother’s sisters into madness and forced them to dismember Pentheus”
(Hypoth. Eur. Bacch.).
What I want to emphasize here is that Euripides describes this “intro-
duction” in terms very similar to a man’s introduction of a son to his
phratry or deme, an act that not infrequently met with opposition from
one or more fellow phrateres or demesmen. The word that Euripides uses
to describe Zeus’s attempt to introduce his son Dionysus to Olympus is
ἀνάγω, a word that is generic enough but nevertheless close to the
technical word for phratry or deme induction in fifth-century Athens,
which was εἰσάγω.107 Euripides may have altered the technical word

106
So West (1983) 96–97. Cf. Seleucus ap. Harpocration s.v. Homeridai (text printed at
FGrH 4 F20), who tells us that the Homeridae of Chios acquired their name in com-
memoration of an exchange of “hostages” between husbands and wives: the women
once got drunk at the festival of Dionysus and attacked their husbands; the violence
was brought to an end when the husbands and wives gave each other hostages (ὅμηρα),
and they call their children Homeridae in commemoration. Here too the giving of
hostages, again in a Dionysiac context, leads to the birth of children (the so-called
Homeridae).
107
See, e.g., Is. 2.14, 7.16, 12.3; Dem. 39.4, 29, 30; 43.11, 12; Ps.-Dem. 40.11.
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 97

εἰσάγω to ἀνάγω, if for no other reason, to reflect the spatial position

of Olympus vis-à-vis earth.108 Hera’s wish to “expel” the young Dionysus
is rendered in Tiresias’s account by the verb ἐκβάλλω, whereas the nor-
mal Athenian expression to describe a phratry’s or deme’s rejection
of a candidate is ἐξελαύνω or ἀπελαύνω (expel) or, more technically,
ἀποψηφίζομαι (vote out).109 While ἐκβάλλω is much more generic than
these technical words, it is a common term at Athens to describe the
process of stripping a citizen of his civic rights and banishing him.110
And it is also the normal word to describe the exposure of children,111
in which case Hera would be playing the role of the new father, who
decides whether to reject the child of the “maternal,” post-partum Zeus.
If any of these hints of Athenian phratry and deme procedures for eval-
uating a son’s claim to citizenship are in fact present in this passage,
then the collocation θεᾷ θεός at the end of line 296, if it refers to Zeus’s
(θεός) providing a hostage to Hera (θεᾷ),112 would certainly call to mind
Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 b.c.e., which held that only a union of
astē and astos could produce a citizen, a requirement that was frequently
the basis upon which demesmen rejected a man’s request that his son
be inducted into the deme.
Pericles’ citizenship law seems to be hinted at also in a local Naxian
version of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus. In this version,
reported by Diodorus Siculus, Zeus “struck Semele with a thunder-
bolt before she gave birth in order that he [Dionysus] be born at the
beginning not from a mortal woman but from two immortals (ἐκ δυεῖν
ἀθανάτων) and thus be immortal right from birth” (5.52.2). The reason
Diodorus gives for Zeus’s striking Semele with a thunderbolt – to ensure
that both of Dionysus’s parents be gods – is mentioned in no other
source and seems, furthermore, to have little to do with Naxos.113 What
is more, Diodorus’s expression ἐκ δυεῖν ἀθανάτων strongly resembles

108
The word ἀνάγω is used also of Ganymede’s “introduction” to Olympus as a daimōn in
Theogn. 1347–48, a perfect parallel for the situation of a mortal brought to Olympus
by Zeus and made into a god.
109
See Dem. 57.2, 58, an appeal of a deme’s rejection of a candidate on the ground that
his mother was not a citizen.
110
E.g., Dem. 21.87, 115.
111
See, e.g., Eur. Ion 964.
112
We may also understand this line to mean that Dionysus, a god, “served as a hostage” to
Hera, a goddess. On the difficulty of interpreting ὡμήρευσε in this passage, see Dodds
(1960) 108.
113
For the connection between being struck by lightning and immortality, see Casadio
(1991) 364.
98 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the language of Pericles’ citizenship law, which required that all citizens
be descendants ἐκ δυεῖν Ἀθηναίων, “from Athenians on both sides.”114
It is indeed not altogether unreasonable to wonder whether this het-
erodox account of Zeus’s motivation for the thigh birth is ultimately of
Athenian provenance.115
It might strike us as strange that the Greeks would discuss the legiti-
macy of a god in terms of the requirements for citizenship, but there is
very clear evidence of this in the case of Heracles in Aristophanes’ Birds,
produced less than a decade before Euripides’ Bacchae. When Heracles
considers Peisetaerus’s proposal that the gods cede Basilinna to the birds
in exchange for peace, Poseidon says that this will ruin Heracles most of
all, for “all that Zeus leaves behind when he dies will be your [Heracles’]
property” (1644–45). But Peisetaerus corrects him: “You will not inherit
the property of your father according to the laws, for you are a bastard
and not a legitimate child” (1649–50). When Heracles protests being
called a bastard, Peisetaerus observes, “by Zeus, you were born of a for-
eign woman. How do you think that Athena, his daughter, could be
recognized as an heiress (ἐπίκληρον), if she had legitimate brothers?”
(1651–54). He then asks a still incredulous Heracles, “Did your father
enroll you in his phratry (εἰσήγαγ’ ἐς τοὺς φράτερας)?” (1668–69), to
which Heracles replies, “No, he did not enroll me, and I’ve wondered
about this for a long time” (1670). This passage clearly invokes the pro-
cess whereby a young man became a citizen and the law of Pericles that
prohibited boys who had a mother or father who was not a citizen from
exercising the privilege.
If, for Heracles, Alcmena is the “foreign” – that is, the mortal – woman
who stands in the way of his being accepted into the divine family of Zeus
and Hera, in the case of Dionysus it is the mortal Semele who, from the
perspective of Pericles’ citizenship law, would make it difficult for him to
be accepted by Hera as a god and as a member of the divine family. The
phrase θεᾷ θεός, with which Tiresias concludes his exegesis, is the key to
Dionysus’s fortunes. For the old-new god of wine, theological legitimacy
and civic legitimacy have become one and the same.

114
This phrasing of Pericles’ law is from Plut. Per. 37.3; the same phrase is placed by
Diogenes Laertius (2.31) into the mouth of Socrates, clearly a reference to the
Periclean law. Cf. Aristotle’s wording ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἀστοῖν at Ath. pol. 26.3, ἐξ ἀμφοῖν
ἀστῶν at Pol. 1278a34; in Dem. 57.46 the phrase is ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων ἀστῶν.
115
Could the ultimate source be Aristotle’s Constitution of the Naxians? Cf. Jacoby ad FGrH
501 F 5, who argues that Diodorus’s immediate source here is “a book ‘On Islands’
rather than one about Naxos.”
 The Thigh Birth of Dionysus 99

Origin of a Myth
While Tiresias is clearly attempting to explain away the thigh birth of
Dionysus by means of a kind of rationalizing allegoresis, he may have
reinscribed one of the original functions that the myth performed when
it arrived crashing on the shores of the Greek world: to establish the
legitimacy of this divine son of Zeus. For the myth appears in Greek liter-
ature and art at just the point when Dionysus’s parentage was becoming
a problem for rationalist theologians. It was at this time that there arose
three new myths that solved this problem in complementary ways: one
made his mother Semele into a goddess, a second identified his mother
as the goddess Persephone, and a third dispensed with the problem of
motherhood altogether and showed the god born from the body of his
father. The old theory that the myth of the thigh birth reflects some kind
of prehistoric adoption ritual is perhaps not far off the mark after all,116
only I have attempted to show that the myth is of much more recent vin-
tage and arose to address the theological and sociopolitical concerns of
historical Greeks of the classical period.

116
See n. 1.
 4

From Myth to Metaphor

Intellectual and Poetic Generation in
the Age of the Sophists

Myth has been central to the developments we have described to this

point. We have taken notice of the role of analogical thinking in the
deployment of these myths: the Dionysus birth myth, for example, pro-
vided a model well adapted to debates over the definition of ­citizenship.
But analogy is not yet metaphor. In this chapter we turn to male preg-
nancy as a metaphor. We encounter the metaphor first during the early
years of the Archidamian War (431–421 b.c.e.), when Athenian tragic
and comic writers began to characterize a man’s efforts to formulate
laws, write poems, and develop new arguments as a form of “giving
birth.” During this same period, some Sophists developed a variation of
the metaphor in which teachers “impregnated” their students with virtue
or knowledge. It was especially this sophistic version that set the stage for
philosophy’s inspired appropriation of the male pregnancy metaphor in
the early fourth century, which we discuss in Chapters 6 and 7.

A New Metaphor
The male pregnancy metaphor appears never to have been employed
on Greek soil before the 420s.1 Pregnancy and childbirth had previously
been employed as metaphors for things other than intellectual and
poetic creation: Theognis, in the sixth century, had described the city of
Megara as “pregnant” (κύει, 39, 1081) with a savior-statesman who might
restore civic order, perhaps an extension of the widespread notion of
the earth herself giving birth to humans,2 and poets as early as the sixth
1
Vancamp (1992) 118; cf. Sansone (1975), an exhaustive book-length survey of numer-
ous metaphors for intellectual activity in Aeschylus, but not this one.
2
Earth giving birth: e.g., Hom. Il. 2.548; see generally Rosivach (1987); Shapiro (1998).
Theognis is echoed in Aristoph. Ran. 1423. Cf. Paul Ep. Rom. 8.22–23.

100
 From Myth to Metaphor 101

century had used the language of parturition to describe one situation,

quality, or emotion as “giving birth” to another.3 But until the 420s, no
author had made a man the subject of the verbs “to be pregnant” (κυέω)
or “to give birth” (τίκτω) used in a metaphorical sense, at least not in the
texts that survive.4 And what we find in the 420s is not one or two tenta-
tive ventures into new metaphorical terrain, but seven passages from six
different surviving plays, which suggests the veritable explosion of a new
metaphor. Here are the seven passages in roughly chronological order:
1. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus 865–70 (430–425 b.c.e.?).5 The “laws”
(νόμοι) governing the world in which we live, the chorus sings, “are
issued from on high, the children created in the heavenly aithēr
(οὐρανίᾳ ’ν αἰθέρι τεκνωθέντες), of which Olympus alone is father;
no mortal nature of men (ἀνέρων) gave birth (ἔτικτεν) to them.”
2. Euripides’ Heraclidae 993–96 (430–426 b.c.e.?). Eurystheus
acknowledges “I was the contriver (σοφιστής) of many sorrows
and, constantly taking counsel with night, gave birth to many
­[stratagems] (πόλλ’ ἔτικτον) to drive out and kill my enemies
[sc. the Heraclidae].”
3. Euripides’ Andromache 476–77 (427–425 b.c.e.?). The chorus, wor-
ried at the prospect of two women, one a wedded wife, the other
a concubine, attempting to live in the same household, compares

3
Solon 6.3 West; Theogn. 153, 392; Aesch. Supp. 769–70, Ag. 758–60, 763–71; cf. Hdt.
7.10ζ; see discussion of these and other examples in Dawe (1982) 182–83. This meta-
phorical use may been inspired by the Hesiodic tradition of genealogical cosmogony,
according to which, for example, Strife gives birth to Infatuation as well as Toil, Pains,
Murders, and Quarrels (Th. 225–32) and Night gives birth to Death, Sleep, and Dreams
(Th. 212).
4
There is one example in which the mind is said to be “in labor” that is earlier than the
420s: Aesch. Choeph. 211 (Electra); cf. also Eur. Hipp. 258–59 (Nurse). But both passages
describe the thought of women, rather than men. Eur. fr. 62a.12 TGF (Deiphobus),
which does describe a man’s thoughts, is later (415 b.c.e.). Cf. Hom. Il. 11.269–72, a
simile in which the pain a man experiences from a battle wound is compared to the pain
experienced by a woman in labor; on this simile, see Chapter 1, n. 36.
5
For the approximate dating for the plays from which these seven passages come, I
refer the reader to the following bibliography for each play. Oedipus Tyrannus: Pickard-
Cambridge (1970); cf. Dawe (1982) 245; Lloyd-Jones (1994) 9. Heraclidae: Webster
(1967) 101. Andromache: Webster (1967) 118; Stevens (1971) 19. Suppliant Women:
Webster (1967) 116–17, 124; Stevens (1971) 19. Pytine: Luppe (2000). Clouds: We face
two vexing issues here: the date of the revised version of the Clouds, which is the version
that survives; and the question of which passages in the surviving version were pres-
ent already in the original version, performed in 423 b.c.e., and which belong to the
­revision. These related issues are admirably discussed in Dover (1968) lxxx–xcviii; Kopff
(1990); and Storey (1993).
102 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

it to an analogous situation: “When two craftsmen (ἐργάταιν) give

birth (τεκόντοιν) to a hymn, the Muses tend to promote strife.”
4. Euripides’ Suppliant Women 180–85 (428–422 b.c.e.?). Adrastus
admits that it is salutary for most people to experience the feelings
of other people, feelings often very different from their own, but
claims that this does not hold true for the poet: “Whenever the
composer of hymns gives birth (τίκτῃ) to songs, he must be in a
good mood to give birth (τίκτειν). If he does not feel this way, he
would not be able to give pleasure to others, because he is suffer-
ing in his own mind.”
5. Cratinus fr. 203 PCG (423 b.c.e.). “Cratinus,” a character in the
poet’s play Pytine, programmatically justifies his “wine-soaked”
comic poetics by saying “No one could ever give birth (τέκοι) to
anything clever (σοφόν) by drinking water.”
6. Aristophanes’ Clouds 137, 139 (423/418–415 b.c.e.). Strepsiades,
wishing to avoid paying his debts, goes to Socrates’ Thinkery in
order to learn some clever arguments. When he knocks on the
door, one of the students inside reproaches him: “You’ve caused
the miscarriage of an idea (φροντίδ’ ἐξήμβλωκας) that had only
just been discovered.” When Strepsiades asks the student to tell him
“what it was that was, as you say, ‘miscarried’ (τοὐξημβλωμένον),”
the latter replies that it is a ritual secret.
7. Aristophanes’ Clouds 530–31 (423/418–415 b.c.e.). In the para-
basis, the chorus, speaking as the poet, reminds the audience that
he did not serve as his own chorēgos for his first play, the Banqueters:
“I was a maiden, and I was not yet allowed to give birth (τεκεῖν)
[sc. and keep the child]. So I exposed it, and another girl picked it
up and raised it [sc. by serving as the chorēgos for the play].”
This metaphor not only made its debut in the 420s (as far as we can
tell from the texts that survive) but appears to have enjoyed its greatest
popularity in Athenian drama during that decade. Indeed, the metaphor
largely disappears from Attic tragedy and comedy in the last two decades
of the fifth century,6 though it is later picked up in other genres, nota-
bly philosophy. This naturally leads one to wonder what was going on in
6
An exception that proves the rule: Aristoph. Ran. 96, 1058–59 (405 b.c.e.). Cf. Eur. Herc.
765–67, but there it is not men who “gave birth to songs” (ἔτεκον ἀοιδάς), but “releases”
(μεταλλαγαί) from tears and sorrow that do so. The apparent popularity of the meta-
phor in Attic drama from the 420s cannot, I think, be accounted for by a disproportion-
ately large quantity of dramatic evidence surviving from this period in comparison to
other periods.
 From Myth to Metaphor 103

Athens during the 420s that made this such a robust metaphor. Did the
extravagant metaphor of a single poet catch on and become popular for
a few years? Or did the metaphor originate outside drama? It will not
be possible to answer these questions with any certainty. Our focus, in
any event, will be on the rhetorical contexts in which the metaphor was
deployed, especially to lay claim to authorship of poetry and ideas.
Before we begin to trace the deployment of this metaphor in Athenian
drama during the 420s, we may briefly consider why the story we are
about to tell has never been told. One reason, perhaps the primary rea-
son, is the scholarly debate surrounding one of our seven passages, the
first passage from the Clouds (no. 6), which has distracted scholars from
considering other uses of the metaphor during this same period and
indeed the larger intellectual context of this idea. Let us take a closer
look at the passage:
Student: God, you’re an idiot! Look how carelessly and violently you’ve
kicked the door! You’ve caused the miscarriage of an idea that had only just
been discovered.
Strepsiades: Well, excuuuse me. But you see I live out in the country. So
tell me what it was that was, as you say, “miscarried.”
Student: It cannot be revealed except to the students here. (135–40)

The debate over these lines has been limited almost entirely to a single
question: does this passage show that the historical Socrates practiced
the kind of intellectual midwifery that the Platonic Socrates is portrayed
as practicing much later in the Theaetetus? The assumption of genera-
tions of classicists was that Aristophanes in this passage from the Clouds
does preserve an authentic metaphor used by the historical Socrates.7
Unfortunately, this conclusion has tended to bring further discussion
of the metaphor to a crashing halt: the unusual metaphor is credited
solely to the imagination of Socrates, and there is felt to be no need to
seek any external influences on or historical context for the inspiration
of so exceptional a genius. Never mind that this conclusion ignores the
significant differences between the metaphor of the Clouds and that of
the Theaetetus,8 and that it ignores those other examples of the birth met-
aphor in the 420s, some earlier than the Clouds, which have little connec-
tion to the historical Socrates.

7
See, e.g., Tomin (1987); Sider (1991); Guidorizzi and Del Corno (1996) 209; and the
earlier bibliography cited in Burnyeat (1977) 14 n. 1.
8
It is not clear that Socrates even plays the role of a midwife in the Clouds passage, an issue
I discuss later in this chapter.
104 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

The consensus view eventually came under attack from two directions.
Kenneth Dover argued that if this was “a Socratic metaphor so important
and well known that one word in Nu. [Clouds] sufficed to make a humor-
ous allusion,” then how are we to explain that it “was wholly neglected by
Plato in his earlier representations of Socrates (including Apology) and
exploited, at a comparatively late date, in one dialogue [the Theaetetus]
alone”?9 Myles Burnyeat, meanwhile, based his critique on internal evi-
dence from the Theaetetus: Socrates there says that the reason the young
Theaetetus has never heard that Socrates practices the related arts of
intellectual midwifery and intellectual matchmaking is that Socrates has
kept it secret for fear of ridicule (149a7); this, Burnyeat argues, is a sig-
nal from Plato that he himself is inventing this image of Socrates as mid-
wife in the Theaetetus, probably written sometime after 369 b.c.e., which
means that Aristophanes in the Clouds cannot possibly be alluding to an
authentic Socratic metaphor.10
Dover and Burnyeat are probably correct to argue that the birth met-
aphor in the Clouds is not one that was used by the historical Socrates;
I argue later in this chapter that Aristophanes is alluding to a pedagog-
ical metaphor used by one or more of the Sophists and, in Chapters 6
and 7, that Plato’s own “Socratic” use of the male birth metaphor is in
fact intended as a critique of the version used by the Sophists. But while
I think the conclusion of Dover and Burnyeat is correct, I believe that
their approach to the issue is negative and cramped. Burnyeat, for his
part, is overly literal in his reading of Plato: he does not consider, for
example, the possibility that the Platonic Socrates of the Theaetetus could
be alluding to Aristophanes’ parody of this metaphor in the Clouds and
what he sees as the comic poet’s malicious and mistaken attribution of it
to him.11 This is an issue to which we return in Chapter 7. And, like pre-
vious scholars, neither Dover nor Burnyeat evinces much interest in the
cultural background to the metaphor of giving birth to thought, poetry,
and virtue.12 So much ink has been spilled over the question of whether

9
Dover (1968) xlii–xliii; cf. Tarrant (1988) 121. The notion of intellectual creation as
childbirth may in fact be alluded to elsewhere in the play: see Sider (1991) 334–36;
Guidorizzi and Del Corno (1996) 209; pace Dover and Tarrant.
10
Burnyeat (1977) 7 and 14 n. 4.
11
Cf. Tomin (1987) 98 who makes a connection between the secrecy Socrates claims in
the Theaetetus to have maintained regarding his work as an intellectual midwife and the
ritual secrecy invoked by Socrates’ student in Clouds (140) when he refuses, initially, to
reveal the nature of the “miscarriage.”
12
Burnyeat (1977) 14 n. 4 cites a number of parallels, none earlier than the Clouds; sur-
prisingly, he does not cite the other example from the Clouds itself (530–31, our passage
 From Myth to Metaphor 105

Clouds 135–40 refers to an authentic Socratic metaphor that a fascinat-

ing development within the history of Greek ideas has been missed.
It is the goal of this chapter to tell that story. We begin with the use
of the birth metaphor to describe the production of thought, which was
probably the earliest of the male birth metaphors; we then turn to two
variations, use of the metaphor to describe the production of poetry and
a pedagogical form of the metaphor that imagined a teacher “begetting”
or “giving birth” to knowledge or virtue in the soul of the pupil; and,
with the pedagogical form of the metaphor, we return once again to the
“miscarriage” of the Clouds.

Giving Birth to Thought I: Cosmogony

and Allegoresis
It is with myth, once again, that we begin our account of the development
of the male pregnancy metaphor in the last third of the fifth ­century. For
it appears to have been a new motif in Greek cosmogonic myth and some
allegorical interpretations of older cosmogonic myths that played the
most influential role in the development of the earliest form of the met-
aphor: pregnancy and parturition as metaphors for the generation and
dissemination of thought.

Cosmogonic Creation through Thought

This development seems to begin in the sixth century, when there appears
for the first time in Greek cosmogony not only a male divine creator fig-
ure, a phenomenon we took notice of in Chapter 2, but one who some-
times creates by means of thought. Egypt seems to be the immediate
source of this idea. According to the cosmogony associated with the cult of
Ptah at Memphis, “the whole divine order came into being from what his
heart thought and tongue commanded.”13 This myth had probably been
in existence for some time, but perhaps became influential only with its
codification in the so-called Monument of Memphitic Theology, which
was erected at the very end of the eighth century.14 Greek mercenaries

no. 7). Tarrant (1988) 120 suggests that the metaphor may have originated as a pre-
Socratic biological metaphor that Aristophanes has distorted for the purposes of parody,
but he provides no specific evidence for this hypothesis.
13
Translation in Pritchard (1955) 4–5. For discussion, see Bickel (1994) 106–7, 144–45.
14
Burkert (2004) 93. The Hebrew creator god creates in part through speech, or naming,
but this is not quite the intellectual creation that we see in the Egyptian cosmogonies.
106 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

and traders could have been exposed to these Egyptian mythical motifs
already in the second half of the seventh century, the period in which
King Psammetichus reigned and the trading settlement of Naucratis was
founded, but Greek-Egyptian contacts were even closer in the middle of
the sixth century, during the reign of King Amasis,15 not long before the
advent of the first examples of intellectual cosmogony on Greek soil.
The motif of creation through thought appears first in Greece, as
far as we can tell, in a mythical cosmogony attributed to Orpheus, the
so-called Derveni theogony, usually dated to about 500 b.c.e.16 In that
poem, the universe appears to have been created initially in the way that
Hesiod describes, through sexual and asexual reproduction, but after
Zeus swallows a god identified only as the “firstborn,” he re-creates the
entire universe from his own body, and the poet characterizes this activ-
ity by using a form of the verb μήδομαι, which in this context must mean
“to contrive or think into existence.” So, for example, “he [thought into
existence (μήσατο)] Gaea and broad Uranus [above], and thought into
existence (μήσατο) the great strength of broadly flowing Ocean” (Orph.
fr. 16 Bernabé). And once he has re-created the moon and probably also
the other heavenly bodies (fr. 17), the re-creation of the world is presum-
ably complete, for the poet tells us, “but when the [mind (φρήν)]17 of
Zeus had thought into existence (μή]σατ[ο) all these works, he wished
to be mixed in love with his own mother” (fr. 18).
We see a similar usage, probably slightly later, in Parmenides’ cosmog-
ony from the “Way of Opinion.”18 Parmenides starts his cosmogony with
three divine entities, which he identifies as fire, night or earth, and, in

Cf. also the cosmogony embraced at Heliopolis, in connection with the cult of Atum-Re:
there the primordial creator god Atum, son of Ptah, creates from his own seed, presum-
ably through masturbation; the god apparently said, upon creating the next generation
of gods, “I am yesterday, while I know tomorrow,” implying the future state of the world is
the creation of his provident knowledge. See Pritchard (1955) 4; Bickel (1994) 72–75.
In the Derveni theogony, Zeus appears to have begun the process of recreating the uni-
verse following his ingestion of the “firstborn” by (re)creating Aphrodite, possibly also
Peitho and Harmonia, perhaps “by means of his own semen (θόρνῃ)” (P. Derveni col.
XXI.1), the same means employed by Pherecydes’ Chronus and by Egyptian Atum to
create the second generation of gods in those cosmogonies. For the text and its inter-
pretation, see the previous discussion in Chapter 2 with n. 102.
15
Burkert (2004) 71–72; cf. Burkert (1992) 14.
16
On the date of the poem commented upon in the Derveni Papyrus, see, e.g., West
(1983) 81–82, 108; Brisson (2003) 19 n. 2.
17
For Tsantsanoglou’s supplement φρήν (mind), see Bernabé (2004) 32 ad fr. 18.1 for
parallels and bibliography.
18
On the seriousness of Parmenides’ cosmogony in the Way of Opinion, see Graham
(2006) 169–82.
 From Myth to Metaphor 107

the middle, the goddess who governs all things (DK 28 B12). This god-
dess, probably Aphrodite,19 performs the first act of creation: “[She]
thought into existence (μητίσατο) Eros first of all the gods” (B13).
Parmenides seems to be influenced by the same Egyptian mythic pat-
tern of intellectual creation as the author of the Orphic theogony, quite
possibly encountering it in the Orphic poem itself.20 What is different is
that Parmenides has presented a goddess as the original intellectual cre-
ator, although it is probably Eros who will be responsible for the more
mechanical mixing of fire and night or earth that will lead to the crea-
tion of the physical world in which we live.21
The Nous of Anaxagoras, which made its debut a few decades later, is a
more abstract version of this new mythical motif of creation by thought,
and it seems to have played the decisive role in the transition from myth
to metaphor.22 Although the role of Nous in Anaxagoras’s own cosmog-
ony was actually rather limited, as we observed in Chapter 2, its recep-
tion in the second half of the fifth century, no doubt influenced by
Diogenes of Apollonia’s more teleological concept of noēsis, suggests that
many Greeks understood Anaxagoras’s Nous to be analogous to the new
thinking creators of myth: not only was Zeus himself frequently under-
stood as a manifestation of this new abstract Nous,23 but myths associated
with Zeus came to be explained as reflecting the operation of Nous in
the world.
We return in a moment to the significant role played by Anaxagoras’s
conception of Nous in fifth-century allegoresis, but it will be helpful first
to address two possible objections to our reading of the Orphic theogony
and of Parmenides. First, it may be objected that “think into existence”
is an overtranslation of μήδομαι. It is true that Homer uses the word in

19
So Plut. Mor. 756f. For other possibilities, see Guthrie (1962–81) 2.61–64; Dover
(1980) 91.
20
So Burkert (2004) 95.
21
Egyptian cosmogonic myth, in some versions, features the same two stages: see n. 14;
Bickel (1994) 145 and n. 83. It is interesting that Empedocles, who, like Parmenides,
was from western Greece and indeed presents a rather Eleatic cosmogony, also gives
Aphrodite (personification of the more abstract Empedoclean principle of φιλότης) the
largest role as craftsman or creator of the universe, though he describes her as creating
not through thought but through τέχνη. See, e.g., DK 31 B71, 73, 75, 86, 87, 95.
22
Xenophanes may have anticipated Anaxagoras in this regard: in DK 21 B25, for example,
he describes “the god” in these terms: “But far from toil he brings everything to fulfill-
ment by the thinking of his mind (νόου φρενί).” But we have few details of Xenophanes’
cosmogony, so we do not know if the φρήν of god was involved in creating the world or
just in governing it.
23
Eur. Tro. 886; P. Derveni col. XVI.9–15.
108 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the more limited sense “devise, contrive,” to describe, for example, plans
“devised” by Zeus. But there is a difference between Homer’s μήδομαι,
which describes Zeus’s management of the Trojan War in accordance
with fate, and the Orphic poet’s μήδομαι and Parmenides’ μητίομαι,
which come in explicitly cosmogonic contexts.24 That we are dealing with
something quite different from the plotting of Zeus in the Iliad becomes
abundantly clear by the time we get to Anaxagoras, whose cosmogony
begins when Nous, or “Mind,” sets the undifferentiated matter of the
future cosmos into motion.
Second, it may be objected that while both the Orphic poet and
Parmenides describe cosmogonic creation as a kind of intellectual pro-
cess, in neither is this creation explicitly described as a birth. But I believe
that birth is implicit nonetheless. In the Orphic theogony, the cosmos,
which Zeus had swallowed along with the “firstborn,” can be ­re-created
only by emerging once again from Zeus’s own body. And indeed a frag-
ment from earlier in the poem refers to the gods “who were born from
(ἐξεγένοντο) Zeus the all-powerful king” (Orph. fr. 4 Bernabé), which
probably refers to all the generations of gods reborn from Zeus, not solely
to the younger generations born to him and his many wives according to
the traditional Hesiodic version.25 In Parmenides, if the creator goddess
who is subject of the verb μητίομαι does not perhaps produce Eros from
her own body, she is nevertheless described as the deity who “rules over
hateful birth and union, sending female to unite with male and again
conversely male with female” (DK 28 B12). These two examples show
what happened in Greece when a genealogical model of cosmogony, in
which the parts of the universe were literally “born” from one another,
was confronted with a new demiurgic model, in which the creator was a
craftsman or thinker or both: birth and fashioning, birth and thinking
became conflated.

Allegoresis: The Birth of Athena

It is the abstract, cosmogonic Nous of Anaxagoras, retrojected, through
allegoresis, back into traditional myth, that seems to provide the inspira-
tion for the next stage in the development of the metaphor of thought
as a form of birth. We have not quite arrived at metaphor itself, but the
24
Cf. Scalera McClintock (1988) 143.
25
So Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou (2006) 175. A similar phrase occurs at
Hom. Il. 5.637, but there refers to heroes who “were born” sons of Zeus but not literally
from the body of Zeus.
 From Myth to Metaphor 109

interpretation of myths about the births of the gods as allegorical rep-

resentations of the operation of Nous in the world, which we discuss
in this subsection and the next, popularized the connection between
thought (nous) and birth and thus helped lay the groundwork for the
metaphor proper.
Perhaps the clearest examples of this phenomenon, those particu-
larly relevant to the larger theme of male pregnancy, are the allegorical
interpretations of the myth of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus that
we begin to see in the late fifth century. “The Anaxagoreans,” George
Syncellus, a Byzantine writer, reports, “interpret the gods of myth, Zeus
as nous and Athena as technē. This explains the [Orphic] verse ‘when
the hands were perishing, skillful (πολύμητις) Athena wanders away’”
(Eclog. chron. pp. 174–75 Mosshammer = DK 61 A6).26 The Anaxagorean
in question has long been thought to be Metrodorus of Lampsacus,27
a fifth-century writer who was said to be a follower of Anaxagoras and
was known particularly for his allegorical explanations of the gods and
heroes of Homer.28 We know that one technique he used was to explain
heroes as parts of the cosmos and gods as parts or humors of the body
(DK 61 A3–4).29 If this is how he approached Zeus and Athena as well,
then he probably identified Zeus as the head, the location of nous, and
Athena, patron of handicrafts, as the hands, the instruments of technē
(skill).30 This is presumably why Syncellus, or his source, appended the
Orphic verse to his summary of Metrodorus: it made the connection
between Athena and “hands” explicit.31 But I think we can go further:
the fact that Syncellus mentions only these two gods suggests that the
relationship between them was central to this particular interpretation,
and it was almost certainly the well-known story of Athena’s birth from

26
For the text of the Orphic verse, see Orph. fr. 856 Bernabé and notes ad loc.
27
Janko (1997) 76–79.
28
Perhaps collected in a work entitled On Homer. This title is mentioned only by Tatian
Orat. ad Graec. 21 = DK 61 A3, and it may be a mistaken inference on the part of the theo-
logian based on the Homeric content of some or all of Metrodorus’s work. Anaxagoras
of Clazomenae retired to Lampsacus and is himself credited with, among other things,
proposing that the poems of Homer be interpreted as teaching virtue and justice. Diog.
Laert. 2.11 = DK 59 A1 (§11).
29
See Califf (2003) for a sympathetic reevaluation of Metrodorus’s approach to Homer.
30
The hypothesis already of Richardson (1975) 69. Cf. Orphic fr. 14.2 Bernabé, which
hymns “Zeus the head (κεφα[λή), Zeus the middle (μέσ]σα).”
31
Given that he was known as an interpreter of Homer, it is unlikely that Metrodorus was
interpreting the Orphic verse quoted by Syncellus (pace Janko [2002–3] 8), though of
course there were others, including the author of the Derveni Papyrus, who did take an
allegorical approach to the verses of “Orpheus.”
110 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Zeus’s head that inspired Metrodorus’s interpretation. The birth of

Athena from the head of Zeus then becomes a myth of cultural progress,
an account of how technē first came into existence as a manifestation of
Anaxagoras’s beneficent, cosmogonic Nous.
A similar allegorical interpretation of the birth of Athena appears
to have been offered by the philosopher Democritus of Abdera in his
ethical treatise entitled Tritogeneia. The contents of this treatise are
described by the lexicographer Orion: “Athena Tritogeneia, according
to Democritus, is believed to represent thought (φρόνησις). For from
thinking are born (γίνεται) three things: deliberating well, speaking
without error, and doing what one should” (DK 68 B2).32 Commentators
have correctly understood the first part of the title, trito-, “three” in the
folk etymology of the time, to refer to the three contributions of Athena
to living an ethical life. But the second part of the title, -geneia or “birth,”
has been ignored.33 It could mean simply that these three contributions
are metaphorically “born” for humanity thanks to Athena. But it is much
more likely to refer to the literal birth of the goddess herself, from the
head of Zeus, so that Democritus’s title too probably implies an allegori-
cal interpretation of the birth of Athena, in his case, as representing the
appearance of phronēsis in its three major forms.34 Plato in the Cratylus
alludes to an interpretation of the Athena myth along similar lines:
“Most of these [experts on Homer], when they interpret the poet, say

32
The treatise is categorized as ethical only by Diog. Laert. 9.46 = DK 68 A33 (§46). Taylor
(1999) 67 n. 51 suggests that the treatise focused on her patronage of “spinning and
weaving, pottery, and the cultivation of the olive.” If so, it may be one of the works in
which Democritus developed his theory of the origin of human civilization. See Cole
(1967) for an attempt to reconstruct this Democritean theory. Cf. also Orph. fr. 266
Bernabé, which says that Athena, after her birth from the head of Zeus, was given the
name Virtue (Ἀρετή).
33
It is possible that it is just such an assumption that led Taylor (1999) 138 to trans-
late γίνεται in DK 68 B2 as “are born.” For Greek etymologies of Athena’s epiclesis
Tritogeneia that explain –geneia as referring to her birth, see, e.g., Diod. Sic. 5.72.3;
P. Köln 3.126 col. I (= Apollodorus of Athens FGrH 354bis Mette); Herodian De orthogr.
s.v. Tritogeneia; Et. Mag. s.v. Tritogeneia; cf. Hdt. 4.180; Diod. Sic. 1.12.8; Corn. Nat.
deor. p. 37.11–13 Lang; Plut. Mor. 381ef. The etymology Democritus follows is in fact
a false etymology: trito- in this context does not mean “three,” but “first,” so that the
epithet Tritogeneia marks Athena as Zeus’s “firstborn.” See now Taillardat (1995); cf.
Bodeüs (1974); Baxter (1992) 126 n. 86.
34
The Stoic Diogenes of Babylon SVF III.33 (updated text in Obbink [1996] 19–20),
probably in his work entitled On Athena, interpreted the name Tritogeneia similarly as
representing the three parts of phronēsis, though his three parts were physics, ethics, and
logic. The fact that Diogenes invokes this etymology in the context of interpreting the
birth of Athena suggests that Democritus did as well.
 From Myth to Metaphor 111

that he has made Athena herself mind (νοῦν) and thought (διάνοιαν),
and the person who created her name seems to have thought this sort
of thing about her, but he describes her more grandly as the ‘mind of
god’ (θεοῦ νόησιν), as if he means that she is ἁ θεονόα, using the alpha
instead of the eta in the non-Attic way, and removing the iota and sigma
altogether” (407b1–6).35 The Homer interpreters Plato refers to prob-
ably do not include Metrodorus, who, as we have seen, identified Zeus,
and not Athena, as nous or “mind.”
Our hypothesis that Metrodorus, Democritus, and Plato were think-
ing of the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus when they interpreted
the goddess as representing thought itself or some manifestation of
thought gains support from a passage written somewhat later by the
Stoic Chrysippus: “I hear that some people speak allegorically regard-
ing the ruling part of the soul being located in the head. They say that
for Athena, who represents cleverness (μῆτιν) and a kind of thought
(φρόνησιν), to be born from the head of Zeus is an allegory for the ruling
part’s being there. . . . But while persuasive, they are in error, in my opin-
ion, and they misunderstand the stories told about these events” (SVF
II 908). This leads Chrysippus to quote verses from Hesiod’s Theogony
that show that Zeus swallowed Metis into his “belly” (νηδύν, Th. 899)
and verses from another Hesiodic poem, possibly the Melampodia,36 that
depict Metis as being hidden in Zeus’s “gut” (σπλάγχνοις, fr. 343.13
MW). He concludes that the location of Metis – and implicitly also the
fetal Athena – in Zeus’s belly or gut demonstrates that the archaic poet
understood the ruling part of the body to be in the thoracic cavity (SVF
II.908). He explains the fact that Athena is ultimately born from Zeus’s
head by observing that thought is expressed from the body through the
mouth in the form of speech (SVF II.909).37
Who are the earlier interpreters that Chrysippus criticizes? Most schol-
ars who have addressed this question believe that Chrysippus is arguing

35
Plato’s use of the word νόησις might suggest the fully teleological cosmology of Diogenes
of Apollonia. But another explanation for the use of the word νόησις here rather than
νοῦς (Anaxagoras’s word) is that the etymology of Athena’s name required a feminine
noun not only because this would presumably be more suited to a female goddess
but also because the Doric form of the feminine definite article, ἁ, could explain the
first letter of the goddess’s name. In either event, this etymology is still fully within the
Anaxagorean allegorical tradition.
36
West (1966) 402–3.
37
Chrysippus does not address the fact that no version of the myth features Athena being
born from the mouth of Zeus. On the aims of Chrysippus’s interpretations of literature,
see Long (1992) 58–59.
112 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

primarily with other Stoics,38 even though we have reason to believe that
all Stoics before Chrysippus were in agreement that the ruling part was
located in the chest.39 But Jaap Mansfeld has shown that Chrysippus
constructed his polemic in On the Soul under the influence of a doxo-
graphical report summarizing the debate over the location of the ruling
part. This suggests that Chrysippus not only is aware of the contributions
to the debate of figures like Plato and Hippocrates, both on record as
believing that the ruling part is located in the head, but is in fact direct-
ing his polemic toward classical thinkers such as these men and others.40
Indeed, it is likely that the birth of Athena was already part of the classi-
cal debate about the location of the ruling part.
Plato, who described Athena in the Cratylus as the “noēsis of god” and
is the great champion of the head as seat of the ruling part, is almost cer-
tainly one of the targets of Chrysippus’s polemic.41 So, too, is Democritus:
Chrysippus, when he complains of those who ground their interpretation
of the birth of Athena in the fact that the goddess “represents cleverness
(μῆτιν) and a kind of thought (φρόνησιν),” seems to refer to Democritus’s
notion that Tritogeneia represents the manifestation of φρόνησις in its
three forms. I think there is reason to believe that Chrysippus is thinking
as well of Metrodorus, who identified Zeus as nous and Athena as technē.
An important clue is the role Chrysippus gives to technē in his account.
He insists that it is Metis, who herself represents technē, who “gave birth
in him [Zeus] to a kind of technē akin to [sc. that represented by] the
birth-giving mother” (SVF II.909).42 Whereas Metrodorus must have
said that Zeus gave birth to technē (Athena) from his head, Chrysippus
corrects him: Zeus swallowed Metis in his belly, where she gave birth to
technē (Athena). Chrysippus seems to confirm that Metrodorus’s refer-
ence to Zeus as nous and Athena as technē, Democritus’s description of

38
The usual evidence is Philodemus’s summary of the views of Diogenes of Babylon
(= SVF III.33; cf. n. 34): see, e.g., Tieleman (1996) 223 with earlier bibliography. But
Philodemus has probably misunderstood the target of the criticism in Chrysippus and
Diogenes.
39
Mansfeld (1989) 316 n. 21, 319.
40
Mansfeld (1989). Democritus too may have believed that the ruling part resided in the
head. Aet. 4.5.1 = DK 68 A105 says so explicitly, but other evidence suggests that for him
the soul was dispersed throughout the body. See, e.g., DK 68 A108 (= Lucr. 3.370–73)
with Taylor (1999) 202.
41
Indeed, Galen’s work entitled On the Views of Hippocrates and Plato, the source of our
lengthy extracts from Chrysippus, is an attempt to vindicate the views of Hippocrates
and Plato against these very criticisms Chrysippus levels in On the Soul.
42
He also explains that Hephaestus plays the role of midwife “because phronēsis is born by
means of technē.” SVF II.910.
 From Myth to Metaphor 113

Athena Tritogeneia as the source of three forms of φρόνησις, and Plato’s

description of the goddess as the “noēsis of god” were likely the full
allegorical interpretations of the birth of Athena that we have argued
that they were.

Allegoresis: The Birth of Nous in the Derveni Papyrus

We have seen that Metrodorus of Lampsacus, a follower of Anaxagoras,
probably explained the birth of Athena as a manifestation of Nous in
the cosmos and, more specifically, in the lives of human beings. This
distinctively Anaxagorean conception of Nous was employed in a similar
way by the author of the Derveni Papyrus in his allegorical interpreta-
tion of the Greek succession myth. For the Derveni author, it is not only
Zeus who is a manifestation of cosmic Nous but also Cronus and likely
also Uranus. His grounds are etymological: Cronus is ὁ κρούων Νοῦς,
“the Nous that causes the elements to knock together,” that is by set-
ting them into motion; Uranus, if Tsantsanoglou’s supplemented text is
correct, is ὁ ὁρ[ίζω]ν Νοῦς, “the Nous that determines [coming-to-be],”
which is to say, the Nous that had planned out the entire universe but
had not yet set creation into motion.43 In order for the Derveni author
to explain the genealogical succession from Uranus to Cronus to Zeus as
manifestations of cosmic Nous, he will have to understand each of these
gods as representing a different phase in the history of Nous’s operation
in the universe. Because these gods are members of the same family tree,
we might expect the author to describe one phase of Nous, in mythical
terms, as being “born” to take the place of another. And this is precisely
what we find in the papyrus.
We may begin with the birth of Cronus. The Orphic theogony ­contained
a line, which must have been quoted in the lacuna at the bottom of col-
umn XIII of the papyrus, that described, among other things, Cronus’s
birth from Ge and Uranus (Orph. fr. 9 Bernabé).44 The commentator
begins his interpretation of this lost verse at the top of column XIV: “ . . .
[sc. in order that Uranus’s phallus], separated off from himself, leap out
over the most bright and hot [aithēr]. Therefore he [Orpheus] says that

43
Cronus: col. XIV.2–4, 7, XV.1–5, 8, 11–12; cf. Plat. Crat. 396b3–7. Uranus: col. XIV.12–13
and Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou (2006) 204.
44
West (1983) 114 line 16 proposes to reconstruct the verse as follows: [τῶι δὲ πελώρη
Γαῖα τέκε Κρόνον,] ὃς μέγ’ ἔρεξεν. Janko (2002) 26 line “a,” who believes that behind
γενέσθαι in the papyrus lies some form of γίγνομαι in the Orphic original, proposes:
[τῶι δ’ αὖτ’ ἐκ Γαίης] γένετο Κρόνος, ὃς μέγ’ ἔρεξεν.
114 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

this Cronus was born (γενέσθαι) from the Sun to Ge (ἐκ τοῦ Ἡλίου τῇ Γῇ),
because he [Cronus] is the cause of elements being knocked (κρούεσθαι)
against one another because of the Sun” (col. XIV.1–4). There are grave
difficulties here, but it appears that our author understands the mythical
castration of Uranus to be an allegorical representation of the separa-
tion of aithēr from the primordial mixture, and thinks that this etherial
heat then causes the remaining elements to be separated – or “knocked
together” – as well, a cosmological process represented symbolically by
Cronus. In this way, the castration of Uranus leads to the birth of Cronus.
Alternatively, we may say that the birth of Cronus represents Nous’s tran-
sition to a new stage of cosmogonic activity: from planning the universe
(Uranus) to separating the elements (Cronus).
One additional feature of the Derveni author’s interpretation of
the birth of Cronus merits closer examination. The commentator has
reversed the traditional syntax of birth: instead of saying that Ge bore
Cronus to Uranus (Sun), the idiom most likely used by the Orphic poet
himself,45 he writes that Cronus, the Nous that causes elements to knock
together, was born from the Sun to the Earth. This move accomplishes
two things. First, it nicely describes the spatial consequences of the birth
of Cronus: Nous, aloof high in the heavens and indeed identified with
Uranus himself, has now “descended into matter,” as it were, causing the
rotation of elements that will eventually “fall” to create the earth itself
and life on it, a distinctively Anaxagorean idea, as we saw in Chapter 2.46
Second, the grammatical construction the Derveni author uses suggests
that, from a cosmological perspective, Cronus’s mother is not Ge but
Uranus: the Nous that “determines coming-to-be” generates the Nous
45
There is one basic formula for birth in archaic epic when both parents are mentioned:
mother (nom.) bore ((ἔ)τεκε) X to father (dat.) (Hom. Il. 2.658, 2.714–15, 2.728, 2.820,
6.21–22, 6.196, 16.150, 16.175–76, 20.384–85, Od. 11.258, 12.133, 19.266; Hes. Th.
53–54, 132–33, 270, 337, 375, 378, 383, 453, 634, 938, 940, 956–57, 984, Scut. 6; and
West’s reconstruction printed in the preceding note; cf. Hom. Il. 5.313). There are four
relatively rare variations: (1) father (nom.) and mother (nom.) bore ((ἔ)τεκον/-μεν)
X (Hom. Il. 22.234, 24.727; cf. Od. 7.55, 8.554); (2) X was born (γένετο) from mother
(ἐκ + gen.) to father (dat.) (Hom. Od. 4.11–12 and Janko’s reconstruction in the pre-
ceding note); (3) X was born (γένετο) from mother (gen.) and father (gen.) (Hes. Th.
930–31); and (4) father (nom.) begat ((ἔ)τεκε) X to mother (dat.) (Hes. Th. 287–88
[Χρυσάωρ δ’ ἔτεκε τρικέφαλον Γηρυονῆα / μιχθεὶς Καλλιρόῃ κούρῃ κλυτοῦ Ὠκεανοῖο]).
This last example is not certain: in the first place, the dative (mother) is governed pri-
marily by the participle μιχθείς and not by the verb ἔτεκε; furthermore, the second line is
omitted in some papyri and may not be genuine (see West [1966] 67).
46
Cf. Betegh (2004) 123–24: “The construction ἐκ + genitive and the dative does not
speak about parental relationships in the literal sense, but rather transforms the mythi-
cal genealogy into a physical theory.”
 From Myth to Metaphor 115

that causes the elements to rotate, “knock together,” and separate. Here
it is the father, grammatically speaking, and not the mother, who “gives
birth” to his son.
The commentator also presents the birth of Zeus as an allegorical
representation of the “birth” of a form of Nous. After quoting a verse
from the Orphic theogony in which the poet identifies Zeus with Moira
or “Fate” (Orph. fr. 14.3 Bernabé), he explains: “For Orpheus called
φρόνησις ‘Fate.’ For this appeared to him to be the most appropriate
from the names that all men use. For before it [φρόνησις] was called
‘Zeus,’ ‘Fate’ was [sc. the name for] the φρόνησις of god, existing always
and everywhere. But when it came to be called ‘Zeus,’ it was believed
that it was actually born (γενέσθαι), even though it existed before but was
not named as such” (col. XVIII.6–12; emphasis added).47 Fate or the
φρόνησις of god is eternal, never born; but Orpheus describes it as in
effect “being born” with the name Zeus because it is easier for mortals
to comprehend. In Anaxagorean terms, Zeus would be neither the Nous
that remains aloof from matter (Uranus) nor the Nous that causes the
elements to separate (Cronus), but a Nous that allows the elements to
recombine into the features of the world as we know it,48 a Nous imma-
nent in our already created world, which guarantees its order and its
adherence to the laws of fate.
At the very end of the Derveni Papyrus, the author begins an exe-
gesis of one final couplet from the Orphic theogony: “But when the
[mind (φρήν)] of Zeus had thought into existence (μή]σατ[ο) all these
works, he wished to be mixed in love with his own mother” (Orph. fr.
18 Bernabé). We join the commentator’s explanation in midthought at
the beginning of column XXVI: “ . . . [he says] ‘μητρός,’ because Nous is
the mother of the other things [in the cosmos], and ‘ἑᾶς,’ because she
is good” (col. XXVI.1–2). The author’s allegorical interpretation of the
myth of Zeus’s mating with his mother does not survive. But it is clear
that insofar as the Mother is another avatar of Nous, this myth reflects yet
another phase in the manifestation of Nous in the cosmos.
We have seen that the Derveni commentator justified his identification
of Uranus and Cronus with Nous on etymological grounds. What about
Zeus? It is worth considering the possibility that the commentator was
led to identify Zeus with Nous as a convenient way to explain the god’s
47
Moira is also called “the φρόνησις of Zeus” at col. XIX.5. The word αὐτόν (col. XVIII.11),
though masculine, must refer back to φρόνησις: see Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and
Tsantsanoglou (2006) 229.
48
By tempering the heat of the sun: see Brisson (2003) 26–27.
116 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

epithet μητίετα, which occurred somewhere in the middle of the Orphic

poem (Orph. fr. 10.3 Bernabé) that the Derveni author is interpreting.
It is indeed shortly after citing this verse that the commentator identifies
Zeus with Nous for the first time, and to support his contention, he cites
another verse from the Orphic poem: “he had cleverness (μῆτιν) and . . .
royal power” (fr. 11.1 Bernabé). The commentator’s evident interest in
Zeus’s μῆτις calls to mind the figure of Metis, so central to Hesiod’s story
of Zeus’s rise to power, and this naturally forces us to consider the ques-
tion of the identity of the “firstborn” god that Zeus swallowed. We have
seen that the Derveni commentator himself understands the “firstborn”
to be a reference to Uranus. But it is quite possible that the Orphic poet
himself understood the “firstborn” god that Zeus swallowed to be Metis,
possibly masculine or bisexual in this version; this is precisely the story
we encounter in the later Rhapsodic tradition, where the figure swal-
lowed is called, interchangeably, Protogonos (firstborn), Eros, Phanes,
Metis, and Ericepaeus.49 If Metis was the “firstborn” god Zeus swallowed,
then the Orphic poet has, in a sense, replaced the birth of Athena, the
result of Zeus’s swallowing of Metis in Hesiod’s Theogony, with Zeus’s
­re-creation of the universe as a whole, the sequel to his swallowing of the
“firstborn” god in the Orphic poem. The poet presents his account of
the re-creation of the universe not quite as an allegorical interpretation
of the birth of Athena, but as a structural equivalent.

We have noticed the appearance in Greek myth around 500 b.c.e. of

the Egyptian motif of a god creating by means of thought: in the Orphic
theogony quoted in the Derveni Papyrus, Zeus “thought into existence”
(μήσατο) Gaea, Uranus, and Oceanus (fr. 16 Bernabé); in Parmenides’
cosmological poem, the goddess “thought into existence” (μητίσατο)
Eros first of all the gods (DK 28 B13). The cosmogonic Nous (Mind)
of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, a more abstract version of this “thinking
creator,” proceeded to inspire a number of different allegorical interpre­
tations of Greek myth as reflecting the operation of Nous in the universe.
The Anaxagorean Metrodorus of Lampsacus seems to have interpreted
the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus as nous (mind) giving birth
to technē (skill). Democritus and Plato interpreted the same myth as god

49
The idea that what Zeus swallowed in the Derveni theogony was Metis was developed first
by Casadesús Bordoy (1996) 80–81; cf. also Brisson (2003) 21 n. 17; Jourdan (2003)
73; Betegh (2004) 162–63. On Metis as masculine god in the Rhapsodies, see Orphic frr.
96, 140, 240 (III) Bernabé, cf. also fr. 243.9. On the assimilation of Protogonos, Eros,
Phanes, Metis, and Ericepaeus, see Chapter 2, n. 98.
 From Myth to Metaphor 117

giving birth to phronēsis, dianoia, nous. Metrodorus thus envisioned nous

as parent, Democritus and Plato as the offspring. The author of the
Derveni Papyrus, meanwhile, used Anaxagoras’s Nous as an allegorical
key to unlock the myth of the divine succession from Uranus to Zeus.

Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides’ Heraclidae

It is quite likely that this new tradition of cosmogonic myth – creation as
a manifestation of thought or mind – and the allegorical interpretations
of myth that it stimulated provided, in turn, the immediate inspiration for
the two earliest examples of the male birth metaphor that we encounter in
Athenian drama in the 420s b.c.e. We may turn first to the passage from
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (passage no. 1), where the “laws” (νόμοι) gov-
erning our world are said to be “issued from on high, the children created
(τεκνωθέντες) in the heavenly aithēr, of which Olympus alone is father; no
mortal nature of men (ἀνέρων) gave birth (ἔτικτεν) to them” (865–70).
The “laws” at issue here are most immediately the ordinances of fate, espe-
cially as revealed by the gods through oracles. Jocasta has just proposed
that Apollo’s oracle that Laius would be killed by his son may have turned
out to be false (852–54). The chorus, unnerved and appalled, responds
with this choral ode vindicating the pronouncements of the gods as against
those of men. Our focus here is on how the image of “birth” functions in
this commentary on the “laws” of the gods, and on what, if anything, this
passage might tell us about the origin of the birth-of-laws metaphor.
The notion that men may “give birth” to laws had become something
of a commonplace by the time we get to Plato. In the Symposium, he refers
to Solon and Lycurgus as “begetting” laws (τὴν τῶν νόμων γέννησιν) for
their cities (209d4–e3). And in the Phaedrus, he suggests that “Solon and
anyone who composes written texts in the form of political speeches that
he calls ‘laws’ (νόμους)” begets not living “legitimate sons” (ὑεῖς γνησίους)
but, implicitly, bastard sons (278a5–b2, c3–4).50 But the human legisla-
tion described by Plato is something rather different from the broader
“laws” of fate mentioned by the chorus in the Oedipus Tyrannus. Is there
a connection? We may recall that the author of the Derveni Papyrus sug-
gested that fate is a manifestation of the “thought of god” and indeed
of Zeus himself. If god can be imagined to give birth to “thought,” as

50
Cf. also Plat. Crit. 50d1–2, where the Athenian laws of marriage ask Socrates, “Did we not
beget (ἐγεννήσαμεν) you in the first place?” meaning that Socrates’ father and mother
begot him pursuant to these laws.
118 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

we saw in our discussion of allegorical interpretations of the birth of

Athena, then it is not difficult to see how god can be imagined to give
birth to the “laws” of fate, which are, at least for the Derveni author, a
reflection of the “thought of god.” This suggests that the birth-of-laws
metaphor is a development from within the birth-of-thought metaphor,
whose origin we have been tracing in this section. By the time Sophocles
wrote the Oedipus Tyrannus, perhaps early in the 420s, the metaphor had
probably already been used to describe the production of laws by human
­lawgivers. Sophocles’ chorus seems to allude to this new development,
and indeed to reject it, when it claims that “no mortal nature of men
gave birth to them,” at least not to the higher “laws” in question here.51
Another feature of this Sophoclean choral ode may shed further light
on the origins of this metaphor. At the beginning of the antistrophe that
immediately follows, the chorus sings the famous line “tyranny begets
hybris” (ὕβριν φυτεύει τυραννίς, 872).52 This phrase seems clearly to
allude to an earlier form of the pregnancy metaphor. Solon, for exam-
ple, famously wrote “the people would follow their leaders best if they
are neither given too much free rein nor excessively constrained, for
surfeit gives birth to hybris (τίκτει γὰρ κόρος ὕβριν),53 when good for-
tune befalls men whose mind (νόος) is not sound” (fr. 6 West). This
notion of one abstraction “giving birth” to another thereafter became
something of a commonplace, as we have seen.54 By juxtaposing ­“tyranny
begets hybris,” from the beginning of the first antistrophe, to “no mortal
nature of men gave birth to them,” a phrase from the preceding strophe,
Sophocles hints at a genealogy for the metaphor of the pregnant male:
the metaphorical subjects of τίκτω were first abstractions like ­“surfeit,”
and only later “men.” This phrase from the antistrophe also further
develops the contrast developed in the earlier strophe between gods,
who do “give birth” to laws, and men, who do not. But the distinction is
now applied to the dramatic case at hand: Oedipus, the tyrannos, does
not “give birth” to the ordinances of fate (as the gods do); if anything,
he, tyrannis embodied, “begets” only hybris.
There are cosmogonic hints also in the passage from Euripides’
Heraclidae (passage no. 2), in which Eurystheus boasts: “I was the con-
triver (σοφιστής) of many sorrows and, constantly taking counsel with

51
Cf. Heraclit. DK 22 B114: “All human laws (νόμοι) are nourished (τρέφονται) by the
one divine [law].”
52
On the long controversy over the text and its interpretation, see Dawe (1982) 182–83.
53
We find the same phrase, in a slightly different context, at Theogn. 153–54.
54
See n. 3.
 From Myth to Metaphor 119

night (νυκτὶ συνθακῶν), gave birth to many [stratagems] (πόλλ’ ἔτικτον)

to drive out and kill my enemies [sc. the Heraclidae]” (993–96).55 The
phrase “taking counsel with night” may be a clue to the origins of this use
of the metaphor. The phrase could be merely a metaphorical way to say
that Eurystheus hatched his plans in the darkness of night, ashamed to
make such scurrilous plans in the light of day. But the word σύνθακος, in
the fifth century at least, refers to a god who “sits with” one and provides
support and advice,56 so that one should perhaps print Νυκτὶ συνθακῶν
and translate “taking counsel with (the goddess) Night.” Eurystheus
would thus be similar to the Orphic Zeus, as depicted in the theogony
read by the author of the Derveni Papyrus, who was inspired to swallow
the “firstborn” and recreate the world from his own body by prophe-
cies received from Night: “[there sat (ἧστο) (sc. beside Zeus)] ambrosial
Night, all prophesying nurse [of the gods] . . . to prophesy . . . from her
innermost shrine (ἀ[δύτοι]ο), [and she] prophesied everything that was
lawful [sc. for Zeus] to accomplish, in order that he might hold sway over
the lovely seat of snowy Olympus” (fr. 6.2–5 Bernabé).57 But behind this
episode from the Derveni theogony is a more general cosmogonic motif
in which a primal goddess, more commonly Gaea than Night in earlier
versions, plays the role of divine counselor to a male deity who would
make an assault on the established order. One thinks here of Hesiod’s
Cronus (Th. 159–75) and, more darkly, Typhoeus (Th. 820–38).58
Eurystheus seems indeed closer to these dark figures of Hesiodic theog-
ony than to the demiurgic Zeus of the Orphic poem.
The image of Eurystheus giving birth to plots against the Heraclidae
probably also plays a more sociopolitical function within the rhetoric of the
play. The subject of the dispute between Eurystheus and the Heraclidae
is patrilineal succession to the kingship of Argos. Eurystheus’s claim is
based ultimately on the primacy of birth: Hera had arranged for him to

55
Cf. Xen. Cyr. 5.4.35, where Gadatas describes his soul as “being pregnant with the
thought of whether (τοῦτο κυοῦσ’ ἆρα) it would be possible to exact vengeance on that
man who is an enemy to both gods and men.”
56
Forms of this word (all nominal) turn up only three other times in literature before the
imperial period, all of them in Attic tragedy from the last third of the fifth century b.c.e.,
and in each case the σύνθακος is a god (Eur. Hipp. 1093, Or. 1637; Soph. OC 1267).
57
For the restoration, see Bernabé (2004) 16 ad fr. 6.2. In the later Rhapsodies, it is Phanes
who re-creates the universe from inside the innermost shrine (ἄδυτον) of Night (Orph.
fr. 164 [I–II] Bernabé).
58
I argue in Chapter 5 that there is a deep structural relationship between cosmogonic
myths of powerful destabilizing goddesses, such as Gaea and Night, and myths of male
pregnancy.
120 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

be born before his cousin Heracles, which conferred upon him the right
to rule the latter (Hom. Il. 19.95–125). But although Eurystheus pre-
vailed in that first round, he finds himself in Euripides’ play responding
to new claims on the part of Heracles’ surviving male children. We have
seen that one of the functions of male pregnancy imagery in ritual and
myth, in Greece and elsewhere, is for a man to lay claim to paternity of
his offspring against rival claimants. Eurystheus here is a rival of Heracles
not for the paternity of these particular children, but for the paternity
of any children who might support their father: indeed it seems no acci-
dent that he is portrayed as sonless in this play, powerless to defeat the
numerous sons of Heracles.59 His imagined “pregnancy” may thus func-
tion as a hedge against the impressive fertility of Heracles; the plots he
gives birth to are metaphorical “sons” who might defeat the flesh-and-
blood sons of his dead rival.

Giving Birth to Poetry: Performing Authorship

Four of our original seven passages describe a metaphorical giving birth
to poetry. The passages provide interesting hints about the origins of this
variation of the metaphor, but our focus, once again, is on the rhetorical
strategies that the birth-of-poetry metaphor was pressed into serving. We
may begin with the earliest examples of this form of the metaphor,60 the
two passages from Euripides (nos. 3, 4), which probably predate by a few
years the two examples from comedy (nos. 5, 7). In Euripides’ Andromache
(passage no. 3), we may recall, the chorus is concerned about the strife
that threatens to erupt within the household of Neoptolemus between
59
According to the much later version of Apollod. 2.8.1, Eurystheus has five sons, who
perish in this war with the Heraclidae. If Euripides knew of this tradition, he is point-
edly silent. We do not know how many sons of Heracles are involved in the action in
Euripides’ play. But his story of the Heraclidae would have likely also resonated against
the exploits of another group of Heraclidae a few generations later, now hundreds of
descendants strong, who invade and capture the Peloponnese. See the summary of this
myth in Apollod. 2.8.2.
60
Cf. already Pind. Pyth. 4.176, which describes the poet Orpheus as “father of songs”;
cf. Plat. Lys. 214a1, where poets generally are called “fathers of wisdom.” But Pindar’s
paternity metaphor does not imply male parturition; it probably refers, in any event, to
Orpheus’s role as the inventor of song, rather than to his creation of individual songs.
There may also be hints of this idea in Hesiod’s poetic initiation at the hands of the
Muses: the Muses “breathed divine voice” (Th. 31–32) into the poet, whom they had just
referred to as an “(empty) stomach” (26). Was it Hesiod’s stomach that they filled with
song? Does he produce his song from his stomach? See now Katz and Volk (2000). This
is still a far cry from the explicit birth of poetry metaphor that we encounter in the later
fifth century.
 From Myth to Metaphor 121

Hermione, the hero’s lawful wife, and Andromache, his war captive and
concubine, and it compares this combustible situation to what happens
when two poets collaborate on a hymn to the gods: “When two craftsmen
(ἐργάταιν) give birth (τεκόντοιν) to a hymn, the Muses tend to promote
strife” (476–77).61 This passage from the Andromache presents a varia-
tion on the old theme of competition between poets. It almost certainly
alludes to the famous passage from the Works and Days where Hesiod
observes that one of the salutary results of the good Strife is that “potter
is piqued [sc. profitably] at potter, builder at builder, beggar is envious
of beggar, and poet (ἀοιδός) of poet” (25–26). But Euripides seems also
to allude to certain poetic practices of his own era: the two poets of his
simile seem to be either composing two different hymns for the same
ritual occasion or, more likely, collaborating on a single hymn.62 We will
return to the issue of poetic competition later in this section, once we
have brought the two passages from comedy into the discussion.
But there is one other aspect of the competition theme in this pas-
sage from the Andromache that we may turn to presently. It is quite likely
that what most worries the chorus is not the rivalry between wife and
concubine for the affection of Neoptolemus, but the competing inter-
ests of whatever children, especially male offspring, they might bear
him. Andromache herself addresses this issue clearly in her opening
speech, when she observes that she has borne a son, for whose safety she
fears, whereas Hermione, Neoptolemus’s new legitimate wife, still child-
less, blames Andromache for her inability to conceive (24–35, 47–50).
The chorus, in the passage from the first stasimon we have been discuss-
ing, does not explicitly mention the issue of children, but does invoke it
indirectly through the birth metaphor of the simile. But instead of com-
paring rival women competing to protect the interests of their children
to rival poets, the chorus compares rival women to rival poets competing
to protect the interests of their metaphorical children. Euripides’ simile
implicitly appropriates the process of giving birth from the women, for
whom it is biologically and dramatically appropriate, and transfers it to
two men, whose creative energies are described as a form of birth. We
have seen that modern examples of the male birth ritual known as the
couvade tend to turn up in situations in which there are rival claims to

61
The word for “give birth” (τεκόντοιν) in this translation is a textual emendation, but it
has been accepted by all modern editors, including Diggle (1981–94). See the discus-
sion of this crux and Wilamowitz’s emendation in Stevens (1971) 154.
62
See Stevens (1971) 154. Euripides’ use of the singular ὕμνος makes the latter option
somewhat more likely.
122 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

paternity. The situation in the Andromache is superficially the opposite,

for the plot centers around rival claims to maternity (though not of the
same children); but rival claims to paternity are manifested here all the
same in the rival claims of two competing male poets to authorship of
the same hymn.

The Source of Poetic Creation: Craftsmanship

or Divine Inspiration?
The passage from Euripides’ Andromache also contains an important clue
to the origin of the poetry-as-birth metaphor in its description of the two
poets as “craftsmen” (ἐργάταιν). Poetry had been described as a craft for
a long time, from Homer to Pindar,63 but the archaic form of the meta-
phor lacks the element of birth. Where did this element originate? One
possibility is that it developed within the poetry-as-craft metaphor. If so,
two related factors were probably influential on this development. First,
as we have seen, the new image of cosmogonic creator as craftsman,
under the influence of the older genealogical theory of creation, seems
to have incorporated an idiom of birth, so that some creators could be
described as crafting the universe by giving birth to it from their bodies.
This birth image, in turn, may have been incorporated, on the analogy of
cosmogonic creation, into some versions of the poetry-as-craft metaphor.
Second, allegorical interpretations of the birth of Athena gave the issue
of craft or technē a central role. Metrodorus, as we saw, probably inter-
preted the birth of Athena as an allegory for mind (nous) giving birth to
craft (technē).64 Of course Athena was not associated with the same kind
of technē that the poets claimed to practice, but in the last third of the
fifth-century technē had come to be claimed by people with many kinds of
skills and talents, especially those that the Sophists offered to teach.
Another possibility is that the poetry-as-birth metaphor developed as
a variation on the thought-as-birth metaphor we discussed in the previ-
ous section. The link among thought, poetry, and birth is quite clear in
two texts that are somewhat later than the seven texts from the 420s that

63
For the image of poet as τέκτων, just one of many craftsman images in Pindar, see, e.g.,
Pyth. 3.113, Nem. 3.4. Cf. also Crat. fr. 70 PCG.
64
In other interpretations of the birth of Athena, technē was not the child that emerged
from the mind of Zeus but was the midwife that made the birth possible. This role was
played by Hephaestus or Prometheus in the sixth and fifth centuries, both of them
easily understood as figures of technē. See n. 42. In the fourth century, the Theogony of
“Musaeus” gave the role of midwife to an obscure figure named Palamaon, surely a per-
sonification of παλάμη or “artifice.” So West (1983) 43 n. 22.
 From Myth to Metaphor 123

we have been focusing on. Aristophanes, in the Frogs, performed in 405

b.c.e., has Aeschylus characterize his poetic art as “giving birth (τίκτειν)
to verses that are well matched to the great thoughts and ideas (μεγάλων
γνωμῶν καὶ διανοιῶν) [sc. that inspired them]” (1059). More explicit
is a funeral elegy for the orator Lysias written by Philiscus of Miletus,
probably in the second quarter of the fourth century. After invoking
Phrontis (Thought), daughter of the Muse Calliope, he urges that “it
is necessary for you, a herald of virtue (ἀρετῆς), to give birth (τεκεῖν) to
a hymn (ὕμνον) for Lysias” (fr. 1.5 West). In this passage, it is Thought
(Phrontis) that gives birth to a hymn. These two passages were written
some years after the Archidamian War, but it is likely that they preserve a
primary, if not original, kinship between the thought-as-birth and poetry-
as-birth metaphors.
More important than the precise genealogy of the poetry-as-birth met-
aphor is the rhetorical function it performs in these texts. Both Euripides
in the Andromache and Philiscus in the elegy to Lysias are trying to nego-
tiate a balance, in terms of their relative importance for poetic creation,
between divine inspiration, on the one hand, and craft or technē, on the
other. In the background are two extreme positions: a view articulated by
a number of authors from the archaic period of the poet as a mere vessel
of the Muse’s inspiration and what is likely a new view, developed most
likely by some of the Sophists from earlier ideas, that the ability to write
poetry is a craft or technē that can be learned and in any event belongs
to the poet himself. Euripides in the Andromache gestures, I think, at the
notion of poetry as a craft by referring to its practitioners as craftsmen
(ἐργάταιν). But notice that he also acknowledges a role for the Muses,
who are credited with fomenting rivalry between poets. So there is still
the possibility of external inspiration – we may even imagine that it is the
Muse who “impregnates” the rival poets – but the poets, through nine
months of gestation, make the poem fully and bodily their own. Philiscus
also cultivates a middle ground: it is the Muse’s daughter Phrontis who is
invoked and asked to give birth to this hymn for Lysias, but perhaps this
fictitious daughter of Calliope is really just a personification of the poet
Philiscus’s own phrontis. The fact that the kind of poem given birth to in
both Euripides and Philiscus is a hymnos, a form addressed primarily to
gods, itself raises the issue of the relationship between god and man in
poetic creation: does creativity come as inspiration from the gods, or does
it originate in the poet himself and become realized as a hymn to the
gods? Similar issues were raised by a number of Sophists in this period
about the source of knowledge, and some of them, as we will see in the
124 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

next section, employed the metaphor of birth to justify their theories of

intellectual authorship and transmission.
Euripides in the Suppliant Women (passage no. 4) explores some of the
same thematic ground that he does in the Andromache. In the Suppliant
Women, Adrastus has come to Athens to ask Theseus for help in recover-
ing the fallen at Thebes for burial. He has not come to Attica to celebrate
the joyous rites of Demeter at Eleusis, as Theseus might think. While it is
possible, even salutary, for men to put themselves in the shoes of those
different from them in social station or prosperity, the poet cannot sing
hymns of joy if he is not himself feeling joy inside: “Whenever the com-
poser of hymns (ὑμνοποιόν) gives birth (τίκτῃ) to songs, he must be in a
good mood to give birth (τίκτειν). If he does not feel this way, he would
not be able to give pleasure to others, because he is suffering in his own
mind” (180–85). On the surface, this seems to be a statement of what
was or would soon become a commonplace in late fifth-century descrip-
tions of the poetic craft: works written by a poet match the state of mind
or personality of the poet himself; the exterior reflects the interior.65 But
I think implicit in this idea is, once again, a statement of the source of
poetic inspiration: it comes from within the poet himself, not from out-
side, even when one writes a hymn to the gods. Euripides’ description of
his poet as a ὑμνοποιός, a word modeled apparently on all those words
ending in - ­ποιός that designate artisans of various kinds, also implies a
theory of poetry as generated by a skill or craft entirely under the control
of the poet.
What the two passages from Euripides and the somewhat later elegy
from Philiscus show is that one function of both the craft and the preg-
nancy metaphors for poetic production was to lay claim to at least some
of the credit for successful writing: the poet who “gives birth” claims that
his poem gestated in his own body, the result of his own phrontis and
technē. In the Suppliant Women, the poet makes this claim not against a
rival poet, as in the Andromache but, if only implicitly, against an external
source of inspiration.

Contesting Poetic Paternity

The two examples of the poetry-as-birth metaphor from comedy feature
rival poets competing for authorship of poetic works and ideas. We may
begin with the fragment from Cratinus’s Pytine (Wine Cask) of 423 b.c.e.

65
Aristoph. Thesm. 148–52 is a parody of this idea.
 From Myth to Metaphor 125

(passage no. 5): “No one could ever give birth (τέκοι) to anything clever
(σοφόν) by drinking water” (fr. 203 PCG). In the plot of this metatheat-
rical play, Comedy, the wife of Cratinus, has threatened to divorce him
because he has abandoned her in favor of drink. The fact that this frag-
ment is in anapests suggests that it probably came from the play’s para-
basis, a traditional element of Old Comedy in which the poet speaks,
through the chorus, in his own voice, frequently in justification of his
art and often in polemic against his comic competitors. It seems that
Cratinus is here responding to Aristophanes’ portrayal of him the year
before, in the latter’s Knights, as a washed-up poet excessively devoted to
drink (Eq. 526–36). But what has only recently been appreciated is the
extent to which Cratinus himself had almost certainly, long before the
Knights, presented himself as an Archilochean iambic poet inspired by
wine.66 A famous couplet by Archilochus probably served as the model
for this poetic self-fashioning: “ . . . since I know how to begin the dithy-
ramb, the lovely song of lord Dionysus, when my mind is thunderstruck
with wine” (fr. 120 West).67
There are two features that Cratinus adds to his Archilochean model:
his poetic creation is imagined to be something “clever” (σοφόν) and
it is something to which he “gives birth” (τέκοι).68 The word sophos is a
common enough word in Greek, but in the second half of the fifth cen-
tury it was a word that had been co-opted in great part by the Sophists
and those who adopted their rhetorical methods, including poets. In
Aristophanes’ Clouds, produced for the first time in the same year as the
Pytine, forms of the word sophos are used almost exclusively, as Thomas
Hubbard observes, “in reference to Socrates and the New Education . . .
or to the two Discourses he keeps in his school.”69 Cratinus’s charac-
terization of his wine-soaked comedy as something sophos suggests that
he sees his comic poetics as new and indeed sophisticated, in spite of
Aristophanes’ claims to the contrary in the Knights. Before we consider
Cratinus’s novel use of the metaphor of birth in his Archilochean self-
fashioning, it will be helpful first to turn briefly to the other comic exam-
ple of the metaphor.

66
Rosen (2000) 33–35; Biles (2002) 172–77, 187–88.
67
Cf. Epicharm. fr. 131 PCG.
68
Horace omits the pregnancy image in his paraphrase of Crat. fr. 203 at Epist. 1.19.1–3.
69
Hubbard (1991) 95. For an earlier conception of poetic sophia to refer to skill in the
craft of poetry, see, e.g., Theogn. 19; Pind. Isth. 5.28; and Aesch. fr. 314 TGF. But refer-
ences to poetic sophia in the final three decades of the fifth century inevitably invoke the
new teaching of the Sophists.
126 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

In the parabasis of Aristophanes’ Clouds, the one contained in the sur-

viving revised version of the play, the poet laments that the first version of
the play, produced in 423, the same year as Cratinus’s Pytine, was poorly
received by the audience and won a disappointing third place. In spite
of its poor reception, he will not give up on the smartest members of the
audience who gave his first play, the Banqueters, such a warm reception.
Of this play, he recalls (passage no. 7): “I was a maiden, and I was not yet
allowed to give birth (τεκεῖν) [sc. and keep the child]. So I exposed it,
and another girl picked it up and raised it [sc. by serving as the chorēgos
for the play]” (530–32). Aristophanes hopes that with this revised ver-
sion of the Clouds (never actually performed) he would be vindicated as
being “clever” (σοφός, 520); he refers to this revised version as the “most
clever” of all his comedies (522), and appeals to the spectators, flatter-
ingly, as “clever” themselves (526, 535).
It is significant that the poetic pregnancy metaphor comes in the con-
text of the poet’s reminiscence about the fortunes of his first play, which
was produced not by Aristophanes himself, but by a certain Callistratus,
who had undoubtedly gotten credit for it at the time of production,
since he served as chorēgos.70 Aristophanes here, in the Clouds, reclaims
­authorship of that early success by describing it as a play that he himself
“gave birth” to. The division of roles between playwright and chorēgos
for the production of the Banqueters has given rise, we might say, to a
dispute over poetic paternity, similar to the one that threatens the two
“craftsman” of the Andromache, who seem to have collaborated on the
same hymn. Aristophanes’ metaphorical reference to “giving birth” to
the early play is a literary version of the couvade.
Aristophanes continues to develop the theme of paternity in the lines
of the parabasis that follow, when he says that “this comedy [the revised
Clouds], like the famous Electra, has come in search of spectators as clever
(σοφοῖς) [sc. as you were when you warmly received my Banqueters]; it
will recognize the lock of its brother’s hair, if it sees it” (534–36). Dover
explains that Aristophanes waits for a sign of renewed favor on the part
of the public, just as Electra waits for the return of her brother Orestes.71
But I think the analogy may extend further. Just as the Electra-Orestes
recognition scene establishes the kinship between sister and brother,
so Aristophanes tries to establish his aesthetic “kinship” with the more

70
Hubbard (1991) 227–30.
71
Dover (1968) 168.
 From Myth to Metaphor 127

intelligent members of the audience, a sure path to their sympathy. This

kinship between Electra and Orestes, as we saw in Chapter 2, is based on
a tendentious paternalist theory of reproduction, not only in Aeschylus’s
version but in Euripides’ versions as well: they are related biologically
through their father Agamemnon alone. Aristophanes does not iden-
tify this Electra as belonging to a particular tragic poet, but if Newiger is
right to suggest that the comic poet here is alluding to a recent revival
of Aeschylus’s trilogy and expressing a preference for it to the revisionist
version of Euripides,72 this would vindicate, we might say, the claims of
the true father, Aeschylus, against those of the younger imposter. And a
few lines later in this same parabasis (553–54), Aristophanes accuses his
rival Eupolis of plagiarizing his portrayal of Hyperbolus in the Knights.
A passage that began with the poet’s claim to be the true author of the
Banqueters, a play born from his own loins, as it were, has moved on to
two other disputes over authorship.
This is probably also the context in which to understand Cratinus’s
use of the birth metaphor in the Pytine. The dispute alluded to in that
metatheatrical play is not between two poets who claim credit for the
same play or hymn, but between two poets competing to control not only
Cratinus’s programmatic metaphor of Archilochean wine-soaked poet-
ics but also Cratinus’s stage biography: will it be Cratinus himself or his
rival Aristophanes?73 This seems to be an example of a larger phenom-
enon observable in Athenian comedy in the 420s of poets borrowing
images and jokes from their rivals and giving them their own spin: this
led to allegations of plagiarism, but what is perhaps really at stake are the
boundaries of the “fair use” of comic ideas that had come to be part of
the public domain.74
Whatever the origins of the birth-of-poetry metaphor, it seems clear
that poets deployed the metaphor as a way to negotiate and indeed per-
form authorship. The poet’s counterclaimant may be a fellow collabo-
rator (Andromache), a chorēgos (Clouds), a plagiarizing rival (Pytine), even
the Muse (Philiscus). In each case, we find the poet claiming a poetic
creation as his own by presenting himself as its birth-giving mother.
72
Newiger (1961). Euripides’ Electra seems to have been performed in ca. 420 b.c.e. A
version of Aristophanes’ Clouds was performed in 423, but the version we have, in which
the parabasis was clearly revised, probably dates to after 418, though it was never per-
formed. So Nub. 534–46 could allude to Euripides’ Electra. On the dating of the original
and revised versions of the Clouds, see n. 5.
73
So, most thoroughly, Biles (2002).
74
See, e.g., Heath (1990); Luppe (2000); Rosen (2000).
128 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Giving Birth to Thought II: The Sophists’

Teaching of Knowledge and Virtue
Another variation on the birth-of-thought metaphor that flourished dur-
ing the last three decades of the fifth century described the process of
teaching as a “begetting” or a “giving birth” to knowledge or virtue in
the soul of the pupil. We seem to encounter this version of the meta-
phor in the passage from Aristophanes’ Clouds with which we began this
­chapter. For there is a clear pedagogical dimension to this scene of intel-
lectual “miscarriage.” But how does the metaphor work in this pedagogi-
cal context? Who “gives birth,” the teacher or the pupil? Socrates himself
seems to be the author of all the discoveries the student describes when
Strepsiades asks to know what it was that “miscarried.” The first, appar-
ently the one that “miscarried” in some way, is Socrates’ discovery of a
way to measure the distance a flea flies in units of “flea feet.” Although
Socrates had initially asked Chaerephon how to make the measurement,
it was Socrates himself who solved the problem by making wax slippers
for the flea and using these to make the measurement (144–52). The
second, that the buzzing sound produced by a gnat is caused by air escap-
ing from its anus (156–64), is described by the student as “Socrates’ dis-
covery (φρόντισμα)” (154–55). Third, it was Socrates who had a great
“discovery taken away” (γνώμην . . . ἀφῃρέθη) the other day while he was
gazing at the path of the moon’s orbit and a lizard defecated on him
(169–73). Fourth and last, in order to get food for dinner, it was Socrates
who “contrived” (ἐπαλαμήσατο) a makeshift compass and used this to
steal a cloak at the palaestra, probably from a pathic, with a view to sell-
ing it to buy food (176–79).75 This Socrates, who is the author of his own
φροντίδες, is a far cry from the Socrates of the Theaetetus, who claims
that he has no knowledge of his own and that he merely serves as the
­“midwife” for the ideas of others,76 one compelling reason to believe
that the object of Aristophanes’ satire here is not the historical Socrates.
What is not clear is whether Socrates himself “gives birth” to these discov-
eries or “begets” them in the souls of his students.
There is indeed good reason to believe that Aristophanes’ actual
target, at least in the first half of the Clouds, is a particular subtype of

75
On the use of διαβήτης to refer to someone “who spreads the legs (sexually),” see
Henderson (1991) 165. We could thus translate 177–79: “He sprinkled a fine dust over
the table, bent a skewer in half, and grabbing this compass (pathic), he stole [sc. comic
pause] the guy’s cloak from the palaestra.”
76
Socratic midwifery in Plato’s Theaetetus is the focus of Chapter 7.
 From Myth to Metaphor 129

Sophist whom he himself describes as a “meteorosophist” (360), a ­figure

who employed the dangerously persuasive language of (pseudo)science
to lead people not to believe in the traditional gods.77 Indeed, each of
Socrates’ four discoveries deals with an issue that falls more or less within
the domain of ta meteōra: the first two deal with flying insects, the third
with the moon’s orbit, and the fourth made use of a compass. The his-
torical Socrates, though he apparently had some interest in physical sci-
ence when he was younger (so Plat. Phaed. 96a6–99d2), was probably
no longer interested in these issues at the time of the Clouds; indeed,
most representations of Socrates in Old Comedy focused on his shabby
physical appearance, not on any interest in ta meteōra.78 Why, then, does
Aristophanes’ satire on the Sophists in the Clouds focus on Socrates?
Charles Willink is probably right that Aristophanes decided to make
Socrates the representative of this group not because he believed that
Socrates’ teaching really resembled theirs, but because Socrates, unlike
nearly all of the others, was an Athenian and because his personal habits
were well known to the audience and easily mocked.79

The Target of Clouds 135–40: Prodicus of Ceos?

If not Socrates, then who? I would argue that one or more of the so-called
Sophists did use pregnancy and birth as metaphors to describe their dog-
matic approach to teaching,80 and that this is where we should look for
the target of Aristophanes’ parody in Clouds 135–40. Reconstructing such
a sophistic birth metaphor presents no small challenge: the thousands
of pages written by the Sophists have been almost entirely lost, and we
must rely to an uncomfortable extent on depictions of them by others,
especially Plato, which inevitably contain some distortion and therefore
must be read with great sensitivity.
One possibility for the originator of the teaching-as-birth metaphor,
and thus one possible target of Aristophanes in Clouds 135–40, is Prodicus
of Ceos. The strongest hint comes in a passage from Plato’s Theaetetus.
There, as we have mentioned already, Socrates presents himself as a mid-
wife, who does not implant wisdom in young men but only assists them
in giving birth to the ideas with which they are already ­pregnant. What is
the source of their pregnancy? Socrates explains: “For those [young men]
77
See Edmunds (2007) 183–84.
78
Edmunds (2007) 184.
79
Willink (1983) 26; see also Dover (1968) xxxii–lvii.
80
See already Burnyeat (1977) 9 on the Sophists’ “sexualized view of teaching.”
130 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

who appear not to be pregnant (ἐγκύμονες), knowing that they need

nothing from me, I quite gladly play the matchmaker (προμνῶμαι) and,
with the guidance of god, I guess reasonably well with whom they would
benefit from consorting. Many of them I have ‘handed over’ (ἐξέδωκα)
to Prodicus, and many to other wise and godlike men” (151b2–6). The
language Socrates uses for “handing over” invokes the technical language
of marriage,81 and the fact that this is treatment he reserves for youths
who are not yet “pregnant” hints that youths go to Prodicus with precisely
this goal.82 Plato presumably singles out Prodicus for mention in this pas-
sage because of all the Sophists active in Athens during the last quarter of
the fifth century, he was the most prominent and perhaps made the most
concrete promises to students of specific knowledge (perhaps especially
how to acquire virtue),83 and likely also because Prodicus himself used a
form of the pregnancy metaphor that Plato here associates with him.
Prodicus would, in that case, be a strong candidate to be the target of
Aristophanes’ parody at Clouds 135–40. And in fact this hypothesis gains
support from the Clouds itself. Prodicus is the only intellectual other than
Socrates and the shadowy Chaerephon actually mentioned by name in
the Clouds,84 and he is explicitly paired with Socrates as a meteōrosophistēs
(360–61). And we know that Prodicus, unlike Socrates, had real inter-
ests in ta meteōra: in the Birds, for instance, he is presented as offering an
alternative cosmogony to the Orphic-inflected one that the birds them-
selves present (692). And in the Clouds Aristophanes alludes not only to
the “meteorosophistical” pursuits of Prodicus but probably also to his
theories of language and rhetoric.85
Clearly there are difficulties with using the passage from Plato’s
Theaetetus to reconstruct an authentic Prodicean pregnancy metaphor.
Although the representations of Prodicus in the Platonic dialogues
are typically respectful,86 Plato is generally not a friendly witness to the

81
LSJ s.v. ἐκδίδωμι I.2a; Burnyeat (1977) 9.
82
Cf. Guthrie (1962–81) 3.i.275–76; Narcy (1994) 8–9. This is, after all, the official goal
of Greek marriage: one “hands over” one’s daughter in marriage “for the plowing of
legitimate children.” For this quasi-legal phrase, see Bonnard (2004) 112.
83
On Prodicus’s prominence at Athens, see Willink (1983) 26, who aptly describes him
as “the current occupier of the Chair of Sophism” at the time of the Clouds. Protagoras
had probably died by 420 b.c.e. (Guthrie [1962–81] 3.i.262) and Hippias of Elis had a
limited presence in Athens (281).
84
Aristophanes also alludes at line 830 to Diagoras of Melos, when a character describes
Socrates as “the Melian.”
85
Ambrose (1983); Papageorgiou (2004); Sansone (2004) 133–34.
86
But cf. Burnyeat (1977) 15 n. 9.
 From Myth to Metaphor 131

thought of Prodicus or any other Sophist. One might well wonder whether
the image of Prodicus as intellectual impregnator is the creation of Plato
himself, a foil for his own image in the Theaetetus of Socrates as midwife
and matchmaker, not a creation of the historical Prodicus. Under this
interpretation, Plato would be criticizing Prodicus’s claim to offer his
students concrete knowledge by mischievously recasting this claim in an
idiom of pregnancy and birth, metaphorically equating Prodicus’s man-
ner of teaching, in effect, to the sodomizing of freeborn youths. But
there is other evidence that some Sophists, perhaps including Prodicus
himself, had described their own teaching as a process involving some
kind of metaphorical birth or had described it in some other way that
was easily (mis)understood as implying metaphorical impregnation. If
this hypothesis turns out to be true, it raises the fascinating possibility
that Plato has himself invented the Socrates-as-midwife metaphor of the
Theaetetus precisely as a counter to a teacher-as-impregnator metaphor
originated by Prodicus or another Sophist but invidiously pinned to
Socrates in the Clouds. We return briefly to this tantalizing possibility in
Chapter 7.
So what is this other evidence? It turns out that Prodicus’s teaching
is described in sexualized terms also in Xenophon’s Symposium, which
is roughly contemporary with the Theaetetus.87 There Socrates playfully
defends his practice of the art of “procuring” (μαστροπεία), which he
defines as making his pupil as attractive as possible, morally speaking, to
the greatest number of people, ideally to the polis as a whole (4.56–60;
cf. 3.10, 8.42). He then goes on to suggest that Antisthenes has prac-
ticed the related art of “matchmaking” (προαγωγεία): “I know that you
[Antisthenes] played the matchmaker and introduced Callias here to
the wise Prodicus, when you saw that Callias was in love with philosophy
and Prodicus was in need of money. And I know that you also introduced
him to Hippias of Elis, from whom he learned his memory technique,
and as a result, he has become even more of a lover because he never
forgets anything beautiful he sees” (4.62).

87
On the complicated dating of these two works, see Burnyeat (1977) 14 n. 4; Thesleff
(1978) 167–68; Huss (1999) 13–18; Thomsen (2001) 135–36; Danzig (2005) 338–39.
Huss makes the most impassioned case for dating Xenophon’s Symposium after Plato’s
Theaetetus, but it requires that the following two propositions both be true: Xenophon’s
Symposium is later than the Phaedrus because it alludes to it in chapter 8 (but see Danzig);
and the Theaetetus is earlier than the Phaedrus (but see Long [1998] 113 n. 2). Also prob-
lematic for Huss’s simple dating is the fact that the Theaetetus was clearly revised (Long
[1998] 114 n. 3).
132 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

There is good reason to believe that both Plato and Xenophon

are drawing on the same independent tradition about intellectual
matchmaking,88 and that this tradition is, in fact, associated as much with
the historical Prodicus as with the historical Socrates, and quite possi-
bly more. We may observe, first of all, that Xenophon’s development of
the sexualized relationship between pupil and teacher is rather different
from Plato’s in his portrait of Prodicus in the Theaetetus. Plato uses the
benign language of marriage and clearly assigns Prodicus the male role:
he is the prospective groom who will impregnate the young student-
bride with knowledge. Xenophon, on the other hand, describes this as a
more baldly meretricious exchange: Callias is motivated by his desire for
philosophy and wisdom, Prodicus by his need for money.89 But it is not
as easy as it might first appear to map this intellectual exchange onto
the arrangement between a prostitute and his client. Callias is described
as an erastēs (lover), and his pursuit of pretty boys is noted later in the
passage. But does this imply that Prodicus, metaphorically speaking,
plays the passive role? Not necessarily. We know that some male pros-
titutes, then as now, played the active role for their clients, and indeed
in this exchange intellectual substance flows from Prodicus, who has the
knowledge, and into Callias, who lacks it. The relationship that in Plato’s
metaphor respects normative gender roles is in Xenophon’s metaphor
dangerously ambiguous. While Xenophon does not invoke the image of
birth, he nevertheless does explicitly describe Prodicus’s teaching as a
sexual transaction.90
Second, one can understand the temptation to associate the metaphor
with the historical Socrates himself, for he is frequently represented, in
both Xenophon and Plato, as willing to introduce young men or their
fathers to other teachers who claim to have the knowledge that Socrates
disavows.91 But the notion of intellectual matchmaking that we encounter

88
Tomin (1987) 100–2; Thomsen (2001) 133–36. Cf. also Danzig (2005) 339, who argues
that while both Plato and Xenophon draw on a tradition of Socrates as matchmaker,
Xenophon’s account at Symp. 4.56–64 was written before Plato’s at Theaet. 150a1–6,
151b1–5 and indeed Plato is explicitly polemicizing against the Xenophontic version. But
cf. Huss (1999) 115–18, with the preceding note, who argues for the priority of Plato.
89
See Gilhuly (2009) 115 on Xenophon’s interest in the “economics” of pedagogy and
pederasty.
90
The matchmaking metaphor was sometimes used to describe Socrates’ introduction of
one potential friend to another rather than his introduction of potential pupil to poten-
tial teacher; on this variation of the metaphor, see Dugas (1894) 60–74; Gilhuly (2009)
124–25.
91
Xen. Oec. 2.15–16, 3.14–16; Mem. 1.6.14, 4.7.1; Plat. Lach. 200d2–3; Theaet. 151b1–5;
cf. Prot. 316b8–c4.
 From Myth to Metaphor 133

in the Socratic writers is in fact as closely associated with Prodicus of Ceos

(the beneficiary) as with Socrates (the benefactor). Indeed, when we
consider only cases in which the language of pandering or matchmaking
is explicit,92 we find only two examples in all the Socratic writers in which
this language is used of introducing a youth or his father to a teacher –
these are the passages from Xenophon’s Symposium and Plato’s Theaetetus
that we have been considering – and it is Prodicus rather than Socrates
who is primarily associated with the metaphor. In Plato, Socrates claims
to match students with Prodicus and “other wise and godlike men”; in
Xenophon, Antisthenes matches Callias with both Prodicus and Hippias.93
It is noteworthy that in Xenophon the role of intellectual matchmaker
(προαγωγεία) is played by Antisthenes and not Socrates. It is quite true
that Socrates describes himself as practicing what he sees as the related
art of procuring (μαστροπεία), but this “art” does not bring together
pupil and teacher, but pupil and city. This suggests the possibility that
intellectual matchmaking may not have originated as a way to describe
the teaching methods of Socrates (for it appears that Antisthenes too
could be represented as playing this role),94 but as a means of character-
izing the teaching of Prodicus.
Why was Prodicus known as a Sophist – or even the Sophist – to whom
one “matched” or even “married” one’s son? It is probably the case, as
we have observed already, that in the last quarter of the fifth century,
Prodicus was the most famous Sophist practicing in Athens, and it is
not difficult to imagine his notoriously high prices provoking charges
of “prostitution.”95 But I think there is also an excellent chance that

92
That is, when the words προαγωγεία, προμνηστική, μαστροπεία, or their verbal forms
are used. The matchmaking metaphor turns up exactly four times in all the surviving
works and fragments of Plato, Xenophon, and other Socratic writers. Two, one each
in Plato (Menex. 239c3–7) and Xenophon (Mem. 2.6.36), are linked with the figure of
Aspasia and do not have to do with intellectual matchmaking. The other two, the pas-
sages from Plato’s Theaetetus and Xenophon’s Symposium that we have been discussing,
both describe matchmaking on behalf of Prodicus.
93
When we consider all cases in which someone introduces a youth or his father to another
teacher, and not limit ourselves to explicit matchmaking and pandering terminology,
the picture remains the same. Only four “teachers” are mentioned by name: Prodicus,
twice, at Xen. Symp. 4.62 and Plat. Theaet. 151b5; Protagoras in Plat. Prot. 316b8–c4;
Aspasia in Xen. Oec. 3.14–16; and Hippias in Xen. Symp. 4.62.
94
I see no reason to agree with Burnyeat (1977) 14 n. 4 that the “purpose [of Antisthenes’
matchmaking] is quite different from that which guides Socrates in the Theaetetus.” To
the contrary, it is Antisthenes’ matchmaking in Xenophon, and not Socrates’, that is
parallel to Socrates’ matchmaking in the Theaetetus.
95
Prodicus’s fees: Arist. Rhet. 1415b15–17; Ps.-Plat. Axiochus 366c1–5; Sansone
(2004) 139.
134 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Prodicus himself had fashioned his teaching persona in such a way as

to attract the distortions that we find in Xenophon, Plato, and even
Aristophanes. Did he claim he could “fill” his students with his wisdom,
that he could “plant the seeds” of his wisdom into their souls, or possibly
even that he could, as Socrates implies in the Theaetetus, metaphorically
“impregnate” his students with virtue and wisdom?

Sophistic Pedagogy: Sowing Seeds of Wisdom

Some teaching metaphors of this sort were in fact current in the last two
decades of the fifth century. For example, we have clear evidence that
teaching was described during this period as a metaphorical planting of
the teacher’s “seeds” in the pupil’s “soil.” Antiphon the Sophist, in a polit-
ical treatise entitled On Concord, written most likely during the last few
decades of the fifth century,96 uses precisely this analogy: “Whatever kind
of seed one plows into (τὸ σπέρμα ἐναρόσῃ) the earth, that is the kind
of harvest one ought to expect. And whenever one plows a noble educa-
tion into the body of a young man (ἐν νέῳ σώματι), it lives and thrives
throughout his life” (DK 87 B60). In other words, what most influences
the young man’s future is not his “soil” (i.e., his noble birth) but the
“seed” planted in it. A similar metaphor is developed at length in the
Hippocratic work entitled Lex, which describes the qualities desirable in
a student of medicine. The author argues that the medical student must
be industrious “in order that education, thoroughly grafted in [sc. the
student’s mind], bears fruit properly and in abundance. For education
in the art of healing is like the process of tending plants that grow in the
earth. Our natural ability is like the soil; the doctrines of our teachers
(τὰ δόγματα τῶν διδασκόντων) are like the seeds (σπέρματα)” (2–3).
This agricultural metaphor for teaching is perhaps a natural one.
But it is first in Antiphon that we see this analogy used to express the
new “democratic” ideology of teaching,97 which holds that the soil,

96
Pendrick (2002) 46.
97
This of course does not mean that Antiphon originated the metaphor. So, e.g., Pendrick
(2002) 409. The idea is expressed in Eur. Hec. 592–602, performed probably in 424
b.c.e., so that the idea has been in the air at least since the 420s, that is, quite likely
before Antiphon wrote the On Concord. De Romilly (1992) 48–49; cf. also Guthrie
(1962–81) 3.i.168–69, 256. If this Antiphon is the same as the oligarch, member of
the Four Hundred, it might be jarring to encounter this apparently “democratic” view
of education in the On Concord. But, in the first place, it is uncertain whether the two
Antiphons are in fact the same man (see Guthrie 285–86), and, second, it is not clear
that a ­“democratic” approach to education is necessarily incompatible with oligarchic
views on more properly political issues.
 From Myth to Metaphor 135

one’s birth, is not as important as the seeds: now any young man can be
taught ­virtue and other politically useful knowledge, regardless of birth.
Certainly Greeks of all periods would have acknowledged a role for both
nature (birth) and nurture (education) in the acquisition and perfection
of virtue, but not surprisingly some authors emphasized one, some the
other. The typical aristocratic view of virtue as a quality that was almost
entirely inborn enjoyed its heyday during the first half of the fifth cen-
tury. Consider Pindar’s eloquent statement in Olympian 2: “The man who
knows many things by nature (φυᾷ) is wise, whereas those who have been
taught (μαθόντες), cry vainly, raucous in their chatter, like a pair of crows
beside the divine bird of Zeus” (2.86–88).98 But around midcentury we
see a new emphasis on education, nurture, as the key to acquiring virtue.
Protagoras, the first great sophistic teacher, gave nurture equal billing
with nature (DK 80 B3), but many of the Sophists dramatically down-
graded nature (physis), and promoted sophistic education as the highest
expression of culture (nomos). Thus Demaratus’s great eulogy of nomos in
Herodotus: “Poverty grows naturally (σύντροφος) in Greece, but virtue
(ἀρετή) is brought in as an immigrant (ἐπακτός), forged by wisdom and
sturdy nomos” (7.102).
But as the advocates of the traditional aristocratic position inevitably
began to push back, some proponents of the new democratic educa-
tional ideology retrenched by describing the new democratic education
in terms co-opted from the realm of nature.99 So Protagoras speaks of
“education” (παιδείη) “growing” (ἐμφύεται) in the soul (DK 80 B11).100
And the author known as Anonymus Iamblichi writes that “it is not possi-
ble to bring this [virtue] to completion if one starts [his studies] late . . .
rather it is necessary that he be nourished together with (συντραφῆναι)
it and grow together with (συναυξηθῆναι) it” (2.7). This may also be
the context in which to understand Antiphon’s pedagogical metaphor
of seeds and soil: it may reflect an attempt to shore up a “democratic”
theory of education in virtue by expressing it in terms of physis.
Prodicus may have also used a form of the agricultural metaphor. His
work entitled the Seasons apparently combined an account of the role of
agriculture in the evolution of human institutions (especially religion)
with ethical instruction of the young.101 Indeed, Plato in the Theaetetus

98
See also Pind. Nem. 3.40–42, Ol. 9.100–02; Eur. fr. 232 TGF; Lys. 2.43; Isocr. 1.7, 9.23,
11.41, 13.21; cf. Thuc. 4.92.7, 4.126.21.
99
See Adkins (1973) 11.
100
See notes at DK 80 B11 for the reconstruction.
101
Nestle (1936) 153, 164–66; Sansone (2004) 137–38 n. 64, 141–42.
136 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

has Socrates justify his expertise in matchmaking on behalf of Prodicus

and “other wise and godlike men” as precisely analogous to that of a
farmer who must know how to match the right seeds with the right soil:
“Do you think that the care and harvest of fruits from the earth and the
knowledge of what kind of plant and seed one should sow into what kind
of soil belong to the same expertise or a different expertise?” (Theaet.
149e1–4). It is probably significant that Plato here, like the Hippocratic
author of Lex, gives equal emphasis to soil and to seed, which suggests
that he is consciously attempting to reverse the Sophists’ “democratic”
emphasis on the seeds of the teacher (as in the probably not so demo-
cratic Antiphon) and return to the traditional emphasis on the soil, the
innate abilities of the student, especially the well born.
An agricultural metaphor for teaching is not the same as a sexual
metaphor, but of course it would have been easy, dangerously easy, for
a Greek to read an agricultural metaphor for teaching in sexual terms.
Both Antiphon and the Hippocratic author of Lex refer to the content of
teaching as seed, a word that already in Hesiod could refer both to plant
seed and, by metaphorical extension, to male semen. And plowing was a
metaphor for marital sexuality from the later archaic period onward.102
The connection was even easier to make in the final decades of the fifth
century in view of the famous theory of Diogenes of Apollonia that air was
the active ingredient of both intelligence, a doctrine explicitly alluded to
at Clouds 229–33, and male semen.103 Antiphon’s formulation of the agri-
cultural teaching metaphor was especially amenable to a sexual interpre-
tation: he described the teacher as “plowing” (ἐναρόσῃ) education “in(to)
a young body” (ἐν νέῳ σώματι). It is almost certain that neither Antiphon
nor the author of Lex meant to describe teaching in terms of homosexual
intercourse, but to the extent that they claimed that the teacher planted
his “seeds” directly into the body or soul of the student, it would have been
easy for others to make the sexual potentiality of the metaphor explicit.
The connection between teaching and sex is made more explicit in
another passage from Plato, Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium, where
the speaker suggests that virtue is something that could be transmitted
from lover to beloved in exchange for sex:
It is clearly necessary for us to reconcile these two principles, the one gov-
erning the love of boys and the one governing the pursuit of philosophy

102
DuBois (1988) 65–85; Henderson (1991) 166–69.
103
This enabled Diogenes to explain, among other things, how soul was transmitted to the
newborn in the father’s semen.
 From Myth to Metaphor 137

and the rest of virtue (ἀρετήν), if a boyfriend’s gratification (χαρίσασθαι)

of his lover is going to turn out to be noble. For when a lover and his boy-
friend come together each with his own principle – the lover, thinking that
if he doted in any way on a boyfriend who had gratified (χαρισαμένοις)
him he would be just to do so, the boyfriend, thinking that if he served in
any way the man who makes him wise and good he would be just to do so;
the lover, having the power to contribute to intelligence and the rest of vir-
tue (ἀρετήν), the boyfriend, needing to make acquisitions on the path to
knowledge and the rest of wisdom – at that time, when these two principles
converge, in that case alone does it turn out to be noble for the boyfriend
to gratify (χαρίσασθαι) his lover; in other situations, it is in no way noble
(184c7–e5).

The pregnancy imagery is lacking here, but this is more than made up
for by the startlingly clear link that Pausanias forges between sexual grat-
ification (χαρίζεσθαι) and the acquisition of virtue (ἀρετή): it is in effect
his submission to the sexual act that enables the boy to acquire the virtue
that he seeks,104 although the euphemistic χαρίζεσθαι softens the edge of
what would otherwise be a base meretricious exchange.105
Plato’s Pausanias has often been described as expressing conventional
aristocratic views of the pederastic relationship. But I think there is a rea-
sonable chance that Pausanias is also reflecting, more specifically, some
of the ideas of Prodicus of Ceos. Plato in the earlier Protagoras describes
Pausanias as Prodicus’s prime pupil, this in a decidedly sympotic context
and at a time when Pausanias was just beginning his long-lived love affair
with Agathon (315d6–e3).106 The narrator of the Protagoras claims to
have been unable to hear the content of their discussion, but the theme
of the dialogue as a whole is whether virtue can be taught, and while
it is Protagoras who is the focus of Socrates’ elenchus in this dialogue,
Prodicus does play a supporting role with his exegesis of a Simonidean
poem about virtue (339e3–341c9).107 More research would be required

104
On the connection between pederastic sex and education within Greek thought, see
generally Brisson (1999) 61–62. Some traditional societies today believe that young
men must be ritually inseminated with masculine power. See the classic Melanesian
studies of Herdt (1981) and (1984). This ethnographic evidence has sometimes been
brought to bear on the evidence for Greek pederasty: see, e.g., Brisson; for a critique,
see Dover (1988).
105
On the aristocratic substitution of χάρις for money as vehicle of exchange, see Kurke
(1991) 103–6.
106
Cf. Hunter (2004) 43. It does not matter whether the historical Pausanias was actually
a pupil of Prodicus; what matters is that Plato clearly associates Pausanias, at least in the
Protagoras, with the teaching of Prodicus.
107
There are three elements in this scene at Prot. 315c8–316a2 that no one has been
able to account for as a group: Socrates, when he first sees Prodicus, refers to him as
138 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

to decide whether Pausanias’s treatment of virtue and vice and his dis-
crimination of near synonyms in his speech in the Symposium reflect the
approach of Prodicus to these same issues.108 But it is tantalizing to think
that Pausanias’s suggestion that the noble lover offers virtue in exchange
for gratification is a somewhat distorted version of an idea he picked up
from his own teacher Prodicus. I strongly suspect that Prodicus himself
had suggested only that a teacher could plant the “seeds” of virtue in a
student’s metaphorical “soil” or even in his metaphorical “womb.” If so,
then what we have here in the Symposium is Plato’s exposing the implica-
tions of such a pedagogical metaphor by transferring it to an explicitly
pederastic context and putting it in the mouth of a man who was perhaps
Athens’s most famous – or even most notorious – lover of boys.
In following the tracks of Prodicus of Ceos, one of the many Sophists
whose teaching methods and metaphors may lie behind the “miscar-
riage” of thought at the beginning of the Clouds, our goal was not to
come to a definitive identification of the target of Aristophanes’ par-
ody, though Prodicus is perhaps a reasonable guess. What is important
is that our pursuit of Prodicus has led to a better understanding of the
pedagogical metaphors used by a number of Sophists during the later
fifth century.

Rhetoric: Sowing Virtue in the Soul

We turn now to consider another side of the sophistic program, the
practice and theory of rhetoric and, in particular, the notion that it is
language at its most polished and persuasive that is best suited to instill
virtue not only in the young but indeed in all citizens of the democratic
state. Our starting point for this phase of our discussion is the Athenian
orator Lysias, though, like Prodicus Lysias will naturally lead us to other
figures with similar ideas.

Tantalus, an allusion, in part, to Hom. Od. 11.582; he describes him as “still lying down,
covered in blankets”; and he describes him as speaking in a deep, vibrato voice. The
reference to Tantalus may, as Guthrie (1962–81) 3.i.274 suggests, be a play on talantos,
making Prodicus “the picture of the unhappy professor, ‘suffering grievous pains.’” But
could this instead be the groaning of a woman in labor? Cf. scene at Clouds 694–745
in which Strepsiades lies on his bed and strains to acquire wisdom; see Sider (1991)
334–36; Guidorizzi and Del Corno (1996) 209. On this scene from the Protagoras, see
generally Willink (1983) 29–33.
108
One might consider Pausanias’s attempt to use the right names for the two different
kinds of Aphrodite and Eros. Note also that Prodicus’s Choice of Heracles is alluded to
earlier at Symp. 177b3–5, though it is Eryximachus, rather than Pausanias, who men-
tions it.
 From Myth to Metaphor 139

It is actually the Platonic “Lysias” of the Phaedrus whom we consider first,

and once again we are faced with the difficulties of recovering authentic
thought in the far from ingenuous reporting of Plato.109 The first half of
the Phaedrus presents three different speeches that deal with the topic of
erotic love. The first of these is a speech attributed to the orator Lysias,
in which the speaker attempts to persuade a boy to grant sexual favors to
him on the paradoxical grounds that he does not love the boy and, more
broadly, that a nonlover is more likely to be interested in the boy’s intellec-
tual and moral development than a lover is, an excellent example of the
Sophists’ fondness for “making the weaker argument the stronger.” Lysias
proceeds to argue that the reason the boy might be willing to grant the
nonlover sexual favors is “because of [the nonlover’s] virtue (δι’ ἀρετήν)”
(232d4–5) and that nonlovers “will reveal their own virtue (ἀρετήν)” to
the boy even after the boy’s beauty has faded (234a8–b1). What is inter-
esting for our purposes is that Socrates, when he later summarizes Lysias’s
approach to teaching virtue, in order to contrast it with the approach of a
divinely inspired lover, describes the nonlover as failing to deliver on his
promise to “give birth” to virtue in the soul of the youth:
This, then, is how many divine benefits the friendship (φιλία) of a lover will
grant you, my boy. The acquaintance (οἰκειότης) of the nonlover, on the other
hand, is diluted with a merely mortal form of temperance, offers stingy bene-
fits suitable only for mortal aspirations, and indeed gives birth (ἐντεκοῦσα) in
the beloved’s soul to a slavish lack of generosity that is praised by the masses
as virtue (ἀρετήν), but will in fact cause the soul to wander mindlessly around
and under the earth for nine thousand years. (256e3–257a2)

This passage presents the same sophistic idea that we have reconstructed
from Plato’s characterization of Prodicus in the Theaetetus and from
Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium: the teacher instructs by, in effect,
“impregnating” the soul of a youth with virtue or knowledge. Although
the birth metaphor occurs not in the speech that Plato puts into the
mouth of Lysias but rather in Socrates’ summary of this speech, it seems
clear that Plato thinks that the “birth of virtue” metaphor accurately char-
acterizes the approach of Lysias and other rhetoricians to the inculcation
of virtue.110

109
Plato’s reference to him as a “Sophist” at Phaedr. 257d8 suggests that Plato did not
think of him as merely a logographer but as a representative more generally of all the
Sophists who were interested in the role of rhetoric in the democratic polis.
110
I am inclined to believe that the speech by “Lysias” was written by Plato himself, but
in a sufficiently convincing Lysiac style. For a good summary of the arguments for and
against Platonic authorship, see Rowe (1986) 142–43.
140 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Our hunch gains support from the second half of the Phaedrus, whose
numerous examples of birth imagery and father imagery to describe
the aims and functions of rhetoric suggest that we are dealing not with
an ad hoc invention of Plato but with a well-developed discourse that
Plato himself inherits and indeed polemicizes against. Whereas rhetoric
aims to instill persuasion in the soul regarding the virtuous course of
action in any given situation (270b7–9, 271a2), or at least what appears
to be the virtuous course of action (259e7–260a4), philosophy, rooted
in the practice of dialectic, aims to “write” logoi together with knowledge
in the soul of the pupil (276a5–7), a process of inculcation that pre-
sumably works by provoking “recollection” of things the soul already
knows (277e9–278a1).111 What has been largely unnoticed is that Plato,
throughout the Phaedrus, characterizes the operation of rhetoric on the
soul of the listener through reproductive and kinship metaphors, which
are not used in this dialogue, with one notable exception, to describe the
practice of philosophy.112
We have seen, for example, Socrates characterize Lysias’s speech
as an attempt to “give birth to virtue” in the soul of the beloved
(256e6–257a1), which presumably means persuading the boy as to what
is the virtuous course of action called for in a given situation, and a few
lines later Socrates asks Eros to blame Lysias, who was the “father” of the
erotic theme of the first three speeches, and to help turn him, like his
brother Polemarchus, toward philosophy (257b2–6). Even earlier, dur-
ing the palinode, when Socrates criticizes the man who “tries to mount
[his ­boyfriend] like an animal and to father a child (παιδοσπορεῖν) [on
him]” (250e4–5), he is contrasting not only the inspired chaste lover
and the vulgar carnal lover but also the philosophical lover like Socrates
and the cynical rhetorical lover like Lysias, who offers to implant virtue
in a meretricious exchange for sex.113
The theme of giving birth to knowledge in the soul continues in the
second half of the dialogue. When Theuth tells King Thamous that his
invention of letters will make the Egyptians “wiser,” Thamous replies that

111
Plat. Phaedr. 277e9–278a1 is describing the best of the written speeches, not purely oral
dialectic. But of course this is also how dialectic proper is thought to work.
112
Cf. already the fascinating, if idiosyncratic, essay by Derrida (1981). There are hints of
birth imagery in Socrates’ account, in the palinode, of the soul’s becoming winged; see
Pradeau (2007). But there is an important difference: the inspired philosophical lover
gives birth to his own soul, whereas the orator, in Socrates’ summary of the speech of
“Lysias,” attempts to give birth in the soul of his beloved.
113
On this interpretation of παιδοσπορεῖν, see Plass (1978) 50.
 From Myth to Metaphor 141

one man has the power to “give birth” (τεκεῖν) to the elements of a craft
(in this case, writing), but it belongs to another man to decide whether
the craft is harmful or useful (274e7–9). Theuth, because he is “the
father of letters” (275a1), is blinded to their true effect, but Thamous
recognizes that Theuth offers “his students the appearance of wisdom,
not the truth” (275a6–7). Clearly Plato is thinking here not only of the
invention of writing but of problems inherent in all written texts. He
makes this clear in an analogy to painting: “the offspring (ἔκγονα) [of
the art of painting] stand there as though alive, but if you ask them some-
thing, they keep a dignified silence; the same holds for logoi. . . . When
one [a written logos] is mistreated and unjustly abused, it always begs its
father to come to its aid. For it [the logos] is not able to defend itself or
come to its own aid” (275d5–7, e3–5).
When it comes to describing the aims of philosophy, Plato shifts meta-
phors from reproduction to farming: the rhetorician is like a man who
sows seeds for the Adonis festival, concerned only that they “become beau-
tiful in eight days,” whereas the philosopher is like the real farmer who,
schooled in the “art of farming,” sows seeds in appropriate soil so that the
plants mature “in the eighth month” (276b1–8). Such “seeds,” sown in
the soul “with knowledge,” are able to come to their own defense and will
produce fruits whose seeds can, through dialectic, take root in other souls
(276e5–277a3). Note Plato’s insistence here, once again, on the impor-
tance of the “soil,” contrary to the democratic emphasis of Antiphon and
others on the “seed.”114 On the one occasion that Plato does apply a repro-
ductive metaphor to philosophy, the image of the “father” is noticeably
absent. There Plato says that better than the written logos that is aban-
doned by its father is the “legitimate brother” of this logos, which is ­“written
in the soul of the student, together with knowledge . . . the living and
ensouled logos of one who has knowledge” (276a5–8). These oral, philo-
sophical logoi are what a man would be proud to call his “legitimate sons”
(278a6). What Plato is trying to get away from here is the idea, promoted
by many rhetoricians, including implicitly Lysias, that a clever speaker – a
“father” – can implant or “give birth” to a ready-made notion of what is
and what is not virtuous action. The philosopher’s logoi do not carry ready-
made knowledge with them but work by provoking the soul to “recollect”
important ideas that it already possesses, ideas seen face-to-face when the
soul was disembodied. These ideas are “sons” without explicit “fathers.”

114
The metaphor occurs also at 260d1, 276b1–8, 276e4–277a4. Cf. also Plat. Theaet.
149e1–4.
142 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

The fact that Plato applies this metaphor in the Phaedrus so consistently
to Lysias and the practitioners of rhetoric suggests that “giving birth” to
virtue in the soul of a student is not a Platonic metaphor for teaching but
a metaphor promoted by those who believed in the power of rhetoric to
teach virtue.115 Lysias is chosen in the Phaedrus as representative of this
view of rhetoric not only because he was one of the great practitioners of
the period in which the Phaedrus is set but also because Lysias was a man
Plato himself knew well and whose rhetorical work and its claims about
justice and injustice had very likely aroused Plato’s polemical interest.116
While Lysias is the focus of Plato’s critique in the Phaedrus, it appears
that this metaphor was associated with practitioners of rhetoric and
teachers of rhetoric more broadly, especially those who claimed that
the function of rhetoric was to teach virtue (to students, to assembly-
men, to jurors) and who published written versions of their speeches
and treatises. In this connection, it is worth glancing at a passage from
the Rhetoric to Alexander, a rhetorical treatise attributed to Aristotle but
probably by Anaximenes of Lampsacus, probably from the second half
of the fourth century, and thus a little later than Plato. In the episto-
lary proem, addressed to the young Alexander the Great, the author,
posing as “Aristotle,” claims the work as a “child” (τέκνον) that he
has “begotten” (γεννήσαντες) and pleads to his addressee to care for
these “young discourses” (νέοι [λόγοι]) so that they not be “corrupted”
(διαφθαρήσονται) in the hands of others (1421a28–30, 35–36). The
author also criticizes the “so-called Sophists of Paros,” likely an allusion
to Euenus of Paros,117 who do not care for their ideas because they have
not “given birth” (τεκεῖν) to any of their own but appropriate the ideas of
others and sell these to the highest bidder (1421a32–34).
The metaphor of birth helps our author, like Aristophanes in the para-
basis from the Clouds, to lay claim to authorship against the Parians who
might try to pass it off as their own. It is probably not accidental that the
author claims for himself the role of “father” (γεννήσαντες), whereas
he describes his Parian opponents as barren “mothers” (τεκεῖν), which
allows him to contrast his masculinity with the femininity of his rivals,
a rather obvious use of an old honor-and-shame rhetorical technique.
And yet this act of paternal begetting, given that the “child” was not

115
In the Symposium and Theaetetus, on the other hand, Plato develops his own birth-of-
virtue metaphor, which is intended to be an alternative to the sophistic version of the
metaphor. This argument is developed at length in Chapters 6 and 7.
116
See Howland (2004).
117
So Chiron (2002) 119 with further bibliography.
 From Myth to Metaphor 143

implanted in any “womb,” is logically an act of male parthenogenesis:

birth must still take place from the author’s body, however masculine.
But it gets more complicated than this: our author is not “Aristotle,” but
a pseudepigraphic poseur.118 We observed earlier in this chapter that
male pregnancy and birth imagery frequently turns up in situations in
which a real author claims authorship against pretenders. Authorship of
this work is contested on two levels: the true author (Anaximenes) versus
the plagiarizing Parians; the true, but anonymous, author (Anaximenes)
versus the author of record (Aristotle).
Can we use this passage as evidence for pre-Platonic views? It is almost
certain that the passage was written after Plato’s death, and it appears to
employ some quite clearly Platonic language and images.119 But the dif-
ferences are just as significant. The intellectual “children” that the lover
in Plato’s Symposium will “raise” with his boyfriend (209a8–c7), like the
“legitimately born” logoi of the Phaedrus, are oral conversations, capable
of responding to the Socratic elenchus. The Rhetoric to Alexander, by con-
trast, is a written work whose author is concerned with the legitimacy of
his authorship, like Cratinus in the Pytine and Aristophanes in the Clouds,
a theme that is absent from the Symposium and Phaedrus. This seems to
suggest that this passage from the Rhetoric to Alexander is probably not in
fact directly influenced by Plato’s Phaedrus (or the Symposium, for that
matter), but presents a form of the very sophistic metaphor that Plato
is combating in the Phaedrus in his lengthy critique of the claims and
methods of Lysias’s rhetorical practice.
One final passage worth considering comes from Isocrates’
Panathenaicus, written not long before the great rhetorician’s death in
338 b.c.e. It is simultaneously a paean to Athens and a reflection on
the meaning and significance of Isocrates’ own teaching. Toward the
end of the work, Isocrates engages in dialogue with a former student
who expresses enthusiasm about Sparta and about oligarchy in general.
Isocrates makes various points in response, concluding with the claim

118
See Chiron (2007) 102–4.
119
Our author, for example, uses the relatively rare word ὑπεραποθνῄσκειν to describe
an author’s willingness to die on behalf of his (metaphorical) children (1421a32) in
exactly the same way Plato uses it at Symp. 208d2. Our author’s request that Alexander
take care of this “child” perhaps recalls Plato’s notion at Symp. 209a8–c7 that the lover
and beloved will jointly care for intellectual offspring. Cf. also the author’s fear that his
“young [discourses] . . . be corrupted” (νέοι [λόγοι] . . . διαφθαρήσονται), perhaps an
allusion to the charges made against Socrates. Cf. also Chiron (2002) 6 n. 25. But other
similarities can just as easily be explained as a function of both works’ drawing on the
same set of sophistic ideas.
144 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

that the Spartans reward their young for prowess in theft and antiso-
cial behavior generally, clearly a reference to the whipping ritual at the
altar of Artemis Orthia:120 “Who is there among men who reason well,”
he perorates, “who would not choose rather to die three times (τρὶς
ἀποθανεῖν . . . μᾶλλον) than to be known to train in virtue (τῆς ἀρετῆς)
through practices such as these?” (12.214). This is a manifest allusion,
conscious or not, to the famous phrase of Euripides’ Medea: “I would
rather stand three times (τρὶς . . . στῆναι . . . μᾶλλον) beside a shield in bat-
tle than give birth (τεκεῖν) once” (Med. 250–51). What is the effect of the
allusion? It creates an analogy between Sparta’s immoral training in virtue
(ἀρετή) and a woman giving birth (τεκεῖν). We are back to the metaphor
of giving birth to virtue or, in this case, to pseudovirtue, as in Plato’s cri-
tique of “Lysias.” And, of course, this is not just a contrast between Sparta
and Athens, but between bad rhetoric, which, in the mouth of the former
student and others, promotes this kind of pseudovirtue, and the proper,
even philosophical, rhetoric practiced and taught by Isocrates. What we
have here in Isocrates’ final work is not an explicit deployment of the
birth-of-virtue metaphor but a “slip of the tongue,” as it were, that invokes
the sophistic connection between birth and rhetoric. The argument in
this passage goes back not to Plato’s Phaedrus, except perhaps inciden-
tally, but to the sophistic ideas Plato himself combats in the Phaedrus.

The disproportionate survival of the Socratic works of Plato may give the
impression that Socrates (or Plato) was the originator of so many of the
great images and metaphors from the end of the fifth century, including
the notion of teaching as a process of giving birth to virtue in the soul
of the pupil. But there is a good deal of evidence, much of it admittedly
circumstantial, that this particular metaphor was, to the contrary, origi-
nated by one or more Sophists rather than the historical Socrates or the
Socratic Plato. Given the tendency of scholars to attribute most of the
other teachings lampooned in the Clouds to Sophists and not to the his-
torical Socrates, we should do the same with the miscarriage-of-thought
metaphor, especially since the metaphor of the Clouds describes Socrates’
actual approach to teaching so poorly. The birth-of-virtue metaphor in
the Phaedrus is clearly used to describe the rhetorical approach of Lysias
(and Isocrates) in contrast to Platonic philosophy, and there is good rea-
son, as we have seen, to suppose that some practitioners of rhetoric (if
not the historical Lysias himself) did in fact use this metaphor.

120
See Plat. Leg. 633b8; Xen. Rep. Lac. 2.9.
 From Myth to Metaphor 145

Sexualized Teaching in the Clouds?

We may conclude with one final look at the scene from the beginning
of the Clouds in which one of Socrates’ discoveries is “miscarried,” for
there are hints that Aristophanes is here parodying an implicitly sexu-
alized theory of teaching similar to the one Plato puts into the mouth
of Pausanias in the Symposium and attributes to Pausanias’s teacher
Prodicus in the Theaetetus. For the final three discoveries that Socrates
“gives birth to” in his students rely on intimate familiarity with the male
anus: the anal music of the gnat, the anal excretion of the lizard, and
the anal eroticism of the pathic. This pattern may hint at an associa-
tion between the anus and birth within sophistic and philosophical dis-
courses about teaching that will be developed at much greater length in
a scene from Aristophanes’ later play the Assemblywomen, the focus of the
next chapter.
 5

Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena

Here I sit, hips a-flexin’

’Bout to give birth to another Texan.1

The development of male pregnancy as a metaphor for various types

of intellectual production and for the transmission of knowledge
from teacher to pupil was enormously influential on the future of
the ­metaphor: the examples of the male pregnancy metaphor that we
explore in the final three chapters of this book must be understood,
at least in part, as responses to these sophistic and (proto)philosophi-
cal versions of the metaphor from the late fifth century. But something
magical happens in the reception: the male pregnancy metaphor is put
to work, for the first time, in rhetorical contexts defined to a great extent
by an opposition between male and female, a domain governed to an
unusual extent by fantasy. In this chapter and the next, we explore texts
in which the male characters or male writers who deploy the metaphor
attempt to balance the social advantages that accrue to the user against
the potentially negative implications for the user’s sense of himself as a
man. Male pregnancy is now, thanks in part to the fact that these texts
treat the metaphor and its implications in greater depth than those texts
from the fifth century, not just a metaphor but a complex fantasy.
In this chapter, we turn to comedy for a privileged glimpse of the fan-
tasy expressed in perhaps its most honest form, before it is subjected to
an anxious scrubbing in the hands of Plato. The focus of our discussion
is a character in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen named Blepyrus, who, in
his first appearance in the play, is desperate to “give birth” to a turd.

1
A graffito common in public bathrooms in the United States, except (or especially?) in
the state of Texas.

146
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 147

This chapter takes the form of a thematic meditation: our main theme is
Blepyrus’s anal pregnancy, but we soon introduce a subordinate theme,
in the relative minor, as it were, in the myth of Athena’s birth from the
head of Zeus, as it is treated in both tragedy and comedy. It is in the poly-
phonic tension between primary and secondary themes that the contra-
dictions in the male birth fantasy become acutely audible.
First, Blepyrus. Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, produced for the first
time in the late 390s,2 is a play about gender roles in classical Athens,
and the effect of this division of labor on politics, the economy, and
family life. The action centers around a plot hatched by Praxagora and
the other women of the city to seize control of the Assembly and imple-
ment a revolutionary constitution under which all property would be
held communally and all citizens fed and clothed from common stores,
and under which sexual relations would be liberated from the institution
of marriage and made more egalitarian with regard to age and attractive-
ness. The second half of the play dramatizes some of the comical ramifi-
cations of Praxagora’s reforms, culminating in a scene in which three old
hags lay claim under the new law to the sexual favors of a young man. In
a play so focused on the opposition between male and female, one would
expect the entrance of the first male character to be important in setting
the tone for how men will be portrayed, especially when that character is
Blepyrus, the husband of the play’s protagonist.
Blepyrus enters in a state of tenesmus: he is desperate to have a bowel
movement and is searching for his clothes so that he can go outside and
relieve himself (313–14). Unable to find them (he does not yet realize
that Praxagora has worn them to the Assembly), he puts on his wife’s
yellow dress and Persian shoes and hopes that no one will see him in this
state (315–16, 320–22). A neighbor drops by and explains that his wife
too has gone off wearing his clothes and that he is worried that without
a cloak to wear he will be unable to get to the Assembly in time to col-
lect the three-obol pay; he leaves the stage in the hope that his wife will
return with his cloak soon (339–43, 351–53). Blepyrus announces that
he too will try to make it to the Assembly once he has relieved himself
but that at the moment he is suffering from severe constipation:
I too [will go to the Assembly] once I’ve taken a shit. But now some wild
pear (ἀχράς) has got my food all blocked up. . . . But what am I to do? And
this is not the only thing that is bothering me: I am also concerned about
where my shit will go in the future when I eat. For now this man from the

2
On the date: Ussher (1973) xx–xxv; Sommerstein (1998) 1–7.
148 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

deme of Wild Pear (ἁχραδούσιος), whoever he is, has stopped my “door”

up with his “bolt” (βεβαλάνωκε τὴν θύραν). Who can fetch me a doctor?
And whom [shall he fetch]? Who among the anal specialists is the most
competent at his trade? Does Amynon know? But perhaps he will say no.
Let someone call Antisthenes right away. For this man, in view of his groan-
ing, knows what the asshole needs when it has to take a shit. O Mistress
Eileithyia, please don’t ignore me when I burst and become un-“bolted”
(μηδὲ βεβαλανωμένον), so I don’t become a comic (κωμῳδική) chamber
pot. (354–71)

Our focus in this chapter is the pregnancy imagery of this passage. We

will attempt to discern whether Blepyrus’s assimilation of his stool to
a baby engages the male audience’s sympathy and sense of identifica-
tion or rather provokes in it scorn and disidentification. Is Blepyrus like
the all-powerful Zeus, the father (and mother) of Dionysus? Is he like
Aristophanes the poet, who, in the Clouds, speaks of “giving birth” to his
first play, or like the pregnant teachers or students of the Thinkery sati-
rized earlier in the same play? Or, if he is a more degraded figure, is he
meant rather to parody the lofty aspirations of the practitioners of the
new learning or even those of Zeus? Although the theme of male preg-
nancy is not central to the Assemblywomen, this brief scene of Blepyrus at
stool does anticipate important themes that the poet develops later in
the play, and it performs as well an important structural role in the play
as a response on behalf of men to the specter of women in power.

A Thick Description of the Birth Theme in

assemblywomen 311–71: Blepyrus, Zeus,
and a Tragic parturiens
It will be profitable first to take a closer look at the extent and impor-
tance of the pregnancy image within the scene of Blepyrus at stool
(311–71). Scholars have tended to see Blepyrus’s imagined “pregnancy”
as confined to the final three lines of the scene (369–71), the prayer to
Eileithyia, and thus have tended to view the birth image as a surprising
conclusion to a scene whose humor is otherwise overwhelmingly scatolog-
ical. But the birth theme is more central to this speech than critics have
allowed. First, birth imagery is present potentially from the very begin-
ning of Blepyrus’s speech at 311, for much of his language, throughout
the speech, is as applicable to someone having a bowel movement as
to someone giving birth. For instance, one word that Blepyrus uses to
describe his rectum – θύρα, “door” (316, 361) – is also used to describe
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 149

the opening of the uterus as well as the vagina more generally.3 The
related images of bolts (βεβαλάνωκε, 361; βεβαλανωμένον, 370) and
keys (ἐγκλῄσασ’, 355), which Blepyrus uses to describe his constipation,
may well recall the bolts and keys that Greek women frequently dedi-
cated after childbirth, representations of a successful “unlocking” of the
womb.4 The word βάλανος could also mean “suppository,” and indeed
Hippocratic doctors used these not only to induce bowel movements
but also to induce labor.5 Blepyrus’s complaint of intestinal “knocking”
(κρούων, 317) could recall the kicking of the fetus before parturition,
and the “rupturing” (διαρραγέντα, 370) he fears is expressed in the
same language used when a pregnant woman’s “water breaks.”6 Finally,
the urgent summons of a “doctor” (ἰατρόν, 363) who has experience
with “groaning” (στεναγμάτων, 367) suits an obstetric context as well.7
None of these words or images perhaps requires an obstetric interpreta-
tion before the prayer to Eileithyia at 369–71, but many members of the
audience might have been predisposed to read these images obstetrically
given the context: for Blepyrus has appeared on stage wearing women’s
clothes (314–19), complains of abdominal pain (317, 355, 359), and,
quite likely, groans histrionically (cf. 367). It would not be difficult for
the performer to play up the ambiguity between defecation and parturi-
tion from the very beginning of the speech.
But the importance of the childbirth theme in Blepyrus’s entrance
scene does not ultimately depend on obstetric puns earlier in the speech.
For there are two other factors that suggest that a pregnant Blepyrus was
central to the poet’s design and not merely a casual image tossed in at
the end of what might appear to be primarily a scatological scene: first,
the end of Blepyrus’s speech, especially the prayer to Eileithyia, quite
likely alludes to a famous scene from tragedy in which a woman appears
on stage in the throes of labor and may allude as well as to a scene from
3
Uterus: e.g., Hipp. Superfet. 2, 6, 9. Vagina: see, e.g., Aristoph. Eccl. 611, 709, 990 and
Henderson (1991) 137–38, 168, and 171 for more examples.
4
See, e.g., IG II2 1533.27 (329/8 b.c.e., dedication of a πεντεβάλανος) and the discussion
of Aleshire (1989) 155–56.
5
Bowel movements: Hipp. Epid. 4.20, Morb. 2.26, Acut. 19. Labor: Hipp. Nat. mul. 32,
Mul. 23. Greco-Roman doctors frequently used the same kind of speculum to examine
the cervix or uterus of a woman and the rectum of a man or woman: see Milne (1907)
149–52.
6
“Rupturing”: Hipp. Superfet. 2; Sor. Gyn. 1.57.2; Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 5.66; Philostr. Sen.
Imag. 1.14.2.
7
Women usually sought the help of midwives (maiai) but sometimes also, in cases of diffi-
cult labor, the specialized services of a male iatros. See Demand (1994) 63–70, 132–34.
150 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Aristophanes’ own Lysistrata, which is probably alluding to the same

tragic scene; and, second, Blepyrus’s “pregnancy” functions thematically
as an anticipation of and ultimately response to Praxagora’s seizure of
power and follows a pattern that is traditional in Greek myths of “women
in power.” In this section, we focus on the probable tragic and comic
intertexts behind the scene of Blepyrus at stool, with the immediate goal
of coming to a proper appreciation of the importance of the birth theme
in this scene. Later in the chapter we turn to the relationship between
Blepyrus’s “pregnancy” and the revolutionary program of Praxagora.

A Tragic Intertext?
Blepyrus’s prayer to Eileithyia seems, as we have said, to invoke two
earlier scenes from the Athenian stage. The vocative phrase ὦ πότνι’
Ἱλείθυα (O Mistress Eileithyia), with which Blepyrus begins his prayer
at Assemblywomen 369, is used also in the mock prayer to Eileithyia at
Lysistrata 742 delivered by Third Woman, who is pretending to be
pregnant in order to abandon her fellow sex strikers on the Acropolis.
Moreover, both passages have been thought, in turn, to allude to a pas-
sage from the tragic stage because of the unusual prosody of πότνι’ in
both passages: the first syllable of this word usually scans long in tragic
trimeters but is always short in the trimeters of Aristophanes, except in
these two prayers to Eileithyia.8 Euripides’ exceptional fondness for the
word πότνια points to him as the most likely object of the parody.9 And

8
The argument that the unusual prosody of πότνια marks these passages as allusions to
tragedy was made first (as far as I can tell) by Meineke (1865) 129, who was followed
by Nauck (1889) 850; but cf. Wilamowitz ap. TGF II.34 and Rau (1967) 200, who are
skeptical. As a benchmark for tragic practice, consider the trimeters of Euripides, in
which πότνια occurs fifteen times in the plays and fragments that survive. In nine cases,
the word must be long (And. 1273; El. 563; IT 533, 1082; Hel. 1093; Ph. 1365; Or. 853;
IA 821; and fr. 436.1 TGF). In the other six cases, it is probably short (El. 487, Tro 292,
Ion 410, Or. 213, IA 1136, and fr. 757.37 TGF; the first syllable in these six cases could
be construed as long, but only if we allow a highly unusual anapest in the second or
fourth foot [on which, see West (1982) 82]). The plural πότνιαι is long in Soph. OC 84,
the only trimeter in Sophocles in which the word occurs. In Aristophanic trimeters, by
contrast, in which the word turns up a total of eleven times, the first syllable of πότνια is
unambiguously short in six cases (Eq. 1170; Pax 271, 445, 1055; Thesm. 130; Ran. 337)
and most likely short in three other cases (Pax 520, Lys. 833, Eccl. 476); in only two cases
must the syllable scan long and these are the two exceptional cases we have been discuss-
ing (Lys. 742, Eccl. 369). The word is also prosodically tragic in Philemon fr. 70.2 PCG.
Herwerden ap. Nauck (1889), pointing to the allegedly tragic diction of μόλω in Lys.
743, argued that that line is also closely modeled on a line from tragedy.
9
Henderson (1987) 166.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 151

he is indeed accused in Aristophanes’ later Frogs of showing, among

other things, “women giving birth (τικτούσας) in temples” (1080),
which a scholiast explains is a reference to Euripides’ play Auge.10 The
standard version of the Auge myth in the fifth century had her become
impregnated by Heracles in the temple of Athena,11 but Euripides in his
Auge seems to have innovated in making Auge also give birth there.12
Now when Aristophanes refers to Euripides showing women “giving
birth” (τικτούσας) on stage, he cannot mean that Euripides showed
the actual moment of parturition, which would be virtually impossible
for an actor to accomplish. But the suggestion that Euripides provided
only a report of the birth’s occurrence in the temple produces a rather
jejune Euripides.13 A middle ground is suggested by Plato’s reference
to women being depicted on stage “in the throes of labor” (ὠδίνουσαν,
Rep. 395e2).14 So we may imagine that Auge had appeared on stage in
the throes of labor, during which she invoked the goddess of childbirth –
O Mistress Eileithyia! – before leaving the stage for the actual moment of
childbirth, perhaps to enter the temple of Athena. Only a melodramatic
portrayal of Auge during the moments just before she gave birth would
have made this the memorable scene it obviously became.
Because Auge in her namesake play gave birth in the temple of
Athena, the Auge would be an ideal target of Third Woman’s parody
in the Lysistrata. For the basis of her excuse to abandon her fellow sex
strikers on the Acropolis is the demand of religious scruple that women
not give birth in a temple: “O Mistress Eileithyia, hold my labor in check
until I can get to a place sanctioned by religious law (ὅσιον χωρίον)”
(742–43). Whereas the famous Auge was shown on stage in the throes
of labor within the precinct of Athena at Tegea, Third Woman claims
to be on the verge of childbirth in another precinct of Athena, on
the Athenian Acropolis: indeed, it is quite likely that Third Woman is

10
Schol. Aristoph. Ran. 1080.
11
See Alcid. Od. 14–16; Paus. 8.47.4 (where it is a fountain near the temple).
12
The standard version had Auge give birth on the road from Tegea to Nauplia, near
Mount Parthenius, where the young Telephus was then exposed: Alcid. Od. 14–16;
Diod. Sic. 4.33.9; Paus. 8.48.7. See Gantz (1993) 428–31.
13
The suggestion is that of Anderson (1982) 170. Equally jejune, I think, is Webster’s
(1967) 159 argument that when Suetonius (Nero 21) says that “[Nero] sang the part of
Canace giving birth” ([Nero] cantavit Canacen parturientem), it means only that Nero read
from the prologue of Euripides’ Aeolus, in which, he suggests, Canace’s pregnancy was
merely described.
14
This may be how we are to interpret Suetonius’s description of Canace in Euripides’
Aeolus (see preceding note). Cf. also Timotheus’s dithyramb entitled Birthpangs of Semele,
discussed in Chapter 3.
152 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

invoking not merely a general taboo against giving birth in a temple,15

but also the negative model of Euripides’ Auge, who had shocked the
Athenian ­public by doing just such a thing in a temple of Athena, per-
haps only a year or two before the Lysistrata.16
Even if we cannot be certain that the Auge itself was performed before
the Lysistrata of 411, similar parturition scenes probably featured in
other Euripides plays, although they may not have been set in a temple
precinct. In the Scyrians, thought by many to be a relatively early play,
Deidameia probably gave birth to Neoptolemus, although almost cer-
tainly offstage. In the Aeolus, probably from the 420s b.c.e., Canace, a
daughter of King Aeolus raped by her brother Macareus, probably gave
birth to her incestuous child during the course of the play. And there are
four other plays in which the birth of a child is at issue and which could
have featured the heroine on the verge of giving birth: the Danae, from
before 425 b.c.e.; the Alope, likely from before 422 b.c.e.; the Alcmene,
probably from the 410s b.c.e.; and even the early Cretans, which might
have featured Pasiphae on the verge of giving birth to the Minotaur.17
Our argument that Aristophanes alludes to one or more tragic scenes
has focused on the unusual tragic prosody of πότνια at Assemblywomen
369. But there is another clue as well: two lines later Blepyrus concludes
his prayer to Eileithyia and the scene as a whole with the worry that he
“become a comic chamber pot” (371). The word κωμῳδική (comic) is
always metatheatrical in Aristophanes,18 and a passage in which the poet

15
For the taboo, see Parker (1983) 33.
16
Cropp and Fick (1985) 77 argue, on the basis of metrical data alone (and, in the case
of this play, exiguous data at that), that the Auge could be from as early as 414, but are
inclined to believe it comes from the last few years of Euripides’ life. See also Webster
(1967) 5, 238. Even if the Auge is too late to be the object of Aristophanes’ parody in the
Lysistrata, it could still be a target of the much later Assemblywomen.
17
On the dates of these fragmentary plays, see Cropp and Fick (1985). On the plots,
see Webster (1967) 14, 87–97, 157–60 (but see n. 13). There was one other, earlier
play that featured a woman on the verge of giving birth and that was Aeschylus’s Semele
(fr. 358 Mette; cf. frr. 221–24 TGF). But given that the Semele must have been produced
no later than 456 (the year of the poet’s death), it is unlikely that Aristophanes would
be alluding to this play in the Lysistrata of 411. Aeschylus’s play may, however, have influ-
enced Euripides’ numerous treatments of the motif: so Webster (1967) 14.
18
κωμῳδικός is used only five times in the surviving plays and fragments of Aristophanes –
Vesp. 1020, 1047; Eccl. 371, 889; and fr. 31 PCG – and seems to be reserved for con-
texts in which the poet is commenting metatheatrically on his own craft. Thus the two
passages from Wasps are both from the parabasis, where the poet speaks in his own
voice; in Eccl. 889, Young Girl expresses concern for the reaction of the spectators (τοῖς
θεωμένοις, 888) to what is about to follow; and fr. 31 PCG mentions the Mormo mask
used on the comic stage.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 153

comments on the conventions of the comic genre is just the place we

might expect an allusion to or parody of tragedy.

A Comic Intertext: Lysistrata 742–57 and the Birth of Athena

More relevant to our interpretation of the Blepyrus scene from the
Assemblywomen is how Aristophanes develops this topos of the parturient
heroine within the Lysistrata itself. In the lines that follow Third Woman’s
prayer to Eileithyia, we learn that she has pretended to be pregnant by
placing the bronze helmet of Athena under her clothes:19
Lysistrata: What’s your story? What is this hard thing you have [in your
belly]?
Third Woman: A male child.
Lysistrata: By Aphrodite, you have no such thing! No, you seem to have
some hollow bronze thing. I’ll take a peek. Buffoon! Was it the sacred hel-
met [sc. of Athena] that you said you were pregnant with?
Third Woman: I am pregnant – may Zeus be my witness!
Lysistrata: Why do you have this [helmet] then?
Third Woman: So that, if childbirth overtakes me while I am still on the
Acropolis, I can get into this helmet and give birth, just like pigeons do.
Lysistrata: What? You are making this up. Your lie is exposed. You can wait
here to celebrate the birth rites (τἀμφιδρόμια) for your . . . helmet. (747–57)

If Third Woman’s prayer to Eileithyia to prevent childbirth until she

leaves the precinct of Athena invokes the tragic model of Auge or
another Euripidean heroine, the ruse of the bronze helmet of Athena
invokes a very different model: the mythical birth of Athena.20 For Third
Woman to be “pregnant” with the helmet of Athena is metonymically
equivalent to being pregnant with the helmeted Athena herself: indeed,
most depictions of the myth represented her appearing from the head
of Zeus armed not only with a spear and a shield but also with a helmet.21
And the action of this part of the Lysistrata is imagined to take place on
19
The “sacred helmet” mentioned in 751 is probably an allusion to the famous bronze
statue of Athena Promachos that stood between the Parthenon and the Propylaea. See
Paus. 1.28.2; cf. Henderson (1987) 167.
20
Third Woman’s initial claim that she is pregnant with a male child (748) need not be
inconsistent with a possible parody of the birth of Athena. This assertion is made to
explain the hardness of Third Woman’s belly, before Lysistrata discovers that what is
making her belly hard is the helmet of Athena. It is upon this latter discovery that the
myth of Athena’s birth becomes fully activated. Even so, Athena is an unusually mascu-
line daughter.
21
See the survey in Arafat (1990) 32–39.
154 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the Acropolis, in the shadow of the Parthenon, whose eastern pediment

depicted this very mythic birth.22 Indeed, when Third Woman, after the
bronze helmet is discovered under her clothing, continues to insist that
she is pregnant, she takes none other than Zeus as her witness. While
Zeus is the god most commonly sworn to in Aristophanic comedy, by
men and women alike, there may be a particular point to Third Woman’s
oath to Zeus here: if any god knows what it is like to be pregnant with the
bronze helmet of Athena it would be Zeus.23
The allusion to the birth of Athena in this scene from the Lysistrata is
important because it not only invokes the old myth but also exposes some
of the contradictions within the myth and indeed its overall implausibility.
First, even as it nods to the cephalic birth of the traditional story, it reimag-
ines the birth as taking place from the belly of Third Woman: Aristophanes’
juxtaposition of head (not only Athena’s [the helmet] but also Zeus’s [the
locus of parturition in the traditional myth]) and belly (Third Woman’s,
in Aristophanes’ parody) calls attention to just how unnatural a head birth
is. Second, Aristophanes’ parody of the birth of Athena comes in the con-
text of a scene of “faked pregnancy,” which encourages us to think of the
story of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus as perhaps no less fictional
than Third Woman’s pseudopregnancy. Third Woman’s suggestion that
she may end up giving birth into the helmet like a pigeon may point in the
same direction, for pigeons were the birds best known among Greeks for
producing infertile “wind eggs.”24 There would also be a metatheatrical

22
Paus. 1.24.5. The Lysistrata may have been performed in the Theater of Dionysus (see
Henderson [1987] xvi n. 4 for discussion of the staging), which was located on the south
slope of the Acropolis. If so, the actors on the skēnē would be looking up at this very east
pediment.
23
The oath to Zeus, while used frequently enough by women elsewhere in the Lysistrata,
is actually rather marked here in this scene, in which four women attempt to abandon
their fellow sex strikers on the Acropolis. First Woman, whose excuse is her need to
protect her wool from moths, swears by the two goddesses (731). Second Woman, who
claims to be worried about her supply of flax, swears by (Hecate) Phosphoros (738).
And when Third Woman herself insists that the bronze helmet under her dress is a baby
about to be born, Lysistrata responds with an oath to Aphrodite (749), which exposes
the real amatory interests behind Third Woman’s lie. In sum, no one in this brief scene
swears by Zeus except Third Woman at 752, where the model of Athena’s birth from
the head of Zeus is fully activated. The oath of Third Woman to Zeus at 777 comes in a
different context.
24
Arist. HA 562a22–24. There is one other aspect of pigeon reproduction described by
Aristotle that is possibly relevant here in the context of a parody of the birth of Athena:
the male pigeon is said to experience sympathetic pain (συναγανάκτησις) when his
mate is giving birth (HA 612b31–613a1), which is as close as the male can get to giving
birth in “nature.”
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 155

element at play: a male actor is playing a woman (Third Woman) who is

“playing” a male Zeus, who himself, in the underlying myth, “plays” the
role of a woman giving birth.25 The performative absurdity caused by the
many layers of gender confusion might also contribute toward exposing
the implausibility of the original myth.
Interest in men “playing” pregnant women may indeed have been in the
air in the last decades of the fifth century. The Women at the Thesmophoria,
produced in the same year as the Lysistrata, also makes several references
to “faked pregnancy” or “faked motherhood.” The most important is
the scene at 688–764 in which Euripides’ Kinsman, in a parody of the
tragic poet’s much earlier Telephus, seizes the baby to which First Woman
claims to have given birth (691, 741), only to find that it is a wineskin,
not a baby. A few lines earlier (637–42), before his true sex is discov-
ered, Kinsman himself pretends to be a mother who has given birth to
nine children.26 One result of such scenes, whatever the motivation of
the male playwrights who wrote them and the male actors who enacted
them, is to deconstruct and indeed devalue motherhood: pregnancy
and motherhood, the very basis of the Greek woman’s public identity, is
just a sham. But enacting childbirth surely also brought pleasure to the
male actors and their largely if not exclusively male audience. We might
recall, in this connection, Timotheus’s dithyramb entitled the Birthpangs
of Semele (fr. 792 PMG) from the late fifth or early fourth century, which,
as we saw in Chapter 3, was famous for its histrionic impersonation of
the laboring Semele. But Timotheus’s identification with the figure of a
woman in labor went too far, judging from the reaction of his audience:27
it was undoubtedly much more comfortable for men to play pregnancy
for laughs, as they did on the comic stage. So when Kinsman exposes the
fakeness of First Woman’s pregnancy in the Women at the Thesmophoria or
Lysistrata responds similarly to Third Woman’s in the Lysistrata, it is not
perhaps so much a comment on the very real role women play in repro-
duction as on the very impossibility of a male enactment of female preg-
nancy on the stage, however attractive the fantasy may be.
Such an interest in enacting – and in deconstructing – male preg-
nancy on the comic stage may also be one context in which to under-
stand Hermippus’s famous comedy entitled The Birth of Athena, which

25
The fullest discussion of metatheatrical gender play in the Lysistrata and other plays of
Aristophanes is Taaffe (1993).
26
Cf. also Thesm. 502–16, where the women describe a woman pretending to be in labor
in order to conceal from her husband the presence in the house of an adulterer.
27
See Chapter 3, n. 28.
156 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

seems to have been performed before, perhaps only shortly before, the
Lysistrata.28 Hermippus seems to have anticipated Aristophanes in sub-
jecting the myth of Athena’s birth to comic treatment, but we cannot
know to what extent (if any) Aristophanes was engaged in the Lysistrata
with his predecessor’s play. The likelihood that Hermippus had previ-
ously treated this theme and that it was memorable (or, at the very least,
unusual) for being a treatment of a myth (a practice foreign to Old
Comedy) makes it all the more likely that Aristophanes’ audience recog-
nized in this scene from the Lysistrata a burlesque of the same myth. But
if Hermippus had not exposed the impossibility of Athena’s birth from
the head of Zeus, Aristophanes certainly did.
The scene of Blepyrus at stool in the later Assemblywomen almost cer-
tainly activates some of the associations of the scene of Third Woman
in the Lysistrata and the tragic play (or plays) that probably lies behind
both. The tragic prosody of πότνια in the two prayers to Eileithyia (Lys.
742, Eccl. 369) is the most obvious link. But there is also a marked simi-
larity between the comic situation of Blepyrus and that of Third Woman
and Auge: just as the two female characters seek to find a place to give
birth that does not violate a sacred taboo, so Blepyrus seeks to find a
place to defecate that will not expose him to comic ridicule (e.g., Eccl.
320–22). We must be careful to acknowledge that an allusion to Lysistrata
742–57 in the scene of Blepyrus at stool does not necessarily invoke that
earlier scene’s parody of the birth of Athena, in whole or in part. And
yet Zeus may be lingering in the background of Blepyrus’s speech all the
same. The alimentary source of Blepyrus’s pregnancy might hint at the
alimentary source – the swallowing of Metis – of Zeus’s. If so, we might
see Aristophanes as making here an additional correction to the logic of
the birth of Athena to the one he offers in the Lysistrata: whereas the cha-
rade of Third Woman implicitly showed that Zeus’s swallowing of Metis
ought to lead him to be pregnant with Athena in his belly rather than
in his head, Blepyrus in the Assemblywomen shows that Zeus’s alimentary
pregnancy ought to reach a logical conclusion in an anal birth.
The probability that Aristophanes, in the scene of Blepyrus at stool, is
invoking one or more tragic models and is invoking as well a scene from
his earlier Lysistrata, which itself likely alludes to a scene from tragedy
and which features a parody of the birth of Athena from the head of
Zeus, requires the interpreter to take seriously Blepyrus’s assimilation
of defecation to parturition. The birth image is not an accidental image

28
Hermipp. frr. 2–6 PCG. On the date, see Nesselrath (1995) 12–14.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 157

in an otherwise scatological scene. Rather, the birth theme is central

to Aristophanes’ depiction of Blepyrus in this scene and is probably
invoked much earlier in the speech than the prayer to Eileithyia, with
which it concludes.

Blepyrus as Demos
Previous interpretations of the scene of Blepyrus at stool are almost
unanimous in viewing Blepyrus as degraded, an inversion with respect
to his proper social role, a symbol of Athens’s social and political ills.
Henderson, the only scholar who has really confronted the birth imag-
ery in the scene, concludes: “Blepyrus’ call to Eileithyia to act as a mid-
wife perhaps serves to emphasize the sudden exchange of sexual roles
by man and wife.”29 Blepyrus, in other words, has temporarily lost his
masculine status. Scholars who have focused more on the scatolog-
ical aspects of the scene have reached similar conclusions. Rothwell,
for example, has suggested that Blepyrus’s obsession with his bowels
reduces him to his bodily functions, which recalls for him “the carni-
valesque abuse of a costumed king.”30 Saïd similarly sees Blepyrus as a
symbol of the Athenian citizen’s further degradation from one who is
ruled by his stomach (e.g., attends the Assembly only for the three-obol
pay) to one who becomes focused on the even lower bodily functions
of his anus.31 Reckford sees Blepyrus’s constipation as a symbol of the
gridlock in Athenian political life at the time the play was written.32
And Foley sees it as a symbol of the “greedy individualistic hoarding
of the Athenian male.”33 What all of these interpretations share is a
view of Blepyrus as humiliated individually and as a symbol of all that is
wrong in Athens and in the topsy-turvy world of the play: hoarding and
blockage are obstacles to prosperity and progress; concern with lower
bodily functions distracts from higher bodily functions; and effeminiza-
tion (birth imagery, transvestism) is inconsistent with the discharge of a
proper masculine civic role.
This view of Blepyrus is not altogether unpersuasive, but I think it does
not adequately account for certain features of Aristophanes’ portrayal
of Blepyrus, including the fact that Blepyrus dominates the final lines

29
Henderson (1991) 189; cf. 102.
30
Rothwell (1990) 98. Cf. Bowie (1993) 258.
31
Saïd (1979) 45.
32
Reckford (1987) 346.
33
Foley (1982) 14. Cf. Rothwell (1990) 53.
158 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

of the play as the newly rejuvenated and sexually satisfied “master.”34 I

propose we consider for a moment a somewhat different view: that the
constipated Blepyrus is representative of the diseased body politic and
indeed of the dēmos itself. The body politic is constipated and needs a
doctor (e.g., the iatros that Blepyrus asks for in 363) to restore its bodily
functioning. On this reading, Blepyrus does not represent those respon-
sible for the failures of the Athenian economy in the 390s but rather
those who are suffering as a result. Blepyrus thus performs a function
similar to that of Demos in the Knights: at the beginning of that play,
Demos is described as a nearly deaf old man (43), with poor eyesight
(909), his legs riddled with sores (907), lacking a cloak (881), and fed
like a child by the Paphlagon, who knows how to “open and close the
Demos’s mouth” (716–20); but by the end of the play Demos has been
“boiled” and rejuvenated by the Sausage-Seller (1321), who gives him
for his sexual pleasure a well-endowed slave boy (1385) and the beauti-
ful Truces (1388–89). Similar is the god Plutus in the Wealth. Plutus, like
Demos in the Knights, is diseased and in need of a cure: at the beginning
of the play, he is blind and generally decrepit (13–15, 187–92); at the
end of the play, thanks to the self-interested intervention of Chremylus
and Blepsidemus, he is restored to sight, and prosperity returns, at least
to the just.35 Plutus does not represent the democratic system as a whole
(as Demos does in the earlier Knights) but is a personification of the effi-
cient and just operation of the Athenian economy, the burning issues of
the 390s and 380s.36
In the Assemblywomen, Aristophanes has attached this “rejuvenation of
the dēmos” plot (in which Blepyrus is the “hero”) to a “utopian seeker” plot
(in which the hero is Praxagora).37 These two plots are also joined in the
later Wealth, in which the utopian seekers Chremylus and Blepsidemus
seek, as we have seen, rejuvenation of the god Plutus. But in contrast to
the Wealth, where the two plots are integrally related, in the Assemblywomen
they are independent and related only structurally. But this structural
link is, I think, more subtle and ultimately more powerful. It is suggested
by a number of verbal and symbolic resonances between Blepyrus’s

34
The “master” is never named, but most scholars believe he is Blepyrus: see Sommerstein
(1998) 233 with further bibliography; for a dissent, see Olson (1987).
35
For the rejuvenation of old men at the end of Aristophanic plays, see Sommerstein
(1984) 320–21.
36
See David (1984) 3–20.
37
On the utopian seeker plot in Aristophanes, see Sifakis (1992) 128–36; cf. also Whitman
(1964) 23–24, 261–69, who focuses exclusively on the plays from the fifth century.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 159

constipation and Praxagora’s utopian scheme. In perhaps the most

important of these correspondences, pregnancy is the common theme.
We recall that Blepyrus requested a medical practitioner to help him pass
a difficult stool, “Who can fetch (μετέλθοι) me a doctor? . . . Let someone
call Antisthenes right away (πάσῃ τέχνῃ)” (363, 366), and he assimilates
this stool just a few lines later to a baby, to which he imagines he is about
to give birth (369–71). In the following scene, when Blepyrus first con-
fronts Praxagora about her earlier disappearance with his clothes, she lies
to him about her whereabouts, using strikingly similar language:
Praxagora: A woman, a dear friend of mine, sent for (μετεπέμψατ’) me
during the night because she was in labor. . . . The woman who sent for
(μεθῆκε) me asked me to come right away (πάσῃ τέχνῃ). . . .
Blepyrus: Then do you not realize that you cost me a bushel of wheat,
which I ought to have earned from attending the Assembly?
Praxagora: Don’t worry. A boy was born!
Blepyrus: To the Assembly?
Praxagora: Lord, no! To the woman I went off to help! (528–50)

In the fictional world of Praxagora’s lie, Praxagora has been “sent for”
(μετεπέμψατ’, μεθῆκε) to attend “right away” (πάσῃ τέχνῃ, 534) to the
medical needs of a friend in labor at the very same time that Blepyrus
“sends for” (μετέλθοι, 363) an anal specialist who is encouraged to come
“right away” (πάσῃ τέχνῃ, 366) and help him deliver his turd child.
Structurally, we are invited to see Praxagora as the “doctor” who can cure
the pregnant/constipated Blepyrus, the dēmos personified.
Aristophanes invites us to translate the medical problems of Blepyrus
and the friend in labor to the larger sociopolitical sphere when he has
Blepyrus misinterpret Praxagora to mean that a baby boy was born to the
Assembly, rather than to the supposed friend in labor.38 And yet there is
a way in which Praxagora does bring to birth in the Assembly a new polit-
ical order.39 The feasting at the end of the play suggests that Praxagora
did realize some success: that Blepyrus can eat at all suggests that his turd
child was born – at least within the bizarre comic logic of the play.
If Blepyrus represents the body politic, it is perhaps specifically one
groaning under a shortage of food supplies and a malfunctioning system

38
Praxagora suggests that a male child was born to the friend in labor rather than a female
child because midwives received a higher pay if the child turned out to be a boy. See
Müller (1988).
39
The metaphorical notion that a new political order may be “born” continues to be popular
during the European Enlightenment: see Pateman (1988) 102–3; Landes (1992) 20–21.
160 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

of distribution.40 The language of Blepyrus in 354–71 alludes to these

problems with the food supply in a number of ways. At line 354–55, he
tells his neighbor that he will try to get to the Assembly as soon as he has
defecated but that right now a wild pear is “blocking” (ἐγκλῄσασ’) his
“food” (τὰ σιτία). In the context of Blepyrus’s constipation, “food” must
refer to the partially digested food that Blepyrus is unable to excrete.
But when the neighbor asks if this wild pear is “the one that Thrasybulus
mentioned to the Spartans” (356–57), he seems to interpret Blepyrus’s
remark more generally as a reference to a blockade of food supplies,
probably an actual or threatened interception by the Spartans of grain
imports heading to the Piraeus.41 Blepyrus turns the conversation back
to the blockage in his own body, but the implications for the body pol-
itic are clear: “And this is not the only thing that is bothering me: I am
also concerned about where my shit will go in the future when I eat”
(358–60). Just as Blepyrus’s constipation prevents him from eating,
because his digestive tract is currently full of feces, so the geopolitical
disruption of food supplies threatens the Athenian people with hunger
and starvation.
Another hint at the crisis in food distribution at Athens in the decade
after Aegospotami comes from the references in the Blepyrus passage to
acorns (βάλανοι) and wild pears (ἀχράδες). The wild pear is mentioned,
as we have seen, as the cause of his constipation (355), and again a few
lines later as a personification of the “man from the deme of Wild Pear,”
whom Blepyrus imagines to be sodomizing him (362). The choice of
“wild pear” was attractive both because it was known to cause constipation
if consumed unripe42 and because it gave Aristophanes a chance to make
a pun on the deme of Acherdous. We have already mentioned two of the

40
See esp. Lys. 22 (from 386 b.c.e.) and the discussions of the social context in Seager
(1966) and Figueira (1986). On Aristophanes’ engagement with these issues in the late
390s and early 380s, see David (1984) 6–9, 18–19; cf. Sommerstein (1984) 330–33, who
focuses on economic deprivation more generally. Cf. also Scholtz (2007) 71–80, who
argues that the comic action must be understood in the context of widespread fear of
stasis in the aftermath of the Thirty.
41
Van Leeuwen (1905) 51 and Ussher (1973) 126 suggest that Thrasybulus had threat-
ened, on behalf of the Athenians, to blockade the Spartans. But I think it is more likely
that Thrasybulus was responding to a Spartan blockade or threatened blockade. See Xen.
Hell. 4.8.25, 5.1.28, cf. also 1.1.35. On Thrasybulus’s role in securing the Hellespontine
grain supply during the Corinthian War, see Seager (1966) 172. Seager (1967) 107–8
thinks that Thrasybulus’s mention of the wild pear means simply that he rejected peace
with the Spartans; similarly Sommerstein (1998) 172. But this interpretation fails to
account for the wild pear image. Cf. also Golden (1987).
42
Hipp. Vict. 2.55. If ripe, it had the opposite effect.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 161

associations of βάλανος in 361 and 370 – as bolt and as ­suppository –

and might add that, in the sexual context of 361, what the man from the
“deme of Wild Pear” is thrusting inside poor Blepyrus must be the tip
of the man’s penis.43 But I think there is another probable meaning of
βάλανος at play in this line and that is its most basic meaning of “acorn,”
especially given the references to wild pears in this same passage. It turns
out that both acorns and wild pears are commonly mentioned in comedy
as the food of rustics and the poor.44 These are foods that would be eaten
by the more prosperous only in times of famine.45 I think one of the rea-
sons that Blepyrus imagines acorns and wild pears in his digestive tract is
that the supply of wheat and other more desirable foodstuffs was, at the
time of the play, dangerously low. The constipated Blepyrus is emblem-
atic, once again, of a choked economy.
The images of homosexual sodomy in this passage contribute to the
impression of a system in crisis. For in Blepyrus’s fevered imagination,
the cause of the blockade – feces (κόπρος) and a partly digested wild
pear (ἀχράς) – do not remain impersonal but become fully personified
as fellow citizens from, respectively, the deme of Kopros and the deme of
Acherdous. The most obvious effect of these personifications is further
to deflate the figure of Blepyrus, who, within the zero-sum economy of
Athens’s sociosexual hierarchy, is now on the wrong end of anal penetra-
tion. But to the extent that Blepyrus is a stand-in for the dēmos as a whole,
we might see the man from Kopros and the man from Acherdous as not
only “fucking” Blepyrus but also “fucking over” the dēmos. They are per-
sonifications of those opportunistic citizens (politicians, grain ­dealers)
who are hindering Athenian prosperity, including and especially the effi-
cient functioning of the food supply. Aristophanes presented a similar
picture, though on a much larger scale, in the Knights, where Demos
was being “fucked (over)” by two politicians, the Paphlagonian (Cleon)
and the Sausage-Seller.46 I do not think that the satire here is as specific
as in the Knights. We do not need to suppose that behind the man from
Kopros and the man from Acherdous lie actual politicians from these
demes who are hindering the functioning of the state and the economy.47
43
See Henderson (1991) 41, 119. Greek βάλανος is indeed cognate with Latin glans.
44
See Pherecr. frr. 8, 13 PCG; Alex. fr. 167.13 PCG; and Ceccarelli (2000) 457–58, 462.
45
On acorns (βάλανοι), see Plin. Nat. 16.6 and Levine (1988–89) 90–91.
46
See, e.g., Eq. 263, 962–63 and Henderson (1991) 68, 155, 200. The intersection of
political and sexual imagery in this play has been admirably discussed by Wohl (2002)
73–123 and Scholtz (2007) 43–70.
47
Both are small demes, and Whitehead (1986) lists no men from either deme known
from the first two decades of the fourth century b.c.e.
162 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

The deme names are clearly chosen for the pun. We do not even need
to suppose that Aristophanes is thinking of any specific politicians from
any deme. The point is that when Blepyrus’s bowel obstruction becomes
personified, Mr. Kopreios and Mr. Achradousios are presented simulta-
neously as masculine and dominant on the sexual plane and as oppor-
tunistic and antisocial on the political plane. Blepyrus is a loser on both
levels, as a man and as representative of the dēmos.
But the fortunes of both the man and the dēmos change at the end of
the play. Hunger and want give way to a fantastic feast that includes not
only grain but luxuries like fowl and fish, as well as the longest word in
the Greek language (1169–75). And on the sexual plane, Blepyrus goes
from being the catamite of two men (personifications of his “shit” and
of the “wild pear” that is causing his constipation) to being the domi-
nant sexual partner of two (or more?) young women.48 The transition
we see in Blepyrus from being homosexually passive to heterosexually
active is, as Henderson has shown, a frequent metaphor in Aristophanic
comedy for the city’s return to a peaceful and productive state.49 The
rejuvenation of Demos in the Knights employs the same metaphor: he
begins as the passive beloved of two corrupt politicians and ends up as
the active lover of the voluptuous Truces (1389) and of a beautiful, well-
hung slave boy (1385–86).50
There can be no doubt of the humiliation of Blepyrus in his first appear-
ance in the play: he is wearing his wife’s clothes, he is anxious about his
inability to have a bowel movement, and, in what appears to be an allu-
sion to a famous Euripidean scene, he invokes the goddess of childbirth
to help him “deliver” his turd. But in this state he represents the masses
at Athens in the late 390s, who suffered from the economic disruptions
of the Corinthian War, just as Demos in the Knights, in the later years of
the Archidamian War, represented an Athenian populace who was, in
Aristophanes’ view, being “fucked over” by selfish politicians like Cleon.
The cure for Blepyrus rests with the utopian seeker Praxagora, whose
economic and sexual policies lead to a rejuvenation of the dēmos, or at
least of old men like Blepyrus. Her claim to have been midwifing a friend
may have been a lie, but it speaks truth about the role she actually plays.
Perhaps she has not led the Assembly to give birth to a new order. But the
feast made possible by her revolutionary program does suggest that the
48
On the number and identity of the young women Blepyrus gets at the end of the play,
see Sommerstein (1998) 235.
49
Henderson (1991) 68–69. Cf. Henderson (1996) 150–51.
50
For a darker reading of the end of the Knights, see Wohl (2002) 105–23.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 163

efficient distribution of food supplies has been restored;51 and Blepyrus,

the “master,” would not have been able to enjoy it if he had not finally
been able to pass that stool. Praxagora has, however indirectly, helped
Blepyrus to give birth: if not to a new order, at least to a turd.

Male Pregnancy, Female Power, and

the Birth of Athena
I have suggested that the image of a pregnant Blepyrus is thematically
reactivated by Praxagora’s mendacious claim that she was helping a
friend to give birth, and that when Blepyrus mistakenly supposes that
it is the Athenian Assembly that Praxagora was assisting as midwife, the
constipated Blepyrus is transformed into a pregnant dēmos, who will suc-
ceed, thanks to Praxagora’s reforms, in giving birth to prosperity. But I
think that Blepyrus’s pregnancy is embedded thematically in the play’s
matriarchal plot also at a deeper, more structural level, and would argue
that it not only anticipates the reproductive reforms that Praxagora will
soon reveal to her husband but perhaps also constitutes a precocious
response to it.
The scene of Blepyrus at stool (311–71) is followed by a scene in which
Blepyrus learns that women have taken over the Assembly (372–477)
and a long agonistic scene in which he learns from Praxagora herself the
details of her reforms (519–729). The centerpiece of Praxagora’s polit-
ical program, as she herself presents it, is the abolition of private prop-
erty (590–91), but an innocent question posed by Blepyrus about where
men will get money to buy presents for their girlfriends induces Praxagora
to reveal two additional reforms that deal with sexual practice. First,
­“intercourse and procreation” will no longer be restricted to marriage but
will be permitted to any man and woman who wish to join in such a union
(613–15). Second, access to sexual partners will be more ­egalitarian: older
and uglier women will have to be satisfied sexually before men will be
permitted to turn to younger, more attractive partners (617–18), a privi-
lege later extended to older men as well (626–29). Although these sexual
reforms are announced as corollaries to Praxagora’s economic program,
they turn out to play a more prominent role than economic reform in the
remainder of the plot, notably in the long scene between the young man
and the three hags, which dominates the last third of the play (877–1111).

51
We may recall, in this connection, that Artemidorus thought that pregnancy dreams
experienced by a poor dreamer predicted economic prosperity.
164 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

It is also interesting that the sexual reforms are revealed only incidentally,
in response to a question posed by Blepyrus, which would seem to confirm
male suspicions, expressed frequently on the comic stage, that sexual plot-
ting is behind everything that women do.
Praxagora’s sexual program, despite its obvious superficial attrac-
tions, raises two concerns for Blepyrus. The first arises from the “elders
first” policy, which he fears will exacerbate his already limited capac-
ity to perform sexually: if he must first satisfy an older woman, he will
be completely spent by the time he gets to a younger one (619–20; cf.
467–69). The young man who is pursued by three hags toward the end of
the play voices the same concern (1030), which shows that fear of inad-
equate performance is not limited to older men. Although the “elders
first” policy will apply equally to men and women, the scene between the
young man and the three hags at the end of the play makes it clear that
the policy threatens men more than women; there is no comparable
scene in which a young woman is shown to be helpless to meet the sexual
demands of both older and younger men.
The promiscuous unions proposed by Praxagora raise a second and
more serious concern for Blepyrus: the paternity of children. Praxagora
answers that children will arbitrarily be assigned the oldest cohort of
men as their collective father (635–37). But what Athenian male could
take solace in this? Praxagora’s abolition of individual paternity strikes at
the heart of male social status, reducing men’s control over a reproduc-
tive process in which they play a comparatively small role to begin with.
It is significant that Praxagora’s program leaves maternity untouched,
in contrast to the ideal state described in Plato’s Republic, in which chil-
dren will know neither father nor mother (Rep. 460c1–d5, 461c8–e3).52
Indeed, one might view Plato’s evenhanded abolition of blood ties as
striking a greater blow to women than to men, because women have more
to lose. Moreover, the community of children in the Republic is justified
by its promotion of unity within the state, whereas in the Assemblywomen
it is merely a by-product of Praxagora’s plan to give greater sexual free-
dom to women, without any social or political justification of its own.
Praxagora’s denial of paternity and silence on the matter of maternity,
then, exacerbates an already asymmetrical situation: Praxagora proposes,
in a word, to remove what little confidence Athenian men had in their
biological ties to their children.

52
Both Aristophanes and Plato are probably drawing on earlier utopian schemes: see
Ussher (1973) xv–xx; Hubbard (1997) 36–40; Sommerstein (1998) 13–18.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 165

Now we might well wonder if there is any thematic connection between

Blepyrus’s pregnancy and Praxagora’s utopian abolition of paternity.
Froma Zeitlin has argued that the plot of the Assemblywomen, at its most
basic structural level, enacts a reversal of a uniquely Athenian myth: the
story of Cecrops’s institution of marriage.53 Marriage brought with it not
only paternity but also hierarchical institutions such as the oikos (house-
hold) and the polis (city-state), through which men, for the first time,
were able to rule. Pre-Cecropian Athens, by contrast, was not only matri-
lineal but also characterized by a kind of nonhierarchical matriarchy by
default: in the later version of Varro, for example, women “ruled,” but
only because they outnumbered men by one.54 Zeitlin suggests that we
may see Praxagora’s reforms in the Assemblywomen as marking a return
to pre-Cecropian times: her abolition of private property effectively abol-
ishes the notion of the independent household as well as the conceptual
distinction between household and state; and her sexual egalitarian-
ism, whose superficial appeal is undermined in the hag scene, requires
the abolition of marriage. Zeitlin’s suggestion that the myth of Cecrops
functions as a structural subtext for the plot of the Assemblywomen helps
to explain the audience’s probable ambivalence toward the action that
unfolds on stage: Praxagora’s reforms are forward-looking and utopian
but also, at the same time, regressive and indeed frightening.55
I believe we can identify another, and related, mythic subtext in the
background of the Assemblywomen, and one that sheds particular light on
the figure of the pregnant Blepyrus. It turns out that there is an intimate
relationship between Greek myths of matriarchy and Greek myths of male
pregnancy. The myth of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus will serve as
our main paradigm for the intersection between these mythic ­paradigms,
but I would like to start with an example from Greek ethnography.
According to Strabo, the Cantabri, a Celtic people who lived in northern
Spain, practiced a form of the ritual known to modern anthropologists as
the couvade: “When the women give birth, they wait on their husbands and
put them to bed instead of themselves” (3.4.17).56 Strabo understands

53
Zeitlin (1999) 181–90.
54
Varro De gente populi Romani fr. 7 Peter.
55
On forward- and backward-looking utopias in the plays of Aristophanes, see generally
Hubbard (1997).
56
A version of the couvade has also been attributed to the modern Basque people: see, e.g.,
Gallop (1936). One is tempted to see some continuity between the ancient Cantabrian
and modern Basque couvade, at least in the ethnographic imagination, if perhaps not as
a matter of actual practice.
166 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

this custom as a function of a more general inversion of gender roles,

which he characterizes as “a sort of gynaecocracy” (τινα γυναικοκρατίαν):
husbands give dowries to their wives rather than receive them; property
is inherited by daughters rather than sons; and brothers do not marry off
their sisters but are married off by them (3.4.18). What Strabo describes
is a matrilineal descent system rather than a pre-Cecropian form of matri-
archy: paternity is recognized among the Cantabri, but it is institutionally
weak. While a modern anthropologist might explain the Cantabrian prac-
tice of the couvade, if it is an authentic custom, as a means for fathers ritu-
ally to reinforce these weak paternal ties to their children, Strabo himself
does not present it in this way. Ritualized male pregnancy, in his descrip-
tion, is not a hedge against women’s social and political domination but
exists in the shadow of it: male pregnancy among the Cantabri symbolizes
men’s inverted status.57
The myth of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus is also frequently
invoked in the context of female power, but in this case as a successful
male response to it. In the archaic period, the birth of Athena was pre-
sented, at least in part, as an attempt by Zeus to check the power of one
or more powerful goddesses and to consolidate his own power within the
cosmos. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of Athena comes immediately
after Zeus’s triumph over the Titans and Typhoeus and is motivated by a
desire to put an end to the royal succession of father to son (892–900).
It has long been recognized that the challenge Zeus confronts is not
merely the threat of a particular son born to a particular wife but more
generally a reproductive system that tends to produce sons more loyal to
their mothers than to their fathers. Before Zeus, the real power in the
cosmos rested with Gaea: although she did not rule in her own name, she
did control the succession of would-be patriarchs. She helped Cronus to
overthrow Uranus (159–75) and Zeus to defeat Cronus (479–96, 505,

57
For references to other alleged examples of the couvade in the Greco-Roman world,
see Chapter 1, n. 4. In at least one of those other cases, the Tibarenoi of the Black Sea
(Ap. Rhod. 2.1109–14), the practice also seems to be linked with women’s power more
generally. We know little about the actual social structure of the Tibarenoi, but Strab.
12.3.29 reports that in his day the Tibarenoi were actually ruled by a woman, and Fusillo
(1985) 163 has shown that the Pontic ethnographies from which Apollonius has drawn
have been heavily influenced by the paradigmatic case of the neighboring Amazons, the
myth of gender inversion par excellence. We may thus think of the Amazons and Tibarenoi
as a pair: among the Amazons, women perform men’s roles; among the Tibarenoi, men
perform the roles of women. Note also that the Mossynoikoi, whom the Argonauts visit
just after the Tibarenoi, are said to engage in “public intercourse,” which seems to be a
form of promiscuous mating under which maternity alone can be established.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 167

626). She also produced Typhoeus as a rival to Zeus (820–22). It is true

that Gaea eventually comes to advise Zeus about how to distribute power
in the new order (884) and is even the origin, together with Uranus, of
the idea of swallowing Metis (891). But, even so, she represents a con-
stant potential for political instability.58
In other archaic versions of the birth of Athena, Zeus’s nemesis is not
Gaea but Hera. In a pseudo-Hesiodic work from the sixth century, per-
haps the Melampodia, a quarrel between Hera and Zeus leads Hera to
give birth to Hephaestus “without aegis-bearing Zeus,” whereas Zeus, for
his part, swallows Metis and gives birth to Athena.59 The fragment that
survives does not explicitly say that Zeus gave birth to Athena in response
to Hera’s parthenogenetic birth of Hephaestus, though the mere narra-
tive ordering of these events implies at least a structural connection.60
Regardless, the birth of Athena takes place in the context of a conflict
with the reproductively powerful Hera.
More relevant to our discussion of Aristophanes’ Blepyrus is the
deployment of the birth of Athena in classical Athens. The myth is
invoked in four texts from fifth-century Athens, all of them tragedies,
and in all four cases the myth functions as a counter to some form of
matrilineal ­ideology. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the birth of Athena is
invoked twice. First, Apollo suggests that his tendentious version of
Anaxagorean embryology gains support from the story of Athena’s
birth, which shows that “one can become a father without a mother”
(663–64). We have seen that Apollo’s embryology denaturalizes mater-
nity, casting doubt on the existence of blood kinship between Orestes
and his mother, the centerpiece of the Furies’ argument, and naturalizes
paternity, making it a more secure basis for patrilineal succession. Later
in the play, Athena herself adduces the story of her birth to explain her
vote for Orestes: “There is no mother who bore me. . . . I am entirely my
father’s child. As a result, I will not give greater weight to the fate of a
woman who kills her husband, the overseer of the home” (736–40).
Athena, who had no mother of her own, does not think much of the
Furies’ argument about the primacy of the mother-child bond, a ret-
rograde position that provides justification for mothers who kill their
husbands in favor of their children.

58
See Arthur (1982) 77–78.
59
Hes. fr. 343 MW; see discussion of West (1966) 401–3. This passage was central to
Chrysippus’s allegorical interpretations of the birth of Athena, which we discuss in
Chapter 4.
60
The Greek text merely correlates their respective actions: ἣ μὲν . . . αὐτὰρ ὅ.
168 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Whereas Aeschylus presents the myth of “motherless” Athena’s birth

from the head of Zeus as being in opposition to a matrilineal ideology
that privileges the kinship bond a child shares with his mother, Euripides
in the Ion focuses on a different manifestation of matrilineal ideology:
the Athenian myth of autochthony.61 Although myths of autochthony
were perhaps never deployed in defense of matriliny, Euripides exposes
the implicit matrilineal logic of autochthony by emphasizing that the
first Athenian’s birth from the earth is essentially a birth “from woman
alone” and by showing that autochthony, in the plot of this play at least,
serves the interests of the Erechtheids, who wish to trace Ion’s descent
matrilineally from Creusa. The play begins with a focus on Creusa’s
maternity – the child she has lost, the child she hopes to have – but even-
tually shifts attention, in the middle of the play, to Apollo’s establishment
of Xuthus’s social and (fictive) biological paternity of the young temple
attendant. While Creusa, Ion, and the audience know that Creusa is Ion’s
biological mother and that Xuthus is his father as a matter of social con-
vention alone, the Athenians will believe the reverse, that Xuthus is the
biological father and Creusa his mother by adoption. Within Athenian
society, Ion will be just as motherless as Athens’s patron goddess.
It is perhaps not surprising that the myth of Athena’s birth is recounted
by the chorus of Athenian women at just the moment in the play when
this transition from maternity to paternity is gaining momentum: they
address Athena as one “who was not born amid labor pain with the help
of Eileithyia (ἀνειλείθυιαν) . . . but midwifed (λοχευθεῖσαν) by the Titan
Prometheus from the top of Zeus’s head” (452–57). The chorus goes
on to ask Athena and her half sister Artemis to intercede with Delphian
Apollo to promise children to Creusa and Xuthus, so that the genos of
Erechtheus may be preserved (469–71); as Athenians, they are natu-
rally concerned with maintaining the royal line matrilineally through
the “heiress” Creusa. But in the antistrophe of the same choral ode,
they shift their focus to the father’s interests in childbearing: they men-
tion patrilocal marriage (ἐν θαλάμοις πατρίοισι, 476–77) and patrilin-
eal inheritance (πλοῦτον ὡς ἕξοντες ἐκ πατέρων, 478–79), and refer
to the Athens that Xuthus helped to save as a “fatherland” (γᾷ πατρίᾳ,
483). And, sure enough, in the episode that follows, Xuthus returns
with the oracle that declares Ion, the first person to cross his path, to be
his son, and not just his adoptive son, but his biological son (536–37).

61
But cf. Loraux (1993) 8–11 who sees autochthony as supplanting the role of individual
mothers.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 169

Whereupon Xuthus proceeds to perform the rituals that a father per-

forms upon the birth of a son: he plans the birth celebration (653) and
bestows a name (661). At the end of the play, Athena acknowledges
Apollo’s role in fathering and saving Ion but declares that in Athens Ion
will be known as the son of Xuthus alone, and Ion, in accepting this set-
tlement, addresses her as “daughter of most powerful Zeus” (1606), one
final hint of her ­motherless birth.
But Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus does more than mark a shift
in the plot from Creusa’s maternity to Xuthus’s paternity; it also suggests
an alternative to the matrilineal strategy of Creusa and the Erechtheids.
Euripides has put his finger on a awkward paradox: the Erechtheids,
whose rule is based on a succession of “earthborn” royals beginning
with Erichthonius (20–24, 267–70, 999–1000, 1428–29), are central
to Athens’s identity, and yet Athens cannot survive without the exoga-
mous outsider Xuthus. The mythical paradox was easily understood in
contemporary sociopolitical terms: Is the prosperity and indeed preser-
vation of the Athenian state well served by a narrow Periclean definition
of citizenship that is restricted to sons born of native-born Athenians –
autochthones – on both sides (29, 588–90, 735–37)? In providing a nega-
tive answer (at least in part) to this question, Euripides casts a skeptical
gaze at autochthony and its attendant myths. So, for example, when Ion,
wondering about the identity of his mother, speculates that “perhaps
I was born from mother earth (γῆς μητρός),” the socially anomalous
Xuthus declares, dismissively, “the earth (πέδον) does not give birth to
children” (542).
Euripides even hints at Athena’s hostility to the doctrine of autoch-
thony. She never explicitly rejects it, for she is too deeply embedded
in the myth of Erichthonius; Euripides’ strategy, instead, is subtly to
distance her from the myth. He reminds us that Athena received the
earthborn Erichthonius, but only to hand him over to the daughters
of Aglaurus (21–24; cf. 1427–29),62 a myth that served as the basis of
the Arrhephoria, a ritual that initiated representative Athenian girls into
marital sexuality. The myth of Erichthonius here is invoked, then, to hint
that childbirth takes place within the context of marriage, an institution
whose primary function is to guarantee paternity. And, later, when Ion

62
Note the matrilineal designation of the three maidens as “daughters of Aglaurus [the
mother]” (παρθένοις Ἀγλαυρίσιν) rather than as “daughters of Cecrops [the father].”
This is in tune with the thematic focus on maternity in the first part of the play: likewise
Hermes traces his own lineage matrilineally through Maia to Atlas (1–4); though he
mentions Zeus as Maia’s partner, he presents himself as an Atlantid, not a Diid.
170 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

asks Creusa, “Did Athena pick him [Erichthonius] up from the earth?”
she replies, “into her virginal hands, but not as his mother (οὐ τεκοῦσά
νιν)” (269–70). Euripides is at pains here is to downplay this as a myth
of motherhood, especially given that some versions of the myth present
Athena as a sort of “mother.”63
Athena’s role in the Erichthonius story is brought up one final time
when Creusa and the Old Man plot against the life of Ion. According to
Creusa, Athena gave the newborn Erichthonius two drops of Gorgon’s
blood, one of which is lethal, the other salubrious (987–1015); Creusa
proposes to use the lethal drop to kill Ion. It is significant that Euripides
makes the Gorgon one of the “earthborn” (γηγενῆ, 987) Giants
whom “Earth bore” (ἔτεκε Γῆ, 989) and makes Athena its killer. This
Euripidean innovation serves to remind the audience of Athena’s role as
foe of the “earthborn,” and might make one wonder if she does not feel
some ambivalence toward both the “earthborn” Erichthonius, who was
anointed with these two drops of the Gorgon’s blood, and autochthony
generally: autochthony is Athens’s salvation (the salubrious drop) but
also threatens her safety (the lethal drop, used in an attempt to kill the
“son” of Xuthus, Athens’s savior). Creusa, allied here with destructive
forces born of the Earth, threatens to scuttle the plan to save Athens
through a son of Xuthus, much as Gaea threatens the successions of
father to son in Hesiod’s Theogony.
This detailed discussion of the Ion helps to put into context allusions to
the birth of Athena in two other plays by Euripides. In the earlier Erechtheus
(422 b.c.e.), Athena plays a role at the end of the play similar to that in
the Ion: she prophesies to Praxithea that her daughters, the Erechtheids,
will be worshiped as goddesses called the Hyacinthides, that her hus-
band Erechtheus will be granted a cult under the name “Poseidon,” and
that she herself will become a priestess of Athena (fr. 370.65–97 TGF).
What is interesting for our purposes is how Athena prefaces this proph-
ecy: “daughter [ . . . ] of the earth (χθονός), listen to the words of moth-
erless (ἀμήτορο[ς) Athena” (fr. 370.63–64). Why does Euripides allude
to the story of Athena’s birth here? I think Athena’s motherless birth is
meant, as it was in the later Ion, to serve as a counterpoint to the ideology
of autochthony, with which Praxithea closely associates herself earlier in

63
Note especially the version in which Erichthonius’s birth is set in motion when
Hephaestus attempts to mate with Athena and deposits semen on her leg. See Gantz
(1993) 235–36.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 171

the play.64 There, in a lengthy speech in which she justifies sacrificing her
daughter so that Athens may prosper in its war against Eumolpus and
Eleusis, Praxithea defines Athenian unity as a function of autochthony:
The city’s population has not come in from some other place, but we were
born here from the earth itself (αὐτόχθονες). Other cities, meanwhile, were
founded like the chance toss of the dice, some populated from one source,
others from another. (fr. 360.7–10)

She does not think of the daughter she is about to lose as her own, for
in a sense all Athenians have the same mother; this daughter is every-
one’s daughter, a patriotic message for Athens in the waning days of the
Archidamian War. But there is something unsettling about the context
in which Praxithea deploys the myth of autochthony here: Praxithea
and Erechtheus have no son to help them in war (fr. 360.22–31); their
daughters are the only salvation for the house of Erechtheus and the city
of Athens as a whole. And they are not enough, as the rest of the story
makes clear: Athens is saved by the foreigner Xuthus, who is rewarded
with the hand of the “heiress” Creusa and, as we have seen, the social
paternity of her biological son Ion. The fragmentary nature of this play
makes it impossible to draw any secure conclusions, but it seems reason-
able to understand Athena’s reminder to Praxithea of her ­“motherless”
birth as a gentle rejection of the ideology of autochthony, in which
Praxithea earlier in the play took so much pride: it is a reminder that
it will not be mothers who can save Athens on this occasion, but a
father (Xuthus) who is brought from outside and was not born from
the earth.
In the Phoenician Women, finally, Euripides invokes the birth of
Athena as a patrilineal alternative to the autochthony of the Thebans.
Before the fateful battle between Eteocles and Polyneices, the chorus
of Phoenician women recounts the Phoenician version of the founding
of Thebes. At the center of the story is the Phoenician Cadmus, who,
on the advice of Athena, the “motherless goddess” (δίας ἀμάτορος),
sows the dragon’s teeth and kills the armed men who emerge from the

64
We are reminded of this connection when Athena links Praxithea’s genealogy to the
earth in fr. 370.63–64 TGF (quoted previously in the text). Praxithea is not literally the
daughter of the earth: she was either daughter or granddaughter of the river Cephisus.
See Cropp in Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995) 191. There is a lacuna in the middle of
this line: Diggle and TGF print the supplements of Page and Barrett so that the line
reads “daughter of Cephisus, savior of the land” (ὦ χθονὸς [σώτειρα Κηφισοῦ] κόρη),
but this must remain speculation.
172 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

earth (662–75). Why does Euripides give a role to Athena? Why does
he call attention to her motherless birth? The examples from the Ion
and Erechtheus suggest a structural opposition in the minds of Euripides
and his audience between autochthony, a myth associated in Athens
with matrilineal succession, and Athena’s birth, a symbol of patriarchal
order and patrilineal succession. Perhaps Zeus’s exclusive role in the
birth of Athena prefigures the patriarchal role of Cadmus in “plant-
ing” Thebes’s autochthonous generations. If so, we may suppose that
Euripides rewrites the Theban myth of autochthony by emphasizing
the role of a “first father” (Cadmus), working under the guidance of
­“motherless” Athena.
There is one literary reference to the birth of Athena from the fifth
century that is not by an Athenian author, and that is Herodotus’s allu-
sion to the myth in his discussion of Libyan society. According to the
Libyans, Athena was born the daughter of Poseidon and Tritonis, but
“she, angry at her father for some reason, gave herself to Zeus, and Zeus
made her his own daughter” (4.180.5). This story is clearly designed
to reconcile the Libyan genealogy with the standard Greek account: so
Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus, in the Greek version, corresponds
to Athena’s adoption by Zeus, in the Libyan version. Herodotus, or his
source, has implicitly interpreted the myth of Athena’s birth as a myth
of adoption. He goes on to explain, in the very next sentence, that the
children of all Libyan fathers are “adopted” in this way, a function of the
Libyans’ lack of marriage:
These are the things they say [sc. about Athena’s birth and adoption by
Zeus]. And they practice a form of promiscuous mating with women: they
do not cohabit [sc. in marriage] but mate like beasts. And when a woman’s
child grows bigger, the men come together in the third month, and the
child is considered to belong to that man of all the men he most resembles.
(4.180.5–6)

In the absence of marriage, there is no certain way for paternity to be

established; there is only, by default, the fact of biological maternity (and,
in this case, whatever physical resemblance there may be between fathers
and their children). The men of Libya counter this default matriliny by
a ritualized declaration of paternity, a form of adoption, which makes
patrilineal descent possible. And their mythical model for this system of
adduced paternity is Athena, the adoptive “daughter of Zeus,” who, in
the Greek world, is actually born from Zeus’s head.65

65
See the discussion of this passage in Leitao (2007) 266.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 173

In all five fifth-century texts, the birth of Athena represents a hedge

against matrilineal descent, autochthony, and promiscuous mating in
favor of marriage and patrilineal descent. We may understand Blepyrus’s
scatological pregnancy in similar terms: it is structurally a response to
Praxagora’s abolition of marriage and paternity. Although the scene of
Blepyrus at stool precedes the revelation of Praxagora’s program of reform
in the narrative unfolding of the plot, we have seen that Blepyrus’s prayer
to Eileithyia and request for a doctor take place at the same time that
Praxagora was “midwifing” reform through the Assembly. Praxagora,
then, is part utopian seeker but also partly a blocking character in her
own right, for she threatens to return Athens to the pre-Cecropian prac-
tice of promiscuous mating. Blepyrus is thus faced with the same situa-
tion as Zeus in the Theogony and Xuthus in the Ion. Blepyrus is perhaps
too much of a buffoon to be taken seriously as a resister: he is more like
a Cantabrian, perhaps, than a Zeus. But even so, the male audience per-
haps roots for Blepyrus, the dēmos personified, for “giving birth” is cul-
turally enshrined in Greek myth as what men do to resist the assaults of
women on paternity.

Flight of the Dung Beetle: Anal Birth

and Its Discontents
What finally and decisively distinguishes Blepyrus from Zeus is the imag-
ined anal locus of parturition. But as startling as the image is, the anus is
precisely where we should logically expect a male pregnancy to end. To
the extent that the male pregnancy of fantasy is modeled on the female
pregnancy of biological reality, we should expect the pregnant male’s
imaginary reproductive anatomy to be analogous to that of the female.
The part of the male body most closely analogous to the female womb is
naturally the digestive tract, especially the stomach and the bowel, and
the analogy was easily made in the Greek mind given that Greek literary
authors preferred to designate the womb not by a technical term like
ὑστέρα (uterus, womb) or μήτρα (womb), but by more general words
like νηδύς (belly) and γαστήρ (belly, stomach). The same logic ought to
lead one to identify the male anus as the closest analogy to the female’s
os uteri. It is irrelevant, within the logic of cultural fantasy, that women
have the same digestive tracts and anuses that men do, but do not use
them for reproduction. But it is not only the analogy of male and female
bodies that makes possible the idea of anal birth. Also influential, as
we shall see, is the model of avian reproduction: birds lay eggs from
174 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the same cavity (called a cloaca) from which they void solid wastes, as
Aristotle and others were keenly aware,66 making the subconscious link
between defecation and parturition easy if not perhaps inevitable.67 The
idea of anal birth is in fact common the world over, especially in creation
myths.68 But what about ancient Greece?
Blepyrus is in fact the only male in Greek literature who is explicitly
described as giving birth per anum, but there are traces of anality in other
Greek examples of male pregnancy. We may consider once again the
story of the birth of Athena. All versions of the myth have Zeus become
pregnant by means of oral ingestion (i.e., swallowing Metis); once Zeus’s
impregnation becomes translated into an alimentary idiom, parturition
ought logically take place ex ore or ex ano, the only two places, outside
the fanciful world of myth, that the ingested Metis could exit the god’s
body.69 While parturition ex ore must remain a possibility – and we may
have an echo of oral parturition in the myth of Cronus swallowing and
then disgorging his children70 – I would suggest that “oral birth” would
in any event be simply a displacement of anal birth: for if parturient
men take women as their models, their alimentary pregnancies ought
to conclude, as in women, with the emergence of the newborn from
the lower abdomen, from between the legs.71 Impregnation by inges-
tion most logically leads to parturition by excretion. We have already
seen that Third Woman’s parody of the birth of Athena in the Lysistrata
focuses our attention on the belly as the logical location of Athena’s ges-
tation in the body of Zeus. Third Woman may also hint at the anus as
66
See esp. Arist. GA 719b29–720a35.
67
For the Freudian idea that young children believe in a “cloacal theory of birth”
before they come to understand the anatomy and mechanics of reproduction, see
Chapter 1, n. 12.
68
See esp. Dundes (1962). For examples of male anal birth outside the context of creation
myths, see Bettelheim (1954) 234–38; Money and Hosta (1968); Hiatt (1971) 85–86;
Dundes (1976) 227–31; Herdt (1981) 151. For female anal birth, see Gregor (1985)
178–79; Herdt (1981) 146–47.
69
Cf. also the myth of Dionysus’s birth: Euripides, for example, calls Zeus’s thigh-womb for
Dionysus a νηδύς (Bacch. 527), which perhaps brings us back once again to the alimen-
tary model of pregnancy, which ought to end in the anus.
70
One might think also of Zeus’s swallowing and re-creation of the universe in the Derveni
theogony; but we do not know how the swallowed universe emerged from Zeus’ body.
71
On the symbolic interchangeability of στόμα (mouth) and πρωκτός (anus) in Greek
dream language, see Artemid. 5.68. The logic of displacement is reflected also in the
Hittite myth of Kumarbi, who considers different parts of his own body from which to
give birth to Teshub, the storm god, including the mouth and the “good place” (i.e.,
anus) (Pritchard [1955] 121), and in a late Egyptian version of the myth of Horus and
Set, in which Set considers whether to give birth from his ear but ultimately decides to
give birth from his head (Meltzer [1974] 156).
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 175

the logical locus of parturition when she says that she may have to give
birth as a pigeon does, for the womb of a pigeon, like that of all birds,
terminates in the rectum. This may perhaps be the context in which to
understand those Greek cosmogonies which are set in motion when a
male creator gives birth to an egg: Chronus had already been featured in
this role in pseudo-Epimenides’ theogony entitled Oracles, written in the
last third of the fifth century b.c.e., and possibly already in the Orphic
theogony commented on in the Derveni Papyrus.72
Anal pregnancy and birth are also sometimes hinted at in pederastic
contexts in classical Greek literature, although it is always in the con-
text of describing a lover whose interest in his beloved is exclusively
and indeed excessively carnal. The clearest is an anecdote reported by
Aristotle about Periander, the tyrant of Ambracia: one day Periander
asked his boyfriend whether he was pregnant yet with his child, where-
upon the boyfriend flew into a rage and slew the tyrant (Pol. 1311a39–b1;
cf. Plut. Mor. 768f). The anecdote does not make explicit the anatomical
details of the impregnation Periander imagines for his boyfriend, but
the conventions of pederastic sex that we learn about in comedy and
other nonidealizing genres suggest that the boyfriend would become
“pregnant” as a result of anal intercourse,73 and anal impregnation, if
we pursue Periander’s “pregnancy” fantasy to the end, ought reason-
ably to lead to anal parturition. Similar is the vulgar lover criticized by
Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, who “tries to mount [his boyfriend] like an
animal and to father a child (παιδοσπορεῖν) [on him]” (250e4–5), a
phrase that suggests anal impregnation and implies at least some form
of birth.74 Socrates juxtaposes this vulgar anal penetrator, in the next
sentence, to the inspired philosophical lover, whose soul, basking in the
beauty of his beloved, is imagined to sprout wings and fly to the heavens
(251a1–256e2). This “sprouting of wings” is also a kind of birth ­process:
the philosophical lover’s soul is liberated from its body like a fledgling
chick from its shell; the sprouting of wings is accompanied by the “pangs”
(ὠδίνων, 251e5) one associates with labor.75

72
Pseudo-Epimenides: West (1983) 47–52. Derveni theogony: West (1983) 103–4; but cf.
Brisson (1997) 164. On egg imagery in Greek and Near Eastern creation myths gener-
ally, see West (1994).
73
Cf. Henderson (1991) 209–13. Insemination per os is theoretically possible, but our
sources mention this sexual practice only infrequently in connection with pederasty.
Dover (1989) 99.
74
On the meaning of παιδοσπορεῖν in this passage, see Chapter 4, n. 113.
75
On the birth imagery in this passage and on avian birth in Plato more generally, see
Chapter 6.
176 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Although Plato in the Phaedrus presents the anal impregnation prac-

ticed by the vulgar lover in stark opposition to the winged pregnancy
experienced by the philosophical lover, one might understand the latter
as a sublimation or displacement of the former: the philosopher and his
beloved become pregnant, but without being impregnated (i.e., with-
out sexual penetration); their pregnancies are redirected from the anus
(cf. avian cloaca) to the incorporeal soul (cf. avian wings). Plato may not
have been the first to make this move. It seems likely, as we saw in Chapter
4, that long before Aristophanes wrote the Assemblywomen “impregnation”
had become one of the metaphors the Sophists employed to describe
their transmission of knowledge and virtue to Athenian youths, and it is
not unlikely that images from avian birth (sprouting wings, laying eggs)
formed the basis of one important variation on the general metaphor.
One wonders if Aristophanes is not in fact parodying the lofty pedagog-
ical claims that were being made on behalf of pederasty by some elite
Athenians in the late fifth and early fourth centuries, such as those made
later by Prodicus’s student Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium.
Greek myth, as we have seen, suggests that men can become preg-
nant as a means of depriving women of power. But once male pregnancy
becomes inscribed onto relations between men rather than relations
between men and women, the pregnant male puts his masculinity at risk.
Blepyrus, in a sense, reveals the male birth fantasy for what it really is.
He imagines that he has become pregnant as a result of anal penetra-
tion, perhaps not unlike the boyfriend of Periander or the “mounted”
boyfriend of the Phaedrus. If being impregnated by another male and
giving birth anally is so degrading, then why does Blepyrus give voice
to precisely this fantasy? How could Aristophanes and his largely, if not
exclusively, male audience tolerate it? The glib answer that even the most
frightening and disturbing things are tolerable in comedy will not do. I
propose to suggest instead that Aristophanes has put his finger on an
awkward truth, that on some level the anus is the gateway to the secret
aspirations of the Greek male.
It is worth considering, in this connection, a few startling facts about the
thematic use of bodily functions, especially defecation, in Aristophanic com-
edy. Almost all the defecators are men, and feces seem almost to function
as currency in the symbolic economy of manhood. In the Assemblywomen,
as in other plays, men often humiliate one another or imagine humiliating
one another by covering the other in feces (330, 640, 647–48). Sometimes
feces are presented as having great value. Praxagora says that Blepyrus is so
greedy that he would even try to eat more than his share of shit, which leads
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 177

Blepyrus to suppose that shit will also be one of the resources that will be
shared communally under Praxagora’s scheme (595–96). The dissident
neighbor suggests that the wealthy Antisthenes – the same man Blepyrus
had identified earlier as a man who, “in view of his groaning, knows what
the asshole needs when it has to take a shit” (367–68) – would never con-
tribute his property to the communal coffers and would prefer to “shit
for more than thirty days” (806–8). Aristophanes makes an implicit equa-
tion here between Antisthenes’ fabulous wealth and thirty days’ worth of
feces.76 Finally, in the scene from the end of the play between the young
man and the three hags, the young man, feeling a sudden urge to defe-
cate, offers Second Hag two sureties to let him go (1063–65): the sureties
are meant to guarantee his person, but also, implicitly, the value of his
feces. Defecation is a “lower” bodily function, but it produces something
of value, at least within the agonistic economy of men.
We sometimes encounter in comedy a more heroic dimension to this
valorization of feces. In Aristophanes’ Peace, the comic hero Trygaeus,
longing for peace in the waning days of the Archidamian War, flies to
Mount Olympus on a dung beetle to persuade the gods to establish peace
between Athens and its adversaries. Trygaeus finds a heroic model in the
dung beetle of Aesop’s fable (129–79). In Aesop’s telling of the story
(CFA 3), an eagle pursues a hare, who asks a dung beetle for assistance.
The beetle promises assistance and tries to intervene with the eagle, but
the eagle disregards the pleas and devours the hare. The beetle then
seeks revenge: he discovers where the eagle has laid its eggs and, when
the eagle is away, he rolls the eggs out of the nest and smashes them. The
eagle goes to Zeus for help, counting on its special status in the god’s
eyes, and Zeus agrees to allow the eagle to “bring forth its young in his
lap” (ἐν τοῖς ἑαυτοῦ κόλποις τίκτειν). But the beetle, undeterred, forms
a ball of dung and drops it into Zeus’s lap, and when Zeus stands up
in an attempt to dislodge the turd ball, the eagle’s eggs are once again
rolled onto the ground and destroyed. Trygaeus in the Peace has invoked
the fable primarily for its heroic model: the dung beetle of the fable is
the only creature ever to succeed in flying to the gods (129–30); it plays
Pegasus to Trygaeus’s Bellerophon (135–36).
But the underlying fable suggests that the real source of the dung
­beetle’s power is not its ability to soar to heaven but its ability to turn

76
Cf. Aristoph. Acharn. 82, where the Persian king is said to have “shat for eight months
on the golden mountains,” a hint that the king’s “golden” feces are the source of Mount
Pactolus’s gold.
178 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

dung into babies. The text of the fable raises two interesting questions.
First, why is it a “ball” of shit that the beetle drops into the lap of Zeus?
And, second, why does the motif of the eagle’s eggs being rolled to the
ground occur not once but twice in the fable, the first time from the
eagle’s nest, the second time from Zeus’s lap? The answer to the first
question is simple enough: the spherical “ball” of shit becomes function-
ally equivalent to the spherical eggs that the eagle is attempting to lay.77
This equivalence is already implicit in the eagle’s cloacal anatomy: the
eggs come from the same cavity as the eagle’s feces. But the equivalence
works in the opposite direction also: the ball of shit that the male beetle
produces amid the eagle’s eggs in Zeus’s lap becomes a sort of “turd
egg,” which is the source of his victory over the powerful eagle (and
Zeus), just as Blepyrus perhaps seeks an anticipatory victory over women
in power by delivering a “turd child.” But the dung beetle is perhaps not
the only “pregnant male” in the fable, as we can see from a consideration
of our second question. For one effect of repeating the motif of “rolling
out the eagle’s eggs” is to assimilate Zeus to the eagle. The language
Aesop uses is just ambiguous enough: Zeus’s κόλποι, from which this
second “rolling out” takes place, call to mind not only the folds of the
cloak on his lap but also some cavity within the god’s body, especially
a womb.78 Zeus’s command to the eagle – ἐν τοῖς κόλποις τίκτειν – is
equally double-edged: it may be understood to mean either “lay [eggs]
in my lap/womb” or “beget in my lap/womb.”79 This second laying of
eggs in Zeus’s lap may perhaps recall the “second birth” of Dionysus, who
is shown in several red-figured vase depictions from the fifth century as
emerging from the lap (the κόλποι?) of a seated Zeus.80
If Aesop’s story of the dung beetle’s victorious “turd egg” is the inspi-
ration, in the Peace, for Trygaeus’s heroic flight to Olympus, it is used, in
the Lysistrata, to reveal the old men’s fantasy of rejuvenation for the anal
birth fantasy that it really is.81 The context is the great debate between

77
The beetle rolls these dung balls to feed its young, after they have hatched; each ball
contains enough nourishment for one egg, a fact that underscores the isomorphism
between dung balls and eggs.
78
In Hipp. Nat. puer. 31, the word κόλπος refers to pouches within the uterus. In comedy,
the word can refer to a woman’s vagina (see Eccl. 964–65 and other passages cited in
Henderson [1991] 140–41) as well as the anus (see Aristoph. Lys. 1170 [a woman’s]
with Henderson [1991] 149).
79
For τίκτειν meaning “to sire, beget,” unusual in classical Greek prose, see discussion in
Appendix II.
80
On this iconography, see Boardman (2004) 105–6.
81
The fable is alluded to also at Vesp. 1448, but the theme of anal birth is absent there.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 179

the chorus of old men and chorus of old women: the men, recalling
their heroic days resisting tyranny at Leipsydrion, strip for action and
hope for enough rejuvenation to enable them to defeat the women who
have taken the Acropolis (659–70); the women respond by stripping for
action as well and threatening the men in various ways (682–94), ending
with a threat to “midwife” the men “like the dung beetle did the egg-
laying eagle” (695). What is the basis of the women’s threat? Henderson
thinks the women allude to this fable of Aesop for the specific imagery
of violence it offers: just as the beetle destroyed the eggs of the eagle,
so the women threaten to destroy the “eggs,” that is, the testicles, of the
old men.82 This interpretation is promising, but it leaves unexplained
two features of the women’s threatening allusion: why they describe the
beetle’s vengeance as “midwifing” and why they resort to so indirect an
allusion at all if all they mean to do is threaten the old men’s testicles.
The answer, I think, is that the object of the women’s assault is not
primarily (if at all) the men’s testicles, but the men’s fantasy of rejuve-
nation more broadly, which draws on much of the same imagery that the
women see in the fable of the eagle and the dung beetle. We have strong
evidence in the strophic responsion between the men’s and women’s
choruses. The two lines that conclude the women’s antistrophe – “so if
you so much as say a threatening word (because I’m spittin’ mad), I’ll
midwife (μαιεύσομαι) you like the dung beetle did the egg-laying eagle”
(694–95) – respond not only metrically but, indeed, also thematically to
the two lines that conclude the men’s strophe: “But now we must become
young again (ἀνηβῆσαι), sprout wings again (ἀναπτερῶσαι) over our
whole bodies, and shake off this old age (ἀποσείσασθαι τὸ γῆρας)”
(670–71). We can in fact be even more specific and say that the fable of
the dung beetle responds in particular to that part of the men’s rejuve-
nation fantasy that involves “sprouting wings again” (ἀναπτερῶσαι). The
women see in the notion of “sprouting wings again” an implicit image
of rebirth, and their description of the vengeance the beetle has on the
eagle as “midwifing” confirms this.
There are other passages from classical Athenian literature in which
“sprouting wings” is a metaphor for rebirth, especially the eschatolog-
ical rebirth that was promised by the mysteries. Plato in the Phaedrus,
as we have seen, uses the image of “sprouting wings” to describe how
the soul, by practicing philosophy, can metaphorically take flight from
82
Henderson (1987) 161. On ᾠά as slang for testicles, see Henderson (1991) 126. The
men had themselves referred to their testicles (ἐνόρχης, 661) in the strophe to which
the women’s antistrophe responds.
180 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the body. But this metaphor is attested even before Plato. Toward the
end of Aristophanes’ Birds, Peisetaerus receives requests for wings from
Cinesias, a “soaring” dithyrambic poet, who presents himself as a sort of
poetic shaman “flying over the sea with the gusts of wind . . . now proceed-
ing along a southern route, now drawing my body toward the north, cut-
ting the harborless furrow of the aithēr” (1395–1400). He also receives
this request from an informer, who wishes to fly from place to place
bringing lawsuits and then escape his enemies (1420–29). Peisetaerus
exhorts him to pursue a more noble profession and describes this very
exhortation as an attempt to “give wings” to the young informer (1437).
When the informer asks him what he means, Peisetaerus replies that
“all are given wings through words” (πάντες τοι λόγοις ἀναπτεροῦνται,
1438–39), marking a shift from the literal growth of wings desired by
Cinesias and the informer (πτερόω) to the growth of wings as a meta-
phor for inspiration (ἀναπτερόω, 1439, 1443, 1449).83 Peisetaerus him-
self explains the metaphor: “For the mind flies in midair (μετεωρίζεται)
thanks to words” (1447). This suggests that here too we are dealing with
a somewhat philosophical, even shamanistic, kind of inspiration. While
the wing-sprouting imagery is most prominent in these short scenes from
the end of the play, the entire plot of the Birds is predicated on the idea
that taking flight to the heavens is the path to personal rejuvenation and
societal renewal more generally.84
A similar context must be found for the fantasy of the men’s chorus
in the Lysistrata: the rejuvenation and the casting off of old age that
they hope for are just what contemporary Dionysiac-Orphic mystery
cults promised their initiates,85 and it is quite possible that the growth
of wings was part of this eschatological fantasy, as it certainly was a gen-
eration later when Plato penned the Phaedrus. When the chorus of old
women threaten to “midwife” the old men like the dung beetle mid-
wifed the eagle, they deflate the men’s fantasy of a mystical, avian rebirth
by reminding them of women’s reproductive power (thus the midwife
who helps other women give birth) and pointing out that just beneath
the surface of the men’s dream is the cloacal reality of anal birth (the

83
On this metaphor, see Dunbar (1995) 299–300.
84
So already Henderson (1991) 84–85. The theme may be inspired, in part, by eschato-
logical Orphic cosmogonies that begin with the hatching of Eros from an egg, clearly
parodied at Av. 693–703. Hubbard (1997) 27–36 has argued that Peisetaerus’s program
is sophistic in origin; if so, the invocation of mystery imagery may also be sophistic in
origin.
85
See Eur. Bacch. 187–90; Aristoph. Ran. 345–49; Plat. Leg. 666b5–7.
 Blepyrus’s Turd-Child and the Birth of Athena 181

fable of the eagle and the dung beetle). The flight of the dung beetle,
which was the inspiration for Trygaeus’s heroic journey to Olympus in
the Peace, is invoked here by the old women of the Lysistrata to reveal
men’s fantasy of rejuvenating rebirth for the filthy, and absurdly impos-
sible, affair that it is.

Blepyrus’s Turd-Child
It should be clear by now that Blepyrus’s scatological pregnancy rep-
resents more than an opportunity for a cheap laugh. We have seen
that Aristophanes uses this scene as a way to engage with one or more
tragic or comic scenes of childbirth, including a scene from his own
earlier Lysistrata, which probed the logic of the story of Athena’s birth
from Zeus’s head. We have indeed seen that there is a heroic quality
to Blepyrus’s “pregnancy.” He plays a similar symbolic function to that
of Demos in the Knights: his constipation represents the blockages that
have hampered the functioning of the Athenian economy, especially the
market for grain; his parturition ought to unloose the market forces that
can bring food aplenty to the Athenian populace. It is in fact what hap-
pens at the end of the play. Praxagora, meanwhile, is the dēmos’s midwife:
she is midwifing a new order in the Assembly at just the moment that
her husband Blepyrus is groaning for relief over his chamber pot. But
Blepyrus plays not only the role of Demos to Praxagora’s midwife but
also the more structural role of male parturient to Praxagora’s woman in
power. The link in Greek thought between male pregnancy and matriar-
chy or matrilineal descent is robust: sometimes the male parturient is an
empowered Zeus, who gives birth to Athena from his head, sometimes
a debased and inverted Cantabrian. It does not matter that we learn of
Blepyrus’s “pregnancy” before we learn the details of Praxagora’s aboli-
tion of marriage: the two take place simultaneously, as we have seen. The
thing that is most unusual about Blepyrus’s “pregnancy” is of course its
anal idiom, and this perhaps more than anything vitiates Blepyrus’s her-
oism as a resister to the novel matriarchal order of Praxagora. But while
the anality of Blepyrus’s pregnancy is easily mocked, it may nevertheless
tell the unsanitized truth about the two myths in which Zeus gives birth,
the birth metaphors employed by the Sophists and Plato, and the heroic
aspirations of Greek manhood more generally.
 6

The Pregnant Philosopher

Masculine and Feminine Procreative Styles
in Plato’s Symposium

Although much has been written on the pregnancy metaphor in Plato’s

Symposium, there is still a surprising lack of consensus regarding its nature
and function. One of the main causes of our imperfect understanding of
Plato’s use of the metaphor is the fact that few scholars have attempted
to situate it within a broader historical context.1 There has, in fact, been
a tendency to assume that Plato either was himself the inventor of the
metaphor or revived a minor, moribund metaphor and developed it into
something completely new, although this assumption, by itself, has not
proved to be an impediment to some thoughtful readings of how the
metaphor functions within the Symposium. But however original Plato’s
use of the pregnancy metaphor, his Greek readers would have under-
stood him to be deeply engaged with earlier deployments of myths and
metaphors of male pregnancy and birth in the fifth century, especially
the reproductive and agricultural metaphors used by the Sophists to
describe their own teaching practice.
One of Plato’s major interests throughout his career was the nature
and origin of knowledge, and the passion he brought to the topic was
fueled, in great part, by his disdain for the educational theories of the
Sophists, who claimed, among other things, that virtue could be taught.
One could easily argue, without exaggeration, that one of the primary
aims of Platonic epistemology was to refute this very claim. What is
1
Burnyeat (1977) 14 n. 4 and Halperin (1990) 138 do contain references to earlier uses
of the pregnancy metaphor. But Halperin, for example, reflecting an assumption that
I think is typical of most scholars who have discussed Plato’s use of the metaphor, nev-
ertheless concludes: “But nothing in the previous literary tradition approaches Plato’s
imagery in the Symposium. Plato turned what was a mere figure of speech – or even,
perhaps, a dead metaphor – into an extended allegory and an explicit programme, elab-
orating it deliberately and systematically as no one had done before” (138). See also
Vlastos (1981) 21 n. 59; Tarrant (1988) 122.

182
 The Pregnant Philosopher 183

interesting about Plato’s epistemological polemics in the Symposium is

that he uses some of the Sophists’ own pedagogical metaphors against
them. Plato adopts a similar strategy in the Theaetetus, which we discuss
in the next chapter.

Diotima on Intellectual Pregnancy

and Parturition
There is still no agreement on precisely what combination of male and
female biological processes lies behind the metaphor presented in the
Symposium. Written perhaps in the 370s b.c.e., the Symposium presents a
fictional account of a party celebrating the tragic victory, more than a
generation earlier, of the poet Agathon; the dialogue focuses on a series
of speeches in praise of love that were supposedly given on this occa-
sion by several prominent Athenians, culminating in the great speech
of Socrates, who reports the erotic teachings he received as a younger
man from a Mantinean priestess named Diotima, and a humorous coda
in which a drunken Alcibiades reminisces about his frustrated love affair
with Socrates. It is in the speech of Diotima, as reported by Socrates, that
Plato develops his pregnancy metaphor through a combination of tra-
ditional fertility metaphors familiar from the poets and prose authors of
the classical period and tendentious but ingenious extensions of these
traditional metaphors into new and unexpected areas.
We can identify three main sections in Diotima’s development of the
male birth metaphor. The first (206b7–207a4) describes erōs as the force
that draws humans together to reproduce. Diotima has established that
love is the desire to possess the beautiful and the good eternally. She now
asks Socrates if he knows the “activity” (πρᾶξις) in which lovers engage
in order to gain permanent possession of the good and the “function”
(ἔργον) of erōs more generally (206b1–3). When Socrates is unable to
answer, Diotima explains that erōs aims at “birth (τόκος) in beauty, both
in body and in soul” (206b7–8); in other words, the “activity” of erōs is
sex and the “function” is reproduction. This is perhaps not the kind of
erōs that the aristocratic homophiles at Agathon’s party are most inter-
ested in, which is perhaps one reason why Plato felt he needed a woman
to remind them.2
We expect the argument to proceed to demonstrate that sexual repro-
duction is the means by which we gain perpetual possession of the good,

2
On the function of Diotima’s femininity, see Halperin (1990) 113–51.
184 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

and ultimately it does. But not before Diotima creates some confusion
when she explains, apparently with the intent of clarifying her earlier
definition of the activity and function of erōs, that “all men are pregnant
(κυοῦσιν) in both body and soul, and when they come of age, their nature
desires to give birth (τίκτειν)” (206c1–4). This is confusing because the
verb κυέω is used by classical Greeks exclusively of women and τίκτω, at
least in prose, almost exclusively of women.3 Diotima knows that she is
pushing the semantic range of these words and tries to reassure Socrates
with the further statement that “sex between a man and woman is, after
all, a ‘birth’ (τόκος)” (206c5–6). It has long been recognized that this
reference to sex as a τόκος envisions the emission of seed – in the male,
especially, but possibly also in the female – as a sort of “birth.” In the
Timaeus, for example, Plato speaks of male ejaculation in terms of not
only “birth” (τόκοι) but also “(birth) pangs” (ὠδῖνες) (86c6–7).4 The
imagery, in our passage from the Symposium, of “shriveling” in the pres-
ence of ugliness (206d5–7) suggests that Plato is in fact thinking, at least
in part, of pregnancy in terms of male arousal.5 This notion of male ejac-
ulation as a τόκος, so reminiscent of Anaxagoras’s one-seed embryology,
puts the male role in the reproductive process on a par with the female
role, if it does not supplant the female entirely.6 But I think Pender and
others are wrong to suggest that this first form of male birth is about
nothing more than ejaculation. Plato’s rhetorical challenge here is, quite
the contrary, to keep the waters muddy: he has Diotima begin by hinting
at a more metaphorical male pregnancy, which she will explain more
later, but then draws back and reassures the reader, for the moment, with
a more familiar concept, that “pregnancy” is really just a metaphor for
male arousal, “parturition” just a metaphor for sexual release.
The pregnancy theme is interrupted briefly at 207a5, where Socrates
rehearses Diotima’s discussion of how humans pursue immortality
through reproduction and, in a few special cases, through heroic action,
but the theme resumes again at 208e1 and continues until the end of
Diotima’s speech at 212a7. This long section forms a single continuous

3
Dover (1980) 147 observes, correctly, that τίκτω is “used both of ‘begetting’ and of
­‘bearing’ offspring.” But this does not mean that they are equally used of men and women,
or even close to it. τίκτω is used of the male reproductive role in a small minority of cases,
at best, and when used in conjunction with γεννάω, is used exclusively of women. The
two terms are rightly distinguished by Sier (1997) 112; cf. Guthrie (1962–81) 4.387. See
more detailed discussion in Appendix II.
4
See Morrison (1964) 52–55; Pender (1992) 72–76.
5
So Pender (1992) 76.
6
Cf. Aesch. Eum. 658–60.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 185

argument leading up to the famous “ascent” passage, but it is punctuated

at 209e5–210a4, where Diotima invokes the language of the mysteries
to distinguish the earlier part of this section (208e1–209e4), which she
likens to μυστικά or “lesser mysteries,” from the more advanced discus-
sion that follows (210a4–212a7), which she compares to the mysteries’
ἐποπτικά or “higher teachings.”
The second section of Diotima’s discourse on intellectual pregnancy
(208e1–209e4), which she characterizes retrospectively as the “lesser
mysteries,” takes up the issue of soul pregnancy, which had been left
unexplored in the first section. But in order to do so, Diotima feels the
need to introduce the notion that humans and animals reproduce in
order to gain a sort of immortality. The reason that Diotima provides
this digression on immortality is that she needs to explain the motivation
men have to give birth intellectually: for while men may be motivated
to engage in physical procreation by the prospect of physical pleasure,
­pleasure – even intellectual pleasure, if there be such a thing – seems
somehow beneath the more lofty project of intellectual birth. Immortality
can now be presented as the motivation for both physical and intellec-
tual birth: men who are pregnant in body have sexual intercourse with
women in order to gain immortality through their children; men who
are pregnant in soul gain immortality through their intellectual children
(208e1–209a4). The shift of emphasis from the biological mechanics of
reproduction, from which perspective the woman’s role is much longer
and palpably more impressive, to the eschatological aspirations behind
all reproduction, physical and intellectual, places the father on a level
equal to that of the mother. The parallel shift from physical to intellec-
tual reproduction further develops this paternal metaphysics, threaten-
ing to render the mother entirely otiose.
In the first half of this section, Plato continues his practice of employ-
ing both male (γεννάω) and female (κυέω, τίκτω) reproductive terms
almost interchangeably, and the reason is that he wishes to emphasize the
analogy between the production of intellectual children and the produc-
tion of physical children. So the intellectual lover, like the physical lover,
becomes pregnant (ἐκύει, 209c3), and here it may still be, in part, a meta-
phor for arousal: for Diotima tells us that it is in the presence of a beautiful
youth that the intellectual lover becomes “full of” (εὐπορεῖ, 209b8) logoi.
The intellectual lover is also said to both “give birth to and beget” these
offspring (τίκτει καὶ γεννᾷ, 209c3). But in the next clause Plato shifts to
a more traditional male reproductive metaphor: the child of this intel-
lectual “sex” is referred to as something “begotten” (γεννηθέν, 209c4).
186 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

I think the retreat to γεννάω here is important, for it seems to put the
lover in the father’s role, and perhaps hints that the boyfriend is the
“mother,” though the boyfriend will become increasingly unimportant
as the discussion proceeds.
It is striking that the language for male intellectual creativity in the
remainder of this second section is consistently that of “begetting,” the
traditional male role in reproduction. The shift to begetting coincides
with a transition from general remarks on the nature of intellectual
reproduction to a discussion of specific poets and lawgivers who have
produced intellectual offspring. Diotima says that “all poets are begetters
(γεννήτορες)” (209a4), and a bit later lists Homer and Hesiod as among
those who have left “offspring” (ἔκγονα) behind (209d1–4). Solon is
credited with the “begetting” (γέννησις) of laws (209d6–7), and other
men who have performed great deeds are credited with “having begot-
ten” (γεννήσαντες) all types of virtue (209d7–e3). There are two proba-
ble reasons for this retreat back to the language of male begetting. First,
to refer to Homer and Solon as the “begetters” (i.e., “fathers”) of their
respective intellectual children, when metaphor in the fifth century pre-
sented poets and lawgivers as “giving birth” (i.e., “mothers”) to these
intellectual offspring, enables Plato to stop short of activating a complete
reproductive metaphor: he perhaps does not want the reader to wonder
who the (intellectual) sexual partners of these historical figures might
have been, especially since Plato has made it clear that the context of
intellectual reproduction here is the pederastic love between man and
boy.7 But I think there is a second reason for Plato’s retreat to beget-
ting here: the spiritual reproduction of Homer and Solon, while supe-
rior to the physical reproduction transacted between men and women
(209c5–d1), still falls short of the intellectual creativity that Diotima
reveals in the next section, which she characterizes as the epoptika of
love’s mysteries. To take this final step, as we shall see, is to embrace a dis-
tinctively female mode of creativity, at which Plato has been hinting from
the moment Diotima described male arousal as “pregnancy” (κυοῦσιν,
206c1) and sexual release as “parturition” (τίκτειν, 206c3–6).
The third section (210a5–212a7) introduces these “higher mysteries”
of love. Whereas the second section developed the distinction between
procreation in body and procreation in soul, the third section focuses on

7
So, rightly, Pender (1992) 80. Cf. Dover (1980) 151–52, who suggests that “the beautiful
medium ‘in’ which Homer ‘generated’ poems or Solon laws” is the “virtuous character
of the societies for which Homer sang and Solon legislated.”
 The Pregnant Philosopher 187

a more epistemological distinction between the “many” and the “one”:

the goal of the ascent is to realize that the beauty that resides in one
object is the same on some level as that which resides in other objects.
Parallel to this opposition between the many and the one are two others.
The first is a different version of the distinction between body and soul:
this is not the distinction between physical reproduction (in the body,
between male and female) and intellectual reproduction (in the soul,
between man and youth) of the second stage, but a distinction within
the realm of intellectual reproduction. For some men produce intellec-
tual offspring inspired by physical beauty, and indeed often the physical
beauty of a single youth,8 whereas others are inspired by the beauty of
an individual soul or even beauty generally. Related to this is a distinc-
tion between the (one) beauty that may be observed in physical objects
(especially, but not exclusively, human bodies) and that which one may
observe in “activities” (ἐπιτηδεύματα, 210c3, 6, d2–3) and eventually
“forms of knowledge” (ἐπιστῆμαι, 210c7, d7).
These mutually dependent transitions from many to one, body to soul,
sensibles to intelligibles coincide with a striking and decisive shift once
and for all to the female language of giving birth. We noticed that half-
way through the second section Plato signals a retreat to the language
of begetting. He begins the third section with the same language: the
spiritually pregnant lover who is inspired by the beauty of a single body is
said to “beget” (γεννᾶν) logoi (210a7). But thereafter – after, that is, the
transition from the many to one has been introduced (210b2–6) and
we begin to focus on the love inspired by the beauty of another’s soul
(210b6–c1) – Plato uses exclusively the language of female parturition.
So the lover who is attracted to the beautiful soul of a single youth “gives
birth to” (τίκτειν) logoi that will make young men better (210c1–3), a wry
reversal of the charge laid up against the historical Socrates. When the
lover transcends individual beautiful souls and gazes on the sea of Beauty,
he “gives birth to” (τίκτῃ) logoi and thoughts (210d4–6). The same man
will “give birth to” (τίκτειν) not images of virtue but true virtue, and once
he has “given birth to” (τεκόντι) true virtue, he will become as immortal
as possible for a human being (212a2–6).
Some scholars have argued that the reproductive image here is still
masculine. Pender, for example, adducing a passage from the Republic in

8
Note that the intellectual lovers of the second section, “who are pregnant in their souls
even more than in their bodies” (209a1–2), are attracted not just to a youth’s beautiful
soul, but to “both” (συναμφότερον, 209b7) soul and body.
188 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

which the philosopher “mingles” with the Forms and “begets” (γεννήσας)
intelligence and truth (Rep. 490b5–7), argues that when Diotima says that
the philosopher “gives birth to” (τίκτῃ) logoi “in unstinting ­philosophy”
(ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ ἀφθόνῳ) (210d5–6), Plato means that he inseminates
Philosophy, and when the philosopher “gives birth (τεκόντι) to true vir-
tue” (212a5–6), he actually begets virtue on the Form of Beauty.9 But
there are grave difficulties with this interpretation. First of all, it ignores
the fact that while Plato in the Republic uses only the masculine γεννάω,
in the Symposium he makes a marked shift from γεννάω to τίκτω toward
the end of Diotima’s speech and sticks with τίκτω for the remainder of
the speech.10 Second, the word “in” (ἐν) in the phrase Pender translates
as “in unstinting philosophy” must instead be translated “in the pres-
ence of,” as in the earlier passage where Diotima says that all men beget
and give birth “in the presence of beauty” (ἐν καλῷ, 206b7–8),11 with
Beauty playing the role of midwife (206d2–3). The philosopher of the
Symposium does not (pace Pender) ejaculate “into” Philosophy but gives
birth “in the presence of” Philosophy personified.
Our preliminary description of the development of the pregnancy
metaphor in Diotima’s speech has left us with two important questions.
First, what exactly is it that Diotima imagines that the philosopher strives
to give birth to? We hear of poetry, laws, logoi, and virtue in the second
section of her description of intellectual pregnancy and parturition, and
logoi and virtue alone in the third section. Does the philosopher aim at
all of these indiscriminately? Or is there some relationship between these
different kinds of intellectual offspring? Second, how do we account for
Plato’s decisive shift from the masculine language of begetting (γεννάω)
to the feminine language of parturition (τίκτω)?

γεννάω: The Missing Mothers of Myth

We begin with a preliminary consideration of Plato’s shift from γεννάω
to τίκτω, but by way of a detour through the earlier speeches in the

9
Pender (1992) 81–83.
10
The Republic passage does couple the philosopher’s masculine “begetting” (γεννήσας)
with the distinctively feminine experience of “labor pangs” (ὠδίς), but I would argue
that the former trumps the latter, and that we are perhaps meant, in any event, to imag-
ine these “labor pangs” as the “pangs” of pleasure that precede ejaculation, as at Tim.
86c6–7.
11
See Sheffield (2001) 3 n. 1. But ἐν does denote sexual penetration at 191c3–4: γένεσιν
ἐν ἀλλήλοις . . . διὰ τοῦ ἄρρενος ἐν τῷ θήλει. For a different interpretation of this phrase,
see Brisson (1999) 211.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 189

Symposium, which anticipate, in a way that has not been noticed, the
mysteries of male birth introduced by Diotima. The theme of birth has
in fact been activated almost from the very beginning of this dialogue of
speeches in praise of Eros, which should perhaps not surprise us given
that the encomium genre requires, as one of its elements, an account
and praise of the honoree’s γένος, his “birth” or “genealogy.”12 In these
speeches leading up to Diotima, Plato relentlessly suppresses the fem-
inine role in the birth of Eros and of erōs and replaces it, in part, with
various forms of masculine “pregnancy” and “birth” that we explored in
the earlier chapters of this book: masculinist theories of reproduction,
myths of male parthenogenesis, and male pregnancy and parturition
metaphors. If the pregnant male of those earlier myths and metaphors
was not explicitly set up in opposition to the pregnant female, he clearly
is in the Symposium, at least in part. Plato’s strategy here will yield two
dividends. First, his suppression of feminine birth in the earlier speeches
will make it safe for the male philosopher to reappropriate a somewhat
different version of feminine birth, when it comes time for him to “give
birth.”13 Second, his replacement of feminine birth with images of male
“birth” from a previous generation of poets and thinkers allows him to
contrast these essentially “phallic” forms of male pregnancy and partu-
rition with a more powerful, and fully feminine, pregnancy available to
the true philosopher alone. We take up this idea in the final section of
this chapter.

Before the Speeches

Plato actually begins to remove the female from the scene of birth before
the speeches in praise of Eros even begin. Eryximachus has suggested that
he and his fellow symposiasts banish the flute girl and engage themselves
instead in conversation (176e4–9). The topic he proposes, praise of the
god Eros, had its origin in a conversation he once had with his boyfriend
Phaedrus: “I begin my proposal along the lines of Euripides’ Melanippe.
For ‘the story is not mine’ but Phaedrus’s here (οὐ γὰρ ἐμὸς ὁ μῦθος,
ἀλλὰ Φαίδρου τοῦδε)” (177a2–4). The learned men at Agathon’s party,
not to mention the ideal readers of Plato’s Symposium, would not fail
to recall the complete line from Euripides’ Melanippe Sophe: “The story

12
See, e.g., Arist. Rhet. 1367b30; Nightingale (1993) 115, 117.
13
Cf. Loraux (1995) 144, on Plato’s strategy in constructing the masculinity of Socrates in
the Phaedo, quoted in Chapter 1.
190 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

is not mine, but [one I learned] from my mother” (κοὐκ ἐμὸς ὁ μῦθος,
ἀλλ’ ἐμῆς μητρὸς πάρα, Eur. fr. 484.1 TGF). Eryximachus has substituted
“Phaedrus here” in place of Melanippe’s “my mother,” the first of many
instances in the Symposium in which a man takes the place of a mother,
and it comes, naturally enough, just after Eryximachus has proposed
expelling the last remaining female in the room. But while Phaedrus
takes the place of the original mother, he does so not as mother himself
but as a father: he is described as the “father of the proposal” (πατὴρ τοῦ
λόγου, 177d5) to make speeches in praise of Eros.
The guests at Agathon’s party would doubtless also recall the rest of
Melanippe’s speech:
The story is not mine, but [one I learned] from my mother, that Heaven
and Earth were once a single form, and that after they were separated from
one another, they gave birth to (τίκτουσι) all things and brought them into
the light, trees, birds, animals that the salty sea nourishes, and the race of
mortals. (Eur. fr. 484 TGF)

We saw in Chapter 2 that this cosmogony, which erodes the sexual dif-
ferentiation between father Heaven and mother Earth, who both “gave
birth to (τίκτουσι) all things,” was attributed in antiquity to Anaxagoras
of Clazomenae, and we suggested that it must be understood in the con-
text of a larger pattern of masculinism within Anaxagoras’s thought,
especially his view that males alone produce “seed” in the process of ani-
mal reproduction. The substitution of “Phaedrus here” for “my mother”
invokes, then, at least for the educated reader, a masculine Heaven
(Uranus) who “gives birth” in the form of fertile rain and probably also
the notion that individual men “give birth” to homunculi in the form of
ejaculated semen.
It also seems quite possible that Plato also has in mind, if only on a sub-
conscious level, the larger rhetorical context in which Melanippe deploys
this cosmogony in Euripides’ play. Raped by Poseidon, Melanippe has
given birth to twins and, at the urging of the god, exposes them in a cow
shed. Her grandfather Hellen, discovering the boys being suckled by one
of the cows, assumes they are the monstrous offspring of the cow and
urges they be burned. Melanippe, without yet revealing that the sons are
her own, apparently gives this speech with its Anaxagorean cosmogony
to prove that human children could never be born of a cow: these must
be the children of a human female.14 The immediate context of this

14
For this reconstruction of the play, see Dion. Hal. Rhet. 8.10, 9.11; Bury (1932) 18;
Webster (1967) 148; Cropp in Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995) 269–70.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 191

speech, if this reconstruction of the play is correct, is important because

it is apparently a speech that attempts to vindicate human motherhood,
uttered paradoxically by a woman constrained by circumstances to deny
(for the moment) her own maternity.
Eryximachus, then, suppresses the mother not only by substituting
“Phaedrus here” for “my mother” in the one line from the Melanippe Sophe
that he quotes but also by neglecting to quote the lines of Melanippe’s
speech that follow, which seem to have been offered as proof of the bio-
logical bond between mother and child. What is more, the exchange of
knowledge Melanippe describes as taking place between women (the
passing of Anaxagorean cosmological lore from mother to daughter) is
relocated to a conversation between men (lover and beloved), the scene
of Platonic philosophy.

Phaedrus
“Father” Phaedrus himself continues this program of suppressing the
mother. Phaedrus begins his encomium to Eros with the god’s unusual
birth: proof that Eros is among the oldest of all the gods is that “no
private individual or poet” attributes to him any parents (178b2–3).15
He adduces Hesiod, Parmenides, and Acusilaus as witnesses, but the evi-
dence of Parmenides and Acusilaus undercuts his claim, though in a
way potentially fruitful for Plato as author. We may begin with the evi-
dence from Parmenides, which consists of a single line: “[She] thought
into existence (μητίσατο) Eros first of all the gods” (178b11 = DK 28
B13). By quoting the line out of context, so that the grammatical sub-
ject of the verb is obscured, Phaedrus suppresses the expressed subject
of Parmenides’ original, which allows him to maintain his claim that
Parmenides attributed no parents to the god. But we know that the
grammatical subject of μητίσατο was “the goddess,” probably Aphrodite,
who was in fact commonly identified as the mother of Eros in archaic
and classical texts.16 Phaedrus thus in effect elides from Parmenides’

15
Although Phaedrus insists that “no private individual or poet” gave Eros parents, Eros
was in fact commonly identified as the son of Aphrodite: Sapph. fr. 198 PMG (father
Uranus); Simon. fr. 575 PMG (father Ares); Pind. fr. 122.3–5 SnM; and generally Gantz
(1993) 3–4. Other pre-Platonic sources provided still other genealogies: in Sapph.
fr. 198bis PMG, he is the son of Uranus and Ge; in Alc. fr. 327 PMG, the son of Zephyrus
and Iris; and in Acus. FGrH 2 F 6, as we shall see, the son of Night and either Erebus
or Aether.
16
On the identity of this goddess, see Chapter 4, n. 19. On Aphrodite as mother of Eros,
see preceding note.
192 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

account the goddess most Greeks considered to be the mother of Eros.

Of course Phaedrus might argue that the goddess is not a real “mother”
in Parmenides’ poem, that “thinking into existence” or, more generi-
cally, “devising” (μητίομαι) is not the same as “giving birth” (τίκτω).17
But he is perhaps at cross purposes with Plato, the author, who surely
presents Parmenides’ “thinking” goddess as a prototype for the male phi-
losopher who will give birth intellectually.18
Phaedrus’s citation of Acusilaus is also mischievous. He claims that
Acusilaus’s genealogy gave Eros no parents, but this conflicts with all the
other evidence we have, which suggests that Acusilaus made Eros the
son of Night and some abstract male deity, either Erebus or Aether.19
Acusilaus probably gave Eros a genealogy similar to that we find in
Aristophanes’ genealogical parody in the Birds (694–95), where Eros
emerges from an egg laid in the folds of Erebus by Night, and probably
also in Euripides’ Hypsipyle (fr. 758a TGF), which seems also to make
him the son of Night; it is not at all unlikely that the genealogies pro-
vided by both Aristophanes and Euripides were influenced, at least in
part, by Acusilaus. The Acusilaus evidence also recalls the Orphic the-
ogony discussed by the author of the Derveni Papyrus, in which a figure
called the “firstborn,” sometimes identified with Eros in other sources,
is described as he “who first darted across the aithēr” (fr. 8 Bernabé),
possibly a mythical way of identifying Protogonos/Eros as the son of
Aether.20 Whereas Hesiod can be said to have given Eros no parents,
the same cannot be said for Acusilaus, unless Phaedrus thinks that
Night’s laying an egg in the folds of Erebus or Aether, likely the version
of Acusilaus, does not constitute true sexual reproduction. In any event,
he has suppressed the egg-laying mother Acusilaus seems to have rec-
ognized for Eros.

17
On μητίομαι and μήδομαι in Greek cosmogonies, including Parmenides’, see discussion
in Chapter 4.
18
Phaedrus’s quotation of Parmenides may also play another role in the economy of
the dialogue as a whole: it inevitably invokes the view most commonly associated with
Parmenides in the Platonic corpus, the notion of an unchanging and indivisible One,
which will, later in the Symposium, be associated with the Form of Beauty, in whose pres-
ence intellectual parturition takes place. On the echoes of Parmenides in the famous
“ascent” passage, see Solmsen (1971); Palmer (1999) 3–5.
19
Acusilaus makes Eros the son of Night and Erebus according to Damasc. De princip. 124,
but the son of Night and Aether according to Schol. Theocr. 13.1–2c. Both Aether and
Erebus are associated with the dark air or wind that preceded the emergence of the cos-
mic egg in a number of Phoenician cosmogonies and in several Greek cosmogonies that
were influenced by them. See West (1994) 297, 303–4.
20
Betegh (2004) 154–56; Kouremenos, Parássoglou, and Tsantsanoglou (2006) 23–24.
On this difficult line from the Derveni theogony, see also discussion in Chapter 2.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 193

Pausanias
The genealogy offered by Pausanias at the beginning of his encomium
of Eros furthers this theme of missing mothers, though he accomplishes
this through a genealogy not of Eros but of Aphrodite. He takes advan-
tage of the variety of cult epithets of Aphrodite at Athens to contrast
two major forms of Aphrodite, Pandemus and Urania, and makes use
of different genealogies of Aphrodite to distinguish them: he identifies
Aphrodite Pandemus as the daughter of Zeus and Dione21 but describes
Aphrodite Urania as the “motherless” (ἀμήτωρ, 180d7) daughter of
Uranus (180d6–e1). This characterization of Aphrodite Urania suggests
that Plato’s Pausanias is reading the myth of Aphrodite’s birth from the
severed genitals of Uranus as a myth of male parthenogenesis. Hesiod
never explicitly describes Uranus as the father of Aphrodite, but Pausanias
makes his fatherhood explicit not only by calling her the “daughter of
Uranus” but also, indirectly, by reminding us that she is “motherless”
(and, implicitly, not fatherless), an epithet that would surely call to mind
the most famous myth of male parthenogenesis at Athens, the story of
Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus. Pausanias’s distinction between
the phallic birth of Aphrodite Urania and the more conventional birth of
Aphrodite Pandemus not only privileges the exclusive parthenogenetic
creativity of the male (Uranus) over the sexual reproduction of male and
female (Zeus and Dione) but also anticipates, on the level of myth, the
transition from physical (Pandemus) to spiritual (Urania) procreation
that we will encounter in the philosophical ascent described by Diotima.
Pausanias next invokes the close association between Eros and
Aphrodite in order to suggest that there are two forms of Eros, just as
there are two of Aphrodite. He refers to the lesser Eros as “the [Eros]
of Aphrodite Pandemus” (ὁ τῆς Πανδήμου Ἀφροδίτης, 181a7) and the
greater as “the [Eros] of Urania (ὁ τῆς Οὐρανίας) who, in the first place,
partakes not of the female but only of the male . . . and in the second
place is older and has no share in violence” (181c2–4). The relationship
between the nominative article, which designates Eros, and the genitive
form of the names of Aphrodite is, I think, deliberately ambiguous. It
could designate Eros as “the son of” Aphrodite, a common usage of the
genitive, and indeed Aphrodite was commonly recognized as the mother
of Eros in the classical period.22 But I think Plato is also inviting us to
21
We encounter this genealogy already in Hom. Il. 5.370–74, 428.
22
See n. 15. The phrase could also require the reader to supply a word meaning
­“attendant,” so that one Eros would be imagined to attend on Aphrodite Pandemus, the
other on Aphrodite Urania (cf. 203c2).
194 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

construe the genitive as an objective genitive with Eros in the sense of

erōs (desire for), as elsewhere in this passage (e.g., 181c3–4). “Desire for
Aphrodite Pandemus” (181a7), then, would refer to promiscuous desire
or desire that does not discriminate in its choice of object, whereas
“desire for Urania” (ὁ τῆς Οὐρανίας, 181c2) would point to “desire
for the heavenly realm,” that is, the realm of Beauty and perhaps the
Forms more generally, the proper focus of erotic energy in the theory of
Diotima. What is perhaps most interesting, however, is that, as Pausanias
hints at a shift from physical desire to intellectual desire, from “[Eros] of
Aphrodite Pandemus” to “[Eros] of Urania,” the name of Aphrodite – a
symbol of men’s physical desire for women, and a sometime mother of
Eros – drops out and only her abstract, philosophically useful epithet
(Urania) remains. Pausanias thus grammatically writes out Aphrodite,
the mother of Eros, in much the same way that Phaedrus does in his quo-
tation from Parmenides.

Aristophanes
The genealogy offered by the comic poet is an account of the birth not
of the god Eros but of erōs more abstractly. In the beginning, according
to Aristophanes, human beings were spherical creatures endowed with
a double complement of all limbs and organs and divided into three
“sexes”: double males, double females, and androgynes. When these
primordial humans violently attacked the gods, Zeus ordered them cut
in half, telling Apollo to turn their faces around so as to face the cut,
a reminder of their crime. But the punishment backfired: the former
halves of each whole attempted to cling to each other in a permanent
embrace and, because they neglected to care for their other needs, they
began to perish. Zeus, taking pity on them, transferred their genitals
from the back to the front: now they could satisfy themselves sexually in
a temporary embrace with an other of their kind and then get on with
the rest of their lives. This, Aristophanes suggests, is the origin of men
who are attracted to men, women who are attracted to women, and men
and women who are attracted to the opposite sex: each is ultimately seek-
ing to become whole again though a connection with one of his origi-
nal kind. There are three distinct phases in Aristophanes’ story that will
be of interest to us: (1) a primordial phase populated by double males,
double females, and androgynes; (2) a transitional phase, in which the
newly bisected halves of the original double wholes reproduce “in the
earth,” as cicadas do; and (3) a final phase that brings us to the present,
 The Pregnant Philosopher 195

in which humans, with their genitals transposed to the front, copulate

as humans do now. We shall see that Aristophanes, in his exploration of
human sexuality and reproduction in each of these phases, naturalizes
the (pro)creativity of males and elevates it above the more earthy, ani-
malistic, and destabilizing creativity of the female.
In the first phase, in which primordial humans are still double, there
is no sexual reproduction; this is not possible until after they are bisected
(phase 2) and their genitals transposed (phase 3). Nor is there explicit
mention of any form of nonsexual reproduction at this stage. They could
presumably reproduce “in the earth,” as they will in phase 2, but while
this is biologically possible, Aristophanes probably does not mention it
because, at this stage, humans lack the motivation to reproduce: as long
as they remain whole, they feel no need to engage in activity that would
lead to reproduction. Aristophanes’ sole allusion to reproduction in
phase 1 is in his description of how the original double humans them-
selves were created:
The sexes were three in number and had these characteristics, because
the male was, in origin, the offspring (ἔκγονον) of the sun, the female of
the earth, and the sex common to both of the moon, because the moon
too partakes of both. So naturally they [the first humans] were themselves
round and so too their manner of locomotion, because of their similarity to
their parents. (190a8–b5)

This sounds like a one-off creation on the part of the sun, earth, and
moon in eo tempore, presumably a creation of several of each sex.23 The
notion that humans were originally born of the earth is a very old tra-
dition and was one that had recently enjoyed a surge of popularity in
political discourse and in the arts in Athens.24 There is no tradition that I
am aware of that traced human origins to the moon, but the parthenoge-
netic powers of the earth could easily be extended to the goddess Selene
(Moon), especially after the middle of the fifth century, when she came
to be thought of as a “second earth.”25

23
At 191b2–5, Aristophanes says that if one half of a pair dies, it seeks out another
unpaired (i.e., recently widowed or widowered) half that is, presumably, of its own kind.
This implies that there are multiple double males, double females, and androgynes.
24
See Rosivach (1987); Loraux (1993) 1–68; Shapiro (1998).
25
The intersex status that Aristophanes attributes to Selene, on the other hand, was prob-
ably not altogether new: see, e.g., Philoch. FGrH 328 F184. Cf. Epimenid. FGrH 457 F3,
where the author claims that he was “of the fair-haired Selene by birth”; but West (1983)
48 thinks this means that he was born on the moon (something not conceivable until
the moon’s earthy qualities became known in the early fifth century), not born from
Selene as mother. But we cannot be sure. See also Ion of Chios fr. 30a West; Philol. DK
196 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

What is striking about this mini-myth is the novel reproductive powers

granted to the sun. Philochorus, writing only a generation after Plato,
reports a tradition that made earth and sun the “parents” (γονεῖς) of
human beings (FGrH 328 F182), which may be just another mythical
rendering of those fifth-century anthropogonies that traced the first gen-
eration of human beings to the sky’s fertilization of the earth. But what
we have in Plato is a sun capable of parthenogenesis: as the sole parent of
the superior double male, he is a prototype of the pregnant philosopher
that Diotima will introduce later in the dialogue. He is probably also a
proxy for the object of intellectual pursuit, the realm of the Forms, as he
certainly was in the roughly contemporary Republic,26 which may explain
Socrates’ devotion to this god later in the Symposium (220d3–5).
In phase 2 of Aristophanes’ myth, the primordial double humans have
been cut in half and their faces turned to face the cut, but they have not
yet had their genitals transposed to the front. Sexuality at this stage is
nonpenetrative, limited to an erotic embrace, which is usually perma-
nent and therefore deadly, because the partners are unwilling to part
and care for their other needs. These protohumans reproduce, but not
sexually:
And Zeus pitied them and devised another plan: he moved their genitals
to the front – for until this time they actually had these on the outside,
and they begot and gave birth not in each other, but in the earth, just like
cicadas – anyway, he moved [the genitals] to the front of their bodies and
through them created a form of procreation that takes place in one another.
(191b5–c3)

When Plato suggests that cicadas beget and give birth “in the earth,” he
is referring either to the fact that cicada larvae, after they hatch from
eggs laid by the mother in a hollow twig, burrow into the ground where
they remain, often for many years, before emerging as adults, or, prob-
ably more likely, to the reproductive practice of the grasshopper, with
whom cicadas were often conflated in Greek folk belief, in which the
female deposits her eggs directly in the ground, where they eventually
hatch.27 Plato implicitly contrasts the reproduction of oviparous insects,
which deposit eggs “in the earth,” with that of viviparous species like

44 A20; Herodor. FGrH 31 F4; Heraclid. Pont. fr. 115 Wehrli; and generally West (1983)
47–49.
26
In Rep. 508b12–13, Plato calls the sun “the son of the Good”; cf. also Ap. 26d1–6.
27
On the conflation of cicada and grasshopper, see generally Borthwick (1966) 103 n. 2;
Davies and Kathirithamby (1986) 124–25 n. 95; and, in the Symposium passage itself,
Dover (1980) 117.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 197

human beings, who reproduce “in each other.” But the contrast is mis-
leading, because cicadas (and grasshoppers) do copulate sexually, “in
each other,” and the nurturing of unfertilized eggs inside the body of the
female cicada is biologically analogous, as the Greeks themselves surely
knew,28 to the growth of a fetus inside the uterus of viviparous species.
Plato focuses on the cicada’s deposition of eggs in the earth, rather
than its copulation ritual, for a couple of reasons. First, he wishes to
invoke anthropogonic myths of birth from the earth, including the ver-
sion championed by the Athenians, whose cicada brooches celebrated
this very fact.29 And it is likely that he was aware that even as these myths
served to promote the democratic fiction of equality of birth, they nev-
ertheless imply, as we saw in Chapter 5, a model of matrilineal descent.
It turns out that one of the folk beliefs associated with the grasshopper,
an insect frequently conflated, as we have seen, with the cicada in Greek
folk entomology, was that the female could produce offspring parthe-
nogenetically, a “fact” that emboldened some Greeks to opine that not
only could females of all species produce seed but that male seed was
not necessary at all for reproduction.30 So when Aristophanes tells us
that protohumans in phase 2 reproduced, like cicadas, “in the earth,” he
describes a reproductive system in which males are otiose. The reader
may justly feel confident that this monstrous situation will be reversed in
phase 3 of Aristophanes’ teleological narrative, but the outcome will be
more ambiguous than he expects, as we shall see. Second, the cicada’s
birth “in the earth” is linked directly with the tradition of its immortality:
it is when the young cicada finally emerges from the earth that it sloughs
off its exuviae and is, in a sense, “reborn.”31 Birth “in the earth,” then,
presupposes eventual rebirth from the earth and into the sky, one more
hint at the career of the male philosopher.
Plato seems to be using the cicada as a model not only for human
reproduction in phase 2 but also for human copulation at this stage. His
focus on cicada reproduction “in the earth” obscures, as we have seen,

28
So Arist. GA 721a19–25, speaking of oviparous insects generally and grasshoppers in
particular.
29
See Thuc. 1.6; Aristoph. Eq. 1331, Nub. 984; and generally Borthwick (1966) 107–8,
111 and Davies and Kathirithamby (1986) 125–26.
30
Ps.-Arist. HA 10.637b16–20.
31
On the immortality of the cicada, see Davies and Kathirithamby (1986) 124, 126–27.
Plato suppresses this tradition in the version of the cicada myth he presents at Phaedr.
259b6–d8, where cicadas are said to die. And yet Plato tells us, in the Phaedrus myth, that
after they die they report to the Muses which humans have honored them and which
have not, which implies, after all, a kind of elevation to the divine realm.
198 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the fact that it is preceded by copulation of the male and the female “in
each other.” We learn from Aristotle that they mate ὕπτιοι (HA 556a26),
which means, in this context, “with their rears abutting.”32 Although
Plato elides cicada mating in favor of cicada ovipositing, this retromissive
mating is surely on his mind, for it is precisely what we ought to expect
of our protohumans, whose genitals are on the rear at this stage, though
they are presumably still motivated to embrace only at the front, along
the original cut.
What is interesting is that the copulation of cicadas and other insects
in Greek entomology was strongly associated with gender inversion.
In the Generation of Animals, for instance, Aristotle tells us that in most
insects that copulate, not only is the female larger than the male, but
the males do not appear to have any spermatic vessels and indeed “the
male does not generally insert any part (μόριον) into the female, but the
female [does insert a part] into the male up from below (κάτωθεν ἄνω)”
(GA 721a11–15).33 In the earlier History of Animals, on the other hand,
Aristotle appears willing to accept only a milder form of sexual inversion:
in grasshoppers as well as other blooded insects (which would include
cicadas), the female is larger than the male, but it is nevertheless the
male who “mounts” (ἐπιβαίνοντος, HA 555b18–20). But in the next sen-
tence, he undercuts the fragile sexual dominance of the male grasshop-
per: “[The females] lay their eggs by planting in the ground the member
(καυλόν) that is attached to their tail, something that the males do not
have” (HA 555b20–22). The phallic nature of the female’s ovipositor is
strongly suggested by the fact that the word καυλός, which refers here to
an organ that Aristotle’s males “do not have,” was often used by Greek
writers, including medical writers, of the male penis.34
If the ovipositor of the female grasshopper, in the sexually inverted
world of Greek entomology, functions also as a penis, then the penis
of the bisected protohuman males in phase 2 of Aristophanes’ fanciful
anthropogony can, and indeed must, function also as a fertile “female”
ovipositor. Plato’s invocation of the cicada as a model not only for repro-
duction but also, necessarily, of copulation hints at some possible pro-
creative powers of the male body, powers that are not possessed by the

32
“Belly to belly,” the translation of Thompson (1910) ad loc., is misleading: sometimes
mating cicadas face each other, sometimes they face away, but always “with their rears
abutting.”
33
See also GA 723b20–25, 730b25–32.
34
LSJ s.v. καυλός III. Cf. Dover (1980) 117: “Plato . . . may have thought that the . . . ovipos-
itor is a penis.”
 The Pregnant Philosopher 199

human female. And even as the male body in phase 2 is given some
female qualities, on the inverse analogy of the cicada, the female body is
deprived of some of hers. Commentators have observed that the surgery
performed by Apollo does a poor job of explaining women’s anatomy,
especially the breasts.35 I would go further to suggest that this surgery
actively eliminates the reproductive parts of the female. So, for instance,
the γαστήρ, “belly” but potentially also “womb,” is an artifact created by
Apollo from loose skin for both sexes, and the navel is created by Apollo,
too, not as the ontogenetic locus of former connection to the mother,
but as a phylogenetic remembrance of the old crime and the old suf-
fering (191a3–5). The omphalos, if it reminds us of connection to any-
thing, reminds us of our connection to something much bigger than
the mother, of the supermale’s connection to another supermale and,
ultimately, the Form of Beauty.
In phase 3, the genitals of human beings are finally transposed to the
front, and erōs and, with it, sexual reproduction are born. From a bio-
logical perspective, humanity has reached its true, final form: it can now
reproduce itself. The logic of myth requires this final step: the sexual
and reproductive dominance of the female (the cicada model) must be
reversed; primitive reproduction “in the earth” must give way to more
advanced reproduction of the male and female “in each other.”36 But
there is something asymmetrical about erōs at this stage: halves of the origi-
nal androgyne come together to procreate, but halves of the original dou-
ble male obtain only πλησμονή, “fulfillment” or “plenitude” (191c2–8).
This πλησμονή will turn out to be something higher: while the male-male
couples are left out of the positivistic story of biological evolution, they
remain a superior breed most at home in the wholeness of phase 1. So
while Aristophanes’ myth tells of progress from a biological perspective
(origin of sexual reproduction), from the perspective of Platonic philo-
sophical teleology (return to the One), it is a story of devolution.

Socrates/Diotima
Diotima offers her audaciously fictitious genealogy of Eros in response to
Socrates’ question about who Eros’s parents are if Eros is in fact a daimōn
and not a god. On the day that Aphrodite was born, Poros and the rest
35
See, e.g., Dover (1980) 116–17. Apollo “shaped the chest (τὰ στήθη),” for example, by
“smoothing it out” (191a1–3).
36
Most pre-Socratic anthropogonies presented some kind of two-stage process: see, e.g.,
Anaximand. DK 12 A30; Anaxag. DK 59 A1(§9), A113; Democr. DK 68 A139.
200 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

of the gods held a celebratory feast, and after dinner the uninvited Penia
showed up to beg. But it turns out that what she wanted was not food but
to have a child with Poros, who had fallen asleep drunk in the garden
of Zeus.37 The scheming Penia arranged to recline beside the sleeping
Poros and became pregnant with Eros.38 Plato alludes in this passage
to three different male pregnancy myths, which hints that Eros, too, is
somehow born under the sign of the male. The first male pregnancy
myth Plato alludes to is the birth of Aphrodite, for Plato tells us that
Eros was conceived on the day that Aphrodite was born (203b2), almost
certainly a reference to her birth from the severed genitals of Uranus, a
myth to which Pausanias alluded earlier in the dialogue (180d6–8).
The second is the birth of Athena. Diotima tells us that the mother
of Poros was Metis, and it does seem natural to make “Cleverness” the
mother of “Contrivance.” But why no father? Stranger still is the fact that
Diotima makes a mother of a goddess whose only myth is a story of frus-
trated motherhood: when Zeus heard Metis was pregnant with a child
who would overthrow him, he swallowed her and gave birth to Athena
from his head. Metis is allowed to play the role of mother in Diotima’s
improvisational myth, but the effect is to emphasize both Metis’s histori-
cal failure to be a mother and the appropriation of her maternal role by
Zeus, another prototype for Diotima’s pregnant philosopher. Beneath
the brittle surface of Eros’s matrilineal birth is the powerful ideology of
patriliny, patriarchy, and indeed male parthenogenesis. Third and last
is the myth of Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus, which is invoked
when we are told that Poros gets drunk on nectar, “because wine did not
yet exist” (203b6). Wine had not yet been invented because Dionysus,
the god of wine, had not yet been born.

Plato removes the female from the scene of birth in the speeches lead-
ing up to Diotima by invoking male birth myths and metaphors from an
earlier generation of Greek writers, which conceive of male birth in dis-
tinctively masculine, even phallic, terms. We see this particularly clearly
in all those variations on the myth of a fructifying sky god that are littered
throughout the course of the earlier speeches: the figure of Heaven in
the Melanippe Sophe who, together with Earth his consort, “gives birth”
to ­animals and humans; Aphrodite’s “phallic” birth from the severed
genitals of Uranus, alluded to by both Pausanias and Diotima; and

37
The garden of Zeus is always fertile: Soph. fr. 320 TGF.
38
On the thematics of “reclining” in this and other passages, see discussion in the final
section of this chapter.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 201

Aristophanes’ suggestion that the original double male was produced

parthenogenetically by another fructifying sky father, the sun. Egg-laying
appears to be another easy target of male appropriation: Aristophanes’
female cicadas, who “inseminate” the earth with their eggs, serve as a
model for the phallic mode of reproduction for all males in phase 2 of
his myth and indeed for the male descendants of the original double
male in perpetuity. This may explain why Phaedrus suppresses egg-laying
Night as a mother for Eros in Acusilaus’s theogony: egg laying will be
reconfigured as a phallic form of reproduction kept by the male. These
examples of male birth that fill the vacuum left by disappeared mothers
are all modeled on the traditional male emissive role in sexual reproduc-
tion; we might say that they represent an imperial expansion of the mas-
culine domain of γεννάω. There is not yet any interiority to this male
parturient body. But these masculinist conceptions of birth do pave the
way for a more feminine conception of birth – the domain of τίκτω –
which we discuss in the final section of this chapter.

Virtue Birth
On the nature of the intellectual offspring to which the philosopher is
imagined to give birth, Diotima proposes various possibilities, as we have
seen: poetry, inventions, law codes, logoi, virtue. What is the relationship
among these different possible offspring? What, more specifically, is the
relationship between logoi and virtue, the two offspring featured in the
third and final part of Diotima’s speech, which many commentators have
treated as essentially variations on the same idea?39 Why, finally, does
Diotima conclude her speech with the birth of virtue? The cultivation of
virtue is arguably the goal of all Platonic ethics; one could indeed argue
that the role of erōs in promoting virtue is one of the primary structuring
themes of the Symposium as a whole.40
But why does Plato speak of virtue as something to which the philos-
opher will “give birth”? The answer is that this metaphor helps Plato to

39
Price (1989) 41–42, 47 thinks both logoi and virtue perform the same function, namely
offering the lover a chance of vicarious immortality through the logoi and virtue that
live on in the soul of the beloved; F. White (2004) presents a similar interpretation.
Sheffield (2001) 3, 7–8, 12 thinks that what the philosopher, and indeed all humans,
are pregnant with is “a potentiality for virtue”; the function of the logoi produced by the
philosopher is to educate the young in virtue. See also Sheffield (2006a) 88–91. Sier
(1997) 183 attempts to distinguish between logoi and virtue as intellectual offspring.
40
See Plat. Symp. 178d1–2, 179a7–8, d1–2, 180a7–b1, b6–8, 181e1–3, 182c7–d2,
184c2–e4, 185a5–c1, etc.; Ferrari (1992) 260; F. White (2004); Sheffield (2006a) and
(2006b) 24–28, 35–38.
202 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

combat the claims made by some Sophists to teach virtue. Just as our
analysis of the birth theme in the earlier speeches of the Symposium and in
the first part of Diotima’s speech uncovered a complex pattern of engage-
ment with traditional myths of male birth, so our analysis, in this section,
of Diotima’s account of the nature of the philosopher’s intellectual off-
spring will reveal a sustained engagement on the part of Plato with earlier
metaphors of male birth, especially the pedagogical metaphors deployed
by the Sophists, which we attempted to reconstruct in Chapter 4.

Lesser Mysteries
Diotima’s account of intellectual birth at the preliminary level of the
lesser mysteries, the second section of her account, mentions all the
possible types of intellectual offspring but begins, significantly, with vir-
tue. After stating that men pregnant in body turn to women and seek
to produce human children, she suggests that those pregnant in soul
produce “the things that it is fitting for a soul to become pregnant with
and give birth to (κυῆσαι καὶ τεκεῖν),” namely “wisdom and the rest of
virtue (φρόνησίν τε καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἀρετήν)” (209a2–4). Plato seems to
acknowledge the novelty of this formulation by having Diotima immedi-
ately attempt to explain it by reference to traditional examples of moral
leadership and benefaction. So she reassures us that “of course” (δή)
poets and inventors are among the “begetters” (γεννήτορες) of virtue
(209a4–5) and adds that the greatest form of wisdom is manifested in
the ordering of cities and households, an activity that embodies the spe-
cific virtues of temperance and justice (209a5–8).
But before she clarifies what it means to say that poets and inventors
give birth to virtue, she shifts abruptly to a rather different context for
the birth of virtue: when someone pregnant from youth with temper-
ance and justice and other virtues comes of age, he seeks to “give birth
and beget” and goes around in search of beauty “in which to beget”
(209a8–b3), and when he finds a youth who possesses a beautiful body
and soul, he “is immediately full of logoi about virtue (εὐπορεῖ λόγων
περὶ ἀρετῆς), both about what sort of person the good man should be
and about the activities he ought to engage in, and he attempts to teach
[his beloved these things]” (209b8–c2).41 What the lover-teacher here
is “full of,” which we may perhaps gloss as “pregnant with,” is not virtue
itself but logoi about virtue.

41
On the “demotic” virtue that is the focus of this section, see O’Brien (1984) 189.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 203

But then Diotima tacks once more, this time back to the notion of
giving birth to virtue itself. She names Homer and Hesiod as among the
poets whom she had alluded to earlier as “begetters” of virtue, presum-
ably because their “offspring” (ἔκγονα) inculcate virtue and therefore in
a sense embody it, and she mentions Lycurgus’s and Solon’s “begetting
of laws” (τὴν τῶν νόμων γέννησιν) as examples of what she had referred
to earlier in this passage as giving birth to the virtues of temperance and
justice in the orderly management of cities and households (209d1–7).
These great men and others, she concludes, can be credited with “beget-
ting (γεννήσαντες) virtue of every sort” (209e2–3).
An ancient reader puzzled by Diotima’s initial claim that what the
man pregnant in soul gives birth to is “wisdom and the rest of virtue”
might have been reassured if she had explained that this kind of intel-
lectual birth results in the “birth” of poetry and laws, a metaphor famil-
iar to Athenians, as we have seen, since at least the 420s. But Plato has
Diotima deploy the metaphor rather differently: poets beget not poems
but “wisdom and the rest of virtue,” and lawgivers beget not just laws but
“temperance and justice,” the two specific virtues that relate to the polit-
ical sphere. While many Greeks thought that epic poetry and law codes
sought to inculcate virtue,42 they would likely have thought it strange to
suggest that giving birth to poetry or laws was tantamount to giving birth
to virtue itself.
But there was another form of the birth metaphor in the fifth ­century
that did describe the birth of virtue itself: we argued in Chapter 4 that
one or more Sophists had suggested that a teacher could not only
“plant” virtue in the soul of the pupil but probably also “beget” it. And
we argued that Plato’s own Pausanias presents a version of this latter idea
in the Symposium, and indeed the phrase “wisdom and the rest of virtue”
(φρόνησίν τε καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἀρετήν), which Diotima uses to describe the
nature of the offspring produced by those pregnant in soul (209a3–4),
is the same phrase that Pausanias uses to describe what the beloved gets
from his lover in exchange for sex (184d7–e1).43 Not all forms of the
birth-of-virtue metaphor in the fifth century were so transactional. The
tragedians, for example, frequently suggested that “effort” (πόνοι) could
“give birth” (τίκτουσι) to virtue,44 a formulation that emphasized the

42
Poetry: e.g., Anaxag. DK 59 A1(§11). Laws: e.g., Plat. Gorg. 464b3–8.
43
On Pausanias’s notion of an exchange of sex for virtue, see discussion in Chapter 4.
44
See, e.g., Aesch. fr. 682a Mette ἐκ τῶν πόνων τίκτεσθαι τὰς ἀρετὰς βροτοῖς; but cf.
Aesch. fr. 340 TGF. See also Eur. frr. 237.3, 1052.7 TGF; cf. fr. 575.3 TGF, where “effort”
is the object rather than the subject of τίκτω. Note that at Plat. Symp. 210e5–6 it is
204 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

student’s initiative rather than the teacher’s instruction. But, of course,

what concerned Plato was not the notion that a young man, through
effort, could give birth to virtue in his soul – he will have Diotima herself
endorse a version of this idea later in her speech – but that the young man
could do so only after receiving the “seeds” of the teacher’s wisdom.
There seems also to have been a variation on the sophistic birth-of-
virtue metaphor in which the teacher’s “seeds” were logoi. Our primary
evidence for this form of the sophistic metaphor comes, once again,
from Plato. We encounter it first in two early dialogues, where Plato
seems happy to employ it himself. In the Charmides, Socrates praises the
healing practice of the Thracian shaman-king Zalmoxis, who recom-
mends employing logoi as “spells” that enable “temperance to be born
(ἐγγίγνεσθαι) in souls” (157a4–b1). In the Gorgias, Plato suggests that
this is what the practitioners of rhetoric claim to accomplish but fall
short of delivering; in fact, it is only the true orator, and not the oppor-
tunistic orator that Gorgias represents, who “will bring logoi to bear on
souls” with a view to “how justice may be born (γίγνηται) in the souls
[sc. of his fellow citizens], and injustice removed, how temperance may
be born (ἐγγίγνηται), and licentiousness removed, how the rest of vir-
tue may be born (ἐγγίγνηται), and vice disappear” (504d5–e3).45 It is
true that the verb ἐγγίγνομαι, which is used in both the Charmides and
the Gorgias passages, is, so far as verbs denoting birth are concerned,
semantically rather weaker and less marked than, for instance, a verb
like τίκτω or γεννάω. It seems reasonably clear, in any event, that there
is a sophistic background to the link Diotima makes between logoi and
the birth of virtue.
Plato has thus activated, through Diotima’s account of the “lesser
mysteries,” a whole discourse of intellectual pregnancy from an earlier
generation of Greek, and especially Athenian, thought, but he recasts
this larger tradition in terms of one single form of the metaphor, the
sophistic birth-of-virtue metaphor: so Homer and Solon, for example,
no longer “give birth” to poems and laws, but “beget” virtue itself. Plato

“effort” (πόνοι) that has been leading Diotima and Socrates to a vision of the Form of
Beauty, where the philosopher himself will give birth to virtue.
45
On the power of logos to implant an image of virtue in the soul, see also Isocr. 3.7,
15.255; cf. Gorg. Hel. 13, 15, etc. Cf. also Phaedr. 270b7–9, which credits Pericles with
the theory, purportedly adapted from Anaxagoras’s teachings about “mind,” that the art
of rhetoric functions to “transmit virtue” by “applying logoi” to the soul. But by the time
he wrote the Phaedrus, Plato appears not only to have backed away from this metaphor
but to be at pains to associate it with the teaching of the Sophists and rhetoricians, as we
have seen, effectively repatriating the metaphor to its original authors.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 205

is now able, with a single streamlined metaphor, to interrogate various

popular beliefs about how a young man acquires virtue. Is virtue “begot-
ten” on him by poets such as Homer and Hesiod or by lawgivers such
as Solon and Lycurgus? Is it “begotten” on him by skilled teachers like
the Sophists, who implant their “seeds” of wisdom or their fertile logoi
in his soul?
Already here, in the lesser mysteries, Plato hints at an important mod-
ification in the sophistic metaphor: in Diotima’s reference to the lover
who is “full of logoi about virtue,” it is the philosopher-lover who is, in
effect, “pregnant,” not the pupil-beloved, a first hint that it will be the
former, not the latter, who is to be the primary beneficiary of the myster-
ies of intellectual birth. She anticipates the “greater mysteries” also in
her hints at a particularly feminine form of intellectual birth: although
she tacks abruptly back to γεννάω in the remainder of her description of
the “lesser mysteries,” she begins this section with the bolder claim that
“wisdom and the rest of virtue” are things that one “becomes pregnant
with and gives birth to” (κυῆσαι καὶ τεκεῖν). But, of course, at this point
the reader is not yet prepared to understand the significance of a specif-
ically feminine form of intellectual birth.

Greater Mysteries
When Diotima turns finally to love’s greater mysteries, or ἐποπτικά, in
the third and final section of her account, the intellectual offspring she
envisions for the philosopher become reduced to two, logoi and virtue.
Diotima turns her attention, in this section, first to logoi. What is striking
about the birth of logoi at this level is that they are not an end in them-
selves but rather a means to deeper understanding.46 At the bottom of
the ladder, she tells us, a man falls in love with the beauty of a single
body and “in its presence begets (γεννᾶν) beautiful logoi” (210a7–8),
perhaps speeches in praise of the young man’s beauty.47 Once the lover
has made the conceptual leap from one beautiful body to the larger
beauty in which all beautiful bodies partake, and once he has come to
value the beauty of the soul as more valuable than that of the body, he is
ready to produce more logoi. From this point on – that is, after the lover

46
Cf. already Sheffield (2001) 20–24.
47
As Price (1989) 41 puts it, praising the boy’s beauty at the first stage in the conven-
tional language of love poetry will lead the lover to realize that these same conventional
terms could be applied to other beautiful boys and indeed to all beautiful boys. See also
R. Patterson (1991) 196; Ferrari (1992) 256.
206 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

has made the transition from bodies to souls – the fertility of the philo-
sophical lover is described exclusively in terms of τίκτω. At this second
stage, the lover will “give birth to (τίκτειν) logoi of the sort . . . that will
make the young better” (210c1–3). These are reminiscent of the “logoi
about virtue” that we encounter in the lesser mysteries, except that the
primary purpose of these logoi, according to Diotima, is for the lover “to
be forced in turn to contemplate the beauty that resides in activities and
laws” (210c3–4), which leads him to the next cognitive level. Indeed,
once he has made the transition from the beauty in activities and laws to
the beauty embodied in forms of knowledge, he is ready once again for
intellectual parturition: this time “he gives birth to (τίκτῃ) many beau-
tiful and generous logoi and thoughts (διανοήματα)” (210d4–6). These
logoi too are instrumental: their role is to prepare for a glimpse of that
one knowledge that is knowledge of Beauty itself (210d6–e1).48
It is probable that these logoi, unlike the “logoi about virtue” generated
at the level of the lesser mysteries, are not produced primarily for the
benefit of others. The presence of an “individual object of love” at the
higher rungs of the ladder of love is still a matter of spirited debate. I
incline to the side of Vlastos and others who claim that there is not.49 The
logoi that the philosopher “begets” at the first stage are clearly inspired by
the beauty of an individual beloved (210a4–8). In the second stage, the
lover “gives birth” to logoi “that will make the young better” (210b6–c3);
although the lover begins by being attracted to a person who “has a suit-
able soul and even a small amount of bodily beauty” (b8–c1), these logoi

48
Diotima says that “he gives birth . . . until” (τίκτῃ . . . ἕως ἄν, 210d5–6) he gains a glimpse
of the knowledge of Beauty itself. Ferrari (1992) 255–59 helpfully observes that the
logoi, because they are themselves “beautiful,” can serve as a transitional object of the
lover’s desire, which allows him to shift his attention from the beautiful person or thing
that first attracted his attention to the larger beauty at the next level. Ferrari’s view com-
plements my own argument that the logoi are instrumental, not an end in themselves.
49
Vlastos (1981) 19–27; Ferrari (1992) 258; Sheffield (2006a) 154ff. Contra: Price (1989)
31, 48–50, 53 argues that all the steps of the lover’s epistemological ascent are taken in
the presence of his beloved and that it is through his beloved alone, and more specifi-
cally through his own logoi and virtue as embodied in the beloved, that the lover himself
gains immortality. He places great emphasis on the word παιδεραστεῖν (to love boys)
at 211b5–6. But all that Diotima says is that one “makes the ascent upward away from
these things [sc. objects in the world of becoming and destruction] through a proper
approach to loving boys” (ἀπὸ τῶνδε διὰ τὸ ὀρθῶς παιδεραστεῖν ἐπανιών, 211b5–6);
she says nothing about the presence of a beloved at the pinnacle. O’Brien (1984) 197 is
right to say that Plato’s mention of the lover’s “gazing upon and being in the company
of” (θεᾶσθαι . . . καὶ συνεῖναι, 211d7–8) beautiful boys and youths is primarily meant to
anticipate the philosopher’s “gazing upon and being in the company of” (θεωμένου καὶ
συνόντος, 212a2) the Form of Beauty.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 207

are arguably not for him but for “the young” more generally and, in any
event, serve primarily to assist the philosopher-lover to make the next
step in his intellectual development. We may contrast this passage with
the one from the lesser mysteries in which Diotima speaks of the man
who, attracted to a youth with an attractive soul, “is immediately full of
logoi about virtue” and proceeds to instruct the youth about “what sort
of person the good man should be,” instruction that is described as a
“child” (τὸ γεννηθέν) that the two can raise together (209b5–c4). By
the time the lover reaches the third and final rung, where he gains a
vision of the one Beauty, there is no mention of any beloved. Nor does
the beloved reappear in the remainder of Diotima’s speech, except in
praeteritio, where she insists that the Form of Beauty that one glimpses
at the climax of the ascent is not the same as the beauty of gold and fine
clothing, boys and youths, the sight of which drives so many men mad
(211d3–5).
I suspect that what motivates most scholars who insist on the presence
of a beloved throughout the ascent is the assumption that if the love
Plato described is at least partly other-directed at the beginning, it must
remain other-directed throughout.50 But there is no warrant for such
an assumption. While we may quibble with this as a theory of emotional
attachment,51 I think it is important to recognize that, by this point in the
dialogue, love has become fully subordinated to the needs of philosophy,
and Plato, at least in the Symposium, envisions the practice of philosophy
not as a transaction between teacher and pupil but as a process whereby
the mature lover of wisdom generates forms of knowledge and ultimately
virtue within himself.52
Diotima concludes her account of the greater mysteries with one final,
and climactic, reference to the birth of virtue. After he has begun to con-
template and enter into communion with Beauty itself, she rhapsodizes,
it becomes possible for him “to give birth not to images of virtue . . . but
to true [virtue]” (τίκτειν οὐκ εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς . . . ἀλλὰ ἀληθῆ, 212a3–5),
and “once he has given birth to true virtue (τεκόντι ἀρετὴν ἀληθῆ)
and nourished it, it is possible for him to become beloved of the gods
(θεοφιλεῖ) and become, if any human being can, immortal (ἀθανάτῳ)”

50
This position has been maintained both by scholars who think that the love relationship
is intellectual throughout, such as Moravcsik (1971), and by those who think it is per-
sonal throughout, as Price (1989) 45–54.
51
This, I think, is what ultimately motivates Price (1989) and others to retain an individual
beloved at the highest rungs of the ladder.
52
Cf. also Sheffield (2001) 11 n. 12, 17. Pace F. White (2004).
208 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

(212a5–7). If logoi are the means to intellectual development, virtue is

the end. This link Diotima forges between logoi and virtue in her account
of love’s greater mysteries clearly invokes the sophistic claim that the
teacher’s logoi can enable virtue to “be born” in the soul of the pupil.
But there is an important difference: the philosopher-lover, as we have
observed already, produces these logoi for himself, not for any pupils,
and as a result, virtue will be born in the soul of the philosopher-lover,
not that of the pupil-beloved.
Diotima’s mention of “images of virtue” clearly refers to the demotic
virtue that poets such as Homer and Hesiod and lawgivers such as
Lycurgus and Solon could be said to have “begotten” on their fellow
citizens, which Diotima argues is inferior to the virtue that is based upon
knowledge, in this case, the knowledge of Beauty itself.53 But Plato has
Diotima refer to demotic virtues as mere “images” not only because he
wishes to suggest that they are somehow ontologically less real but also
in order to invoke and thus discredit a positive educational doctrine
held by a number of Greek thinkers from the classical period that poetry
and music, and possibly even laws, contain salutary “images of virtue”
or “images of character,” which the young can profitably incorporate
wholesale into their own souls. Aristotle later endorsed a version of this
popular conception, and so too did Plato himself in other dialogues.54
Plato’s suggestion that the true philosopher gives birth to “true virtue”
rather than “images of virtue,” then, is a rejection not just of demotic
virtues generally but of a popular pedagogical theory that held that these
demotic virtues could be acquired through exposure to salutary “images
of virtue” or “images of character” contained in music and poetry.
Diotima’s promise of immortality signals one final way in which Plato
invokes traditional ideas with a view to transcending them. It was a cliché
of conventional moral discourse that the practice of virtue could gain a

53
So O’Brien (1984) 189; Ferrari (1992) 255–56, 260; Sheffield (2001) 11.
54
Arist. Pol. 1340a18–21: “There are, in rhythms and melodies, likenesses (ὁμοιώματα) of
anger and gentleness, of courage and temperance and all their opposites, and of all the
other types of character, which are faithful to their true exemplars.” Plato evinces more
ambivalence toward this idea. Positive or neutral references to the idea may be found at
Leg. 655d5 (choral performances contain images of character [μιμήματα τρόπων]) and
798d7–9 (rhythm and music contain images of character [τρόπων μιμήματα]); cf. also
Prot. 326c6–8. But in Rep. 600e4–6 Plato describes Homer and other poets as “imitators
of images of virtue” (μιμητὰς ἐιδώλων ἀρετῆς): the criticism here is more grandly onto-
logical but is nevertheless, like the passage from the Symposium, inspired by the more tra-
ditional notion that poetry and music teach by means of images. See Janaway (1995) 78
n. 45, 176–81. On eikōn and eidōlon in Plato, see Steiner (1996) 94 and 107 nn. 24–25.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 209

man immortal renown,55 and indeed Diotima explicitly invokes this tra-
ditional idea earlier in her speech (208c5–6, d5–8) in order to lay the
groundwork for her claim about the immortality one can enjoy by giving
birth to true virtue. Plato does not make explicit what kind of immortal-
ity he has in mind here in the Symposium,56 but it seems reasonably clear
that in the Symposium immortality is something that can be earned only
by the philosophical few and is not a quality that all human souls share.
The reason he emphasizes this kind of immortality in the Symposium is
that it has to be something parallel to the lesser immortality earned by the
virtuous according to conventional morality. But this does not mean that
Plato did not believe in the immortality of all souls at the time he wrote
the Symposium, and I see no reason to agree with those who believe that
Plato can subscribe to only one form of immortality at a time, so that if
the immortality Diotima describes in the Symposium is different from that
Plato promises in the Phaedo and Republic, we must suppose that Plato’s
views on immortality had changed.57
Diotima’s account of the birth of true virtue at the end of her speech
raises an important question: Is parturition an appropriate metaphor for
the acquisition or cultivation of virtue? Logoi can easily be understood as
objects of parturition; they can be understood as products that, once cre-
ated, enjoy a life of their own. The same can be said of poems and laws.
But virtue, which Plato and most Greeks understood to be not an alien-
able object but rather a state of the soul,58 is another matter. Parturition

55
See, e.g., Soph. Phil. 1420; Eur. Andr. 774–75, fr. 734.1 TGF; Anon. Iambl. 5.2; Lys. 2.6,
80; Isocr. 1.50, 4.84, 5.132, 8.94, 9.70.
56
His reticence has occasioned extensive scholarly comment: see, e.g., Hackforth (1950);
Morrison (1964) 42–46; Dover (1965) 16–20; O’Brien (1984); Dyson (1986); Sier
(1997) 184–86; F. White (2004) 377.
57
Hackforth (1950). A more reasonable approach, I think, is to suppose that Plato invokes
different kinds of immortality to suit different rhetorical contexts. When he wishes to
describe the rewards enjoyed by those who pursue the difficult path to true knowledge,
as he does in the Symposium, he emphasizes an immortality that is necessarily restricted
to the few. But when he tries to make a more general argument about the nature and
source of knowledge, as in the Phaedo’s theory of recollection and the Forms, he needs
a form of immortality experienced by all souls. Cf. already Dover (1965); Rowe (1998)
184–85.
58
A good example may be found in book 4 of the Republic, where Plato describes the
virtue of sōphrosynē or “self-control” as a state of the soul in which the ruling part of
the soul governs the middle and lower parts of the soul, and the virtue of dikaiosynē or
“justice” as a state of the soul in which each of the three parts performs its proper func-
tion (Rep. 442c10–d1, 443c9–d5). See generally T. Irwin (1977b) 39, 58, 93. Sheffield
(2006a) 133–36 suggests that giving birth to true virtue is the same as contemplating
the Forms, realizing our true nature. But cf. F. White (2004) 374 and n. 37.
210 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

logically requires that some new entity emerge from the body of the
mother, and indeed the Greeks very frequently described childbirth with
the otiose formula “gave birth and brought into the light.”59 If Plato’s
notion that the philosopher’s highest aspiration is to give birth to virtue
is at all strange, it is most likely because Plato intentionally presents an
incomplete metaphor. We may recall that some Sophists claimed that they
could metaphorically “implant” or even “beget” virtue in a young man’s
soul, which the young man himself would eventually “give birth” to. Use
of the word τίκτω, in this fuller form of the metaphor, need not imply
the emergence of something new from the body or soul of the pupil but
may denote simply the “impregnation” that results from the teacher’s
pedagogy. But once Plato has removed the teacher from the equation,
when there is no longer any “begetter,” giving birth to virtue becomes
paradoxical: To what can the image of parturition reasonably refer?

The Sophistic Birth-of-Virtue Metaphor, in the

Symposium and Elsewhere
Plato’s reception of the sophistic birth-of-virtue metaphor works similarly
in other dialogues. In the First Alcibiades, whose dating is uncertain but is
now generally thought to be an authentic Platonic work,60 the question is
whether the young Alcibiades possesses the moral qualifications – virtue,
specifically the virtue of justice – to be a statesman who would advise the
Athenian dēmos. Alcibiades believes that the function of the statesman is
to “transmit virtue” (ἀρετῆς μεταδοτέον, 134c1–2) to his fellow citizens,
which is a political variation on the Sophists’ conception of teaching: just
as the teacher can transmit virtue to his pupil, so the rhētōr attempts to
transmit virtue to the people as a whole by teaching them what is “right”
and “wrong” in particular decision-making contexts.61 But Alcibiades is
soon made to concede that he lacks the very virtue he ought to have if he
would transmit it to others (134c4–13), so that he is more like a slave need-
ing to be governed than like the governor he was ambitious to become
(135b7–c11). Alcibiades, chastened, acknowledges that the situation
now calls for an exchange of roles between him and his teacher Socrates:
now he “will attend on” (παιδαγωγήσω) Socrates, as student to teacher,

59
See, e.g., Hes. Th. 157; Eur. fr. 484.4 TGF; Aristoph. Av. 699; Plat. Tim. 91d4–5; Poll.
3.8–9.
60
Date: Ledger (1989) 79–80, 113, 121, 144 (early); Denyer (2001) 22–24 (later).
Authenticity: Denyer (2001) 14–26.
61
Cf. Plat. Gorg. 454b5–7.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 211

just as Socrates used to “attend on” Alcibiades, both as teacher to student

and as lover to beloved (135d7–11). To this Socrates replies: “My good
man, my love will be no different from a stork, if it shall hatch a winged
love for you and be cared for by it in return” (ὦ γενναῖε, πελαργοῦ ἄρα
ὁ ἐμὸς ἔρως οὐδὲν διοίσει, εἰ παρὰ σοὶ ἐννεοττεύσας ἔρωτα ὑπόπτερον
ὑπὸ τούτου πάλιν θεραπεύσεται, 135e1–3).62 The love Socrates hatches
is a desire, on Alcibiades’ part, to “cultivate justice” (135e4–5), the virtue
that matters most to the would-be statesman.63
Plato’s conception of teaching here differs from the more sophistic
conception we described in Chapter 4, according to which the teacher
“plants” or “begets” virtue in the soul of the student. First, while Plato’s
metaphor does give Socrates a role in Alcibiades’ acquisition of virtue,
it avoids any hints of a direct transfer of virtue from teacher to pupil.
So what Socrates hatches for Alcibiades is not virtue itself, but, as we
have seen, the erōs that might motivate Alcibiades to cultivate virtue for
­himself. And the subject of the verb ἐννεοττεύω (to hatch) is not Socrates
himself but rather his erōs for Alcibiades and for wisdom. Second, Plato
here seems to be aware of the sexual overtones of the sophistic metaphor
and to be at pains to minimize them. So rather than having Socrates
“beget” virtue in Alcibiades’ soul, which presupposes copulation, he uses
a metaphor drawn from avian reproduction that focuses on the parent
bird’s nurturing incubation of its eggs.64 While both cock and hen could
serve as the grammatical subject of the verb “to hatch,” it is quite likely
that Plato here imagines Socrates as adopting the role of hen.
This conclusion is suggested by Plato’s subtle intertextual engagement
in this passage with a passage from Cratinus’s comedy entitled Nemesis
(431 b.c.e.), which told the story of Zeus’s impregnation of Nemesis in

62
For the folk belief that the stork was cared for and fed by its own young, once they grew
up, see, e.g., Soph. El. 1058–62; Aristoph. Av. 1353–57; and Arist. HA 615b23–24 with
Thompson (1910) ad loc.
63
Cf. Plat. Rep. 573e3–574a10, where the nestlings that hatch in the soul are destruc-
tive desires. There Plato describes the many desires in the frenzied soul of the tyrant
as nestlings (ἐννενεοττευμένας) that are crying out to be fed and are led by the god
Eros ­himself. If the tyrant does not feed these chicks, he will be beset by “pangs and
pains” (ὠδῖσί τε καὶ ὀδύναις). The mention of the “pangs” (ὠδῖνες) experienced by the
soul hints at the idea of childbirth, given that this word, since Homer, has been largely
reserved for labor pains, but the pangs here have been at least partly transferred from
the process of laying eggs to the nagging of the newborn chicks for food.
64
The phrase παρὰ σοὶ literally means “at your side” (LSJ s.v. παρά B), and so seems to
preclude penetration. Denyer (2001) 247, who translates “in you,” fails to capture the
restraint of Plato’s Greek. Still it seems likely that virtue will eventually “be born in”
(ἐγγίγνεται) Alcibiades’ soul (133b9–10).
212 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the form of a swan – characters that seem to have been thinly veiled allu-
sions to the contemporary figures of Pericles and Aspasia, respectively.65
In Cratinus’s play, a character says to Nemesis: “You must in no way dif-
fer in your behavior from a well-formed hen (εὐσχήμονος ἀλεκτρυόνος
μηδὲν διοίσεις τοὺς τρόπους). Sit on this egg in order to hatch for us a
beautiful and remarkable bird from it” (fr. 115 PCG). Socrates’ freely
iambic πελαργοῦ . . . οὐδὲν διοίσει from the First Alcibiades seems to
recall Cratinus’s ἀλεκτρυόνος μηδὲν διοίσεις, not only for its similarities
of expression but perhaps also for the Alcmeonid context.66 If Plato is
alluding to these lines from Cratinus, he assimilates Socrates to Nemesis,
who hatches the egg she has laid. Socrates is no sophistic lover who will
impregnate Alcibiades with virtue, but a mother hen who will hatch, for
Alcibiades’ benefit, a desire to cultivate virtue.
In the Phaedrus, written after the Symposium, Plato contrasts a sophis-
tic conception of teaching virtue with his own notion about how one
gains knowledge and virtue, and both conceptions are expressed, in
part, through pregnancy and birth imagery. We have seen that Plato
describes the acquaintance of Lysias’s nonlover as attempting to “give
birth” (ἐντεκοῦσα) to pseudovirtue in his beloved’s soul (256e4–257a1).
Socrates’ inspired lover, by contrast, recollecting the Form of Beauty
when he gazes upon the beauty of his beloved, will “give birth to” wings,
by which his soul escapes this world (250c7–252a1).67 Plato focuses here
on the “birth” of wings that takes place within the lover’s soul, just as in
the Symposium it is the lover, not the beloved, who gives birth to virtue.
It is true that the beloved’s soul too eventually sprouts wings, but this is
not something that the lover initiates or causes (255c7–e1). The source
of the philosopher’s fertility here is a vision of the Forms, not the “seeds”
or logoi of a teacher. And indeed at the end of his speech, Socrates con-
cludes that philosophical lovers, who made contact with the Forms,
“enslaved that by means of which vice was born (ἐνεγίγνετο) within the
soul and liberated that by means of which virtue [was born within the
soul]” (256b2–3): the intransitive “is born” (ἐγγίγνομαι) usefully sup-
presses the identity of the begetter altogether.

65
See Crat. fr. 118 PCG with Plut. Per. 3.3–4. On the confusion between Leda and Nemesis
in this myth, see Gantz (1993) 319–21.
66
Both Pericles and Alcibiades are members of the Alcmeonid family. One might even
speculate whether Plato’s pelargos, “stork,” is a lambdacizing anagram of Perikles, who was,
furthermore, from the deme of Cholargos. On the lambdacizing speech of Alcibiades,
see esp. Vickers (1997) xvii–xviii, xxxi–xxxii, 24–26, etc.
67
The birth imagery in this passage is made explicit in the reference to ὠδῖνες (labor
pangs) at 251e5.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 213

Two other features of the Phaedrus are worth mentioning in this con-
text. First, the Phaedrus, like the First Alcibiades, employs a reproductive
metaphor with strong avian elements, and one reason for this, I sus-
pect, is that it allows Plato to avoid some of the more explicitly sexual
associations of the sophistic human birth metaphor. Whereas the First
Alcibiades focuses on incubation and hatching, the Phaedrus focuses, more
abstractly, on pterogenesis, which could allude to everything from the
growth of wings and feathers in the embryonic chick to fledging. Second,
in the Phaedrus, as in the Symposium, Plato makes a form of immortality –
individual immortality now – central to the promise of the philosophi-
cal life: whereas the philosopher can shorten the cycle of reincarnation
and more quickly come to live in the heavens (249a3–5, 256d6–e2),
the rhetorical nonlover, whose spirit of friendship “gives birth” to only
pseudovirtue in the soul of his beloved, “will cause his [the beloved’s]
soul to wander mindlessly, around and under the earth for nine thou-
sand years” (256e6–257a2). The “birth” of wings in the philosopher’s
soul is clearly a metaphor for immortality, and one wonders whether
there are intimations of immortality in Plato’s use of the avian reproduc-
tion metaphor in the First Alcibiades and other dialogues as well.
We turn finally to the Theaetetus, which was written around the same
time as the Phaedrus, where Plato once again invokes the idea of the soul
as a locus of avian birth, although here the soul’s “nestlings” represent not
virtue or the erōs to acquire virtue but forms of knowledge (197d5–e6).
We devote a more detailed discussion to this dialogue in the next chap-
ter. For now we may observe briefly that Plato is once again at pains to
interrupt the sophistic connection between the teacher’s logoi and the
student’s virtue or, in this case, knowledge, the basis of Platonic virtue:
Socrates is an intellectual midwife, who helps the young Theaetetus give
birth to his own ideas (149a4–9 etc.), even if they turn out to be merely
“wind eggs” (157d3, 161a1, 210b9), not a Sophist like Prodicus, who
would impregnate the young man with Prodicean dogma (151b2–6).
Though the focus in the Theaetetus is the young man’s ability to give birth
to knowledge, Plato makes it clear that virtue is the ultimate goal and
that it is by “pursuing virtue” that one can attain, if not immortality per-
haps, then at least “likeness to god” (176a9–b5).68

68
Cf. also Rep. 613a8–b1, where Socrates praises the man “who wishes, . . . by cultivating
virtue, to become as much like god as humanly possible.” Annas (1999) 70 gets it right
when she observes, in commenting on this passage, that Plato evinces profound ambiv-
alence between the earthly pursuit of virtuous perfection and the fantasy of an other-
worldly escape to the realm of the gods and the Forms. Cf. Russell (2004), who insists that
becoming like god and becoming virtuous are both consistently this-worldly in Plato.
214 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Alcibiades and Socrates

We may conclude with a glance at a probable echo of Diotima’s vision of
the birth of virtue, which occurs at the end of the speech of Alcibiades.
The logoi of Socrates, he observes, are clothed with earthy images of pack-
asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners: “But when one sees them opened up
and gets inside them, he will discover, first of all, that they are the only
logoi that embody reason and, second, that they are the most divine, con-
tain within them the most holy images of virtue (ἀγάλματ’ ἀρετῆς), and
aim at most if not all of what one should investigate if one is going to be a
good man (καλῷ κἀγαθῷ)” (222a1–6). The fact that Alcibiades’ speech
ends with the same kind of long dative-and-infinitive construction that
also marks the end of Diotima’s speech invites us to compare them, espe-
cially because this conclusion to Alcibiades’ encomium provides one last
meditation on the relationship between logoi and virtue.
Alcibiades tells us that Socrates’ logoi contain “holy images of virtue.”
The word ἀγάλματα, which I have translated as “holy images,” is ambig-
uous: this is a word usually reserved for statues of the gods, which might
imply that the virtue contained in Socrates’ logoi is divine and indeed
immortal; but these are still images of the gods and not the real thing,
and one wonders if the “holy images of virtue” (ἀγάλματ’ ἀρετῆς) that
Alcibiades mentions at the conclusion of his speech do not in fact allude
to the “images of virtue” (εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς, 212a4) that Diotima, at the
conclusion of her speech, dismisses as less than the real thing. Has
Alcibiades fallen for an image rather than the truth?69 Alcibiades seems
to think that the teacher’s logoi themselves contain virtue, but we have
seen that these are the terms of the sophistic pedagogical metaphor and
that Diotima herself was at pains to argue that logoi are for the benefit of
the lover and aim to assist him to give birth to his own virtue.
One of the functions of Alcibiades’ speech, I think, is to offer the
reader a humorous portrait of a man who fails to understand the teach-
ing of Socrates, which was based in part, within the fictional universe of
the Symposium, on the erotic instruction of Diotima; Alcibiades is some-
one who thinks he can gain wisdom and virtue from Socrates through
sex.70 So while this passage invokes the themes of logoi and virtue in

69
So Steiner (1996) 92–94. Cf. Plat. Phaedr. 251a6. In Rep. 517d9, the word agalma is used
to describe the puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave; see further Reeve
(2006) 125–28. On images, see also n. 54.
70
Cf. Reeve (2006) 146. For a more optimistic reading of the Alcibiades episode, see the
classic essay of Nussbaum (1986) 165–99.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 215

the context of Alcibiades’ relationship with Socrates, it does not really

change the feeling we were left with at the end of Diotima’s speech – that
however much others may benefit from the logoi that the philosopher
gives birth to as he ascends the ladder of knowledge, the virtue he gives
birth to within his own soul is a matter of self-cultivation and the immor-
tality he may enjoy is not vicarious but predicated on a very real escape
from this world.

τίκτω: Plenitude and the Scene of (Male) Sex

Earlier in this chapter, we described a pattern of suppressing mothers
in the recounting of myths about the birth of Eros and of erōs in the
speeches leading up to Diotima’s and in the first part of Diotima’s own
speech. These mythical elaborations present a fantasy in which men
reproduce by themselves, without women, but it is essentially a fantasy
founded upon the “natural” fact of male begetting, of γεννάω, even if
extended, in some cases, to the point of caricature. This is the masculine,
quasi-phallic reproductive strategy of Zeus himself, the laboring father
of Athena and Dionysus. But with Diotima’s account of the mysteries of
intellectual birth, Plato invites us to consider a more distinctively female
experience of creation, in which the male body can experience some
of the shattering vulnerability of the female body. Diotima signals this
new vision, as we have seen, by means of a final and decisive shift from
γεννάω to τίκτω. If we are to take this shift seriously, we will need to
confront two questions: Exactly what kind of feminine experience is this,
and if the male philosopher is represented as playing, metaphorically,
a feminine reproductive role, how are we to imagine that he becomes
pregnant in the first place?

Getting Pregnant
We may begin with the second question. It is a fair question to ask of
the text, as a specifically feminine metaphor of pregnancy and par-
turition necessarily raises the issue of where this fertility comes from.
The question is all the more insistent given that Plato is ostentatiously
silent in the Symposium on the possibility of some kind of innate knowl-
edge,71 for which he argued explicitly in the Meno, Phaedo, and Phaedrus.

71
Cf. Sheffield (2001) 25–31, who argues that Plato in the Symposium assumes that all
humans have an innate potentiality for knowledge, but not innate knowledge itself.
216 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

It is obviously also an awkward question, given the homosocial context

in which the symposium takes place. We have seen evidence, after all,
that some Greek lovers did claim to “impregnate” their beloveds, meta-
phorically or literally. Of course, the conception of male pregnancy that
Diotima presents in the Symposium is different insofar as it is the lover,
and not the beloved, who is imagined to be pregnant with intellectual
offspring, and it is in the soul rather than in the body that the philos-
opher will bring this offspring to term. But the specter of bodily pen-
etration is still present, as we shall see, and this is perhaps all the more
disconcerting, given that the body in question is that of an adult citizen
male. In this section we consider how Plato represents the interaction of
male bodies in their pursuit of knowledge, paying close attention to how
he negotiates, and indeed delicately defers, the prospect of an impreg-
nated and potentially penetrated male body, and to how he imagines an
alternate, nonsexual source for the philosopher’s fecundity.
We may begin our investigation into Plato’s strategy of deferral with
a passage from Aristophanes’ speech in which he contrasts male-female
and male-male sexual intercourse. The comic poet tells us, toward the
end of his anthropogonic myth, that Zeus transposed the genitals of our
human ancestors to the front and thus
created a form of procreation that takes place in one another (τὴν γένεσιν
ἐν ἀλλήλοις), through (διά) the male in (ἐν) the female, and he did so
for the following reason, so that, through the process of mingling, if a
man (ἀνήρ) meets a woman (γυναικί), they beget (γεννῷεν) and a birth
(γένος) takes place, but if a male meets a male (ἄρρην ἄρρενι), plenitude
(πλησμονή) results from the association and they get relief and return to
their duties. . . . (191c3–8)

This is an account of the origin both of sexual intercourse and of pro-

creation. As far as sex is concerned, the intercourse between men and
women is unexceptionally penetrative: they procreate “in one another”
(ἐν ἀλλήλοις, 191c3), “through the male in the female” (191c3–4). Sex
between males, on the other hand, remains free of explicit penetration:
halves of the original double male, we learn a few lines later, while they
are boys, “enjoy reclining beside men and embracing them” (191e8–
192a1); these men and boys “embrace” what is “akin” (192b5). The myth
is also an account of the origin of human reproduction. For the male-
female couple, what takes place “through the male in the female” is the
process of “procreation” (γένεσις), which Aristophanes describes, later
in the sentence, as begetting (γεννῷεν) and giving birth (γένος), almost
certainly a reference to the male and female roles, respectively. But when
 The Pregnant Philosopher 217

two males (ἄρρην ἄρρενι) come together – he later specifies them to be a

man and a youth (191e6–192b5), in accordance with the norms of clas-
sical pederasty, but the elision of sexual hierarchy here is striking – they
will experience πλησμονή, “plenitude” or “fullness.”
What does he mean by πλησμονή? It is possible, in this context, to
understand Aristophanes to be saying nothing more than that these men
will experience a feeling of “satisfaction” as a result of sexual release.
But the root of this word, pleh1-, denotes “fullness,”72 and it is difficult,
at least for the re-reader of the Symposium, not to discern a hint of the
pregnancy that Diotima’s philosopher will experience, especially since
this πλησμονή is the male-male couple’s answer to the reproductive activ-
ities – begetting (γεννῷεν) and giving birth (γένος) – of the male-female
couple. It is potentially daring to suggest that “fullness” could result
when two males come together sexually, for it implies the penetration
of one or both bodies, but Plato deflects this possibility by contrasting
male-male sexual intercourse, characterized by merely “reclining and
embracing,” with the more explicitly penetrative intercourse of man and
woman. It is also interesting that male-male sexuality does not change
substantively after the transposition of their genitals to the front: some
kind of “embrace” remains the preferred form of sex. In this rather lim-
ited way, male-male sexuality is the historically prior sexual practice, a
more ancient form of sexuality than the male-female sexuality that leads
to procreation.
This passage from the speech of Aristophanes features two images
that turn out to be central to Plato’s delicate task of describing the
source of the pregnant philosopher’s fecundity: proximity (reclining
together, touching) and plenitude (becoming filled).73 Plato has actu-
ally been developing both images from the beginning of the dialogue.
So when Socrates first arrives at the party, Agathon greets him, saying,
“Sit down (κατάκεισο) beside me, Socrates, in order that I, by touching
(ἁπτόμενος) you, might have benefit of that wise thought that came to
you on the porch” (175c7–d1). To this Socrates replies:
It would be great, Agathon, if wisdom were the sort of thing that flowed,
whenever we touch (ἁπτώμεθα) one another, from the one of us who
is more full to the one who is more empty (ἐκ τοῦ πληρεστέρου εἰς τὸ
κενώτερον), just like the water in [two] cups that flows through the wool

72
See Chantraine (1968–80) 901–2 s.v. πίμπλημι.
73
On the “filling” image generally, see generally Lowenstam (1985) 88–89, 96–97; Leitao
(1997) 277–78.
218 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

from the cup that is more full to the one that is more empty. If wisdom is
like this, then I highly value reclining (κατάκλισιν) at your side. For I think
that I will be filled (πληρωθήσεσθαι) by you from your impressive store of
wisdom. (175d3–e2)

These first words of Socrates in the Symposium are more important than
they are usually taken to be. Socrates’ suggestion that wisdom could pass
from one man to another – from the man who is more full to the man
who is more empty – as a result of their physical proximity is certainly
ironic: this may have been a metaphor used by the Sophists or perhaps by
the historical Agathon, but it is well known that Socrates himself scrupu-
lously disavowed having any knowledge of his own, much less knowledge
that could be transmitted to another.74 The image of the empty becom-
ing full almost certainly hints at the claim made later in the dialogue by
both Socrates and Diotima that Eros is “empty” of beauty and of knowl-
edge and therefore always seeking to become “filled.” But in its original
context, the image of Socrates and Agathon exchanging (intellectual)
fluids is quite bold, although Plato softens the image ever so slightly by
describing the exchange as one mediated by a piece of wool: neither
man enters the body of the other any more than the cup that is more
full enters the cup that is more empty. But still this passage suggests,
rather disconcertingly, that wisdom may be exchanged through a zero-
sum erotic economy, so that one man’s acquisition of wisdom implies the
other man’s loss.
This initial interaction between Socrates and Agathon also links the
transmission of knowledge from one man to another to the seating
arrangement of the symposium. The couches on which the men recline
are part of the furniture of philosophical discourse. Agathon’s hope to get
wisdom from Socrates leads him to ask Socrates to “sit down” (κατάκεισο,
175c8) beside him, and Socrates jokes that “reclining” (κατάκλισιν,
175e1) at Agathon’s side could enable him to absorb Agathon’s wisdom
(cf. 175c7, 176a1). A few lines later Eryximachus proposes that Phaedrus
be the first speaker “because he is reclining (κατάκειται) in first position
and is also the father of the proposal (λόγου)” (177d4–5). The word
logos perhaps looks ahead, as we have seen, to the logoi that the pregnant
philosopher will give birth to as he climbs the ladder of ascent (209b8,

74
Bussanich (1999) 40–42, citing Plat. Theag. 130d2–e2 and Aeschin. Socr. Alcib. fr. 11,
argues that this was a “mystic” teaching of the historical Socrates. But in both the Theages
and Symposium passages, the idea is proposed by someone else, and in the Symposium it
is explicitly rejected, albeit gently, by Socrates. On this image, see also Sheffield (2006a)
12–13.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 219

210a8, c1, d5). But here, in its immediate context, a more conventional
paternity may be imagined: Phaedrus is the “father” who will supply the
fertile logoi for the man sitting next to him on the couch, Pausanias, who,
thus fertilized, will take up where he left off.
Plato develops these images of proximity and plenitude over the course
of the dialogue. They will eventually become more abstract and decorpo-
realized as we move closer to Diotima’s presentation of a philosophical
body that is unabashedly feminine. But at first the images continue to
be very corporeal, as they are in the lead up to Eryximachus’s speech
and in the speech itself. It becomes the doctor’s turn to speak when
Aristophanes, whose turn it was, is prevented from speaking because
of a bad case of hiccoughs, caused by “πλησμονή or something else”
(185c6–7). The word πλησμονή in this context must refer to overeating:
Aristophanes’ stomach is too “full.” If this πλησμονή hints at the plen-
itude of intellectual pregnancy that we will be formally introduced to
later, it is clear that we have started at the very bottom. For Aristophanes,
when still overcome with hiccoughs, is full not of wisdom, which is what
Agathon hopes to acquire from Socrates, but of food. We are perhaps not
far from the situation of Blepyrus in Aristophanes’ own Assemblywomen
(see Chapter 5), who is constipated and seeks the assistance of a doctor
and the goddess Eileithyia herself to help him deliver his turd.
While Aristophanes is indisposed, Eryximachus fills the gap. His lan-
guage is technical and scientific, but he is just as much concerned with
the body as the gluttonous, hiccoughing Aristophanes. The expertise
of the physician, he says, resides in his “knowledge of the operation of
erōs within the body with respect to filling and emptying (πλησμονὴν
καὶ κένωσιν)” (186c6–7), which refers to an ability to implant erōs for
things that are healthy and remove erōs for things that are unhealthy
(186d4), and to foster erōs among the often warring elements in the body
(186e1–2). Eryximachus’s reference to “filling and emptying” seems to
allude to some actual theories of contemporary medical practitioners,75
but his claim that what the doctor fills the body with is “healthy erōs,”
given that this claim is made in the context of a homosocial gathering
dedicated to speeches in praise of love, is startlingly sexual. It suggests
that a male doctor works by “implanting” erōs in the body of another, and
it is perhaps an explicitly corporeal notion such as this that Plato aims
to correct when he has Socrates suggest in First Alcibiades that erōs for

75
On the medical notion of “filling” and “emptying,” see Hipp. Flat. 1, Nat. hom. 9; Hunter
(2004) 55–56.
220 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

virtue will be hatched in the soul of Alcibiades not by Socrates himself

but by Socrates’ kindred erōs. Eryximachus practices this healing method
on Aristophanes himself, and it is perhaps no accident that the narrator
reminds us that Eryximachus “reclines” on the couch next down from
Aristophanes (185d1–2) just before we hear of his attempts to implant
this healthy erōs in Aristophanes’ body.
Aristophanes returns the favor when he agrees to “fill” the gaps
(ἀναπληρῶσαι) in Eryximachus’s account of erōs (188e2–3). That
Aristophanes’ “filling” will be directed toward gaps in the logos rather
than bodies, as it was in the medical practice of Eryximachus, represents,
I think, a signal that the comic poet, though he himself suffered ear-
lier from “overfullness” (πλησμονή, 185c6) and was known for comedies
that featured characters engrossed in the lowest alimentary and sexual
functions of the human body, will here present a more edifying vision
of the nature of erōs and the male body’s “use of pleasure.” And indeed
Aristophanes presents us, as we have seen, a taxonomy of desire whose
highest form features males whose “reclining together” leads eventually
to an experience of “fullness” or “plenitude” (πλησμονή).
But it is Agathon who provides the first hints of a higher source of the
male lover’s plenitude. Whereas Eryximachus had proposed that it is the
doctor who “fills” the human body with erōs, for Agathon it is the god
Eros himself who “empties (κενοῖ) us of alienation and fills (πληροῖ) us
with a sense of belonging (οἰκειότητος)” (197d1). Agathon invokes the
common idea that Eros represents the social bonds between men, who
come to “gatherings such as these” (197d2) to experience a sense of
belonging.76 But it is significant that the subject of filling is now a god,
rather than another man, as it was in the brief dialogue between Socrates
and Agathon himself at the beginning of the dialogue. And while in
Agathon’s mouth οἰκειότης is a pretentious synonym for ­“friendship,”
Plato has Agathon use it in order to anticipate the notion that the pleni-
tude the philosopher experiences when he makes contact with the Form
of Beauty is a function of the philosopher’s contact, perhaps for the
first time, with something to which he is truly “akin” (οἰκεῖον, 205e6;
cf. 193d2).
Diotima builds directly on Agathon, suggesting that Eros, now
demoted to the status of daimōn, serves to “fill” (συμπληροῖ, 202e6) the
gap between men and gods. The “filling” that Eros offers is the glue that
can join the philosopher to the realm of absolute Beauty and Truth. Eros

76
On Eros as patron of the social bonds between citizens, see Leitao (2002) 159–62.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 221

is still the subject of the verb “to fill,” but it is space he fills, not bodies,
which would imply penetration. To fill the gap between men and gods
is to erase that gap and bring the philosophical male body into proxim-
ity to the nurturing realm of the Forms. There is no penetration here.
Diotima adopts a similar strategy in her account of the mating of Penia
with Poros: “Penia, in a plot to create a child from Poros because of
her own lack, reclined (κατακλίνεται) beside him and became pregnant
with (ἐκύησε) Eros” (203b7–c1).77 Penia is like the male philosopher: she
plays the active role of pursuer and reclines beside her beloved. While
Plato may expect some readers to supply sexual intercourse between
“reclining” and “pregnancy,” he seems intentionally to have omitted
mention of it; there is no explicit penetration here either. The male phi-
losopher is also like Penia: indeed, this is the first hint of the philosopher
as a female in search of plenitude (Poros). And yet the story ends with
Penia’s pregnancy; there is no mention of the parturition that one might
have expected to follow.
These omissions anticipate the way that the philosopher will draw plen-
itude from the Form of Beauty in the climax of Diotima’s speech. There
will be no intercourse between philosopher and Beauty. In the Republic,
Plato can imagine real “intercourse” (μιγείς) between philosopher and
the Forms because the philosopher plays the distinctively masculine role
of “begetter” (γεννήσας) of intelligence and truth (Rep. 490b5–6). In the
Symposium, by contrast, where the philosopher’s fecundity is described in
more feminine terms – logoi and eventually virtue are things to which he
“gives birth” (τίκτω) – his contact with the Form of Beauty is limited to
“touching” (ἅπτοιτο, 211b7).
Plato has at least one more deferral in store. When Alcibiades arrives
at the end of the dialogue, he immediately seats himself between
Agathon and Socrates, initially unaware of the latter’s presence. When
he notices Socrates, he gently chides him for having chosen to “recline”
(κατέκεισο, 213b9–c1; κατεκλίνης, c3; κατακείσῃ, c5) “beside the most
beautiful” (παρὰ τῷ καλλίστῳ, 213c4–5), a reference most immediately
to Agathon, but this phrase probably also hints at the Form of Beauty,
the true source of the philosopher’s plenitude. When Agathon gets up
and takes a place on the couch on the other side of Socrates, so that
Socrates is flanked on his left by Alcibiades and on his right by Agathon,
it represents a further development of this philosophical idea. When
77
This may recall Greek premarital incubation rituals, in which the bride-to-be sleeps
beside a male cult statue, presumably in order to absorb its powers of fertility. See Nic.
Met. fr. 45; Callim. Aet. fr. 75.1–3; Poll. 3.39–40.
222 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Alcibiades arrived, he proposed that the symposiasts change their topic,

that each man praise the man on his right instead of praising Eros. Thus
Alcibiades gives a speech in praise of Socrates and it would fall next to
Socrates to praise the figure reclining on his right, not just Agathon, but
more importantly, τὸ ἀγαθόν, the Good.

Staying Pregnant
We have now seen that Plato employs a two-pronged strategy to under-
write his male birth metaphor, which becomes increasingly feminine
the closer we get to the quivering climax of Diotima’s speech: he avoids
any hint of bodily penetration and, when it comes time to identify the
ultimate source of the philosopher’s pregnancy, he assures us that it is
not another man, someone wiser and “more full,” but an intellectual
­abstraction – Beauty itself. We are ready now to consider the other ques-
tion that we posed at the beginning of this section: Exactly what kind of
feminine experience is this?
Most scholars believe that Diotima’s metaphor focuses on parturition:
the goal of the philosopher is to “give birth” to offspring from the mind
or soul. There is much support for this in the Symposium itself: Homer
and Hesiod beget poems and Solon and Lycurgus beget laws, both of
which inculcate virtue; and the philosopher, as he climbs the ladder of
love, at first begets and subsequently gives birth to logoi that may benefit
others but primarily serve to assist the philosopher himself to make the
conceptual leap from the many to the one. But giving birth to virtue, the
final goal of the ascent and perhaps of all philosophy, is poorly served by
a metaphor of parturition, as we have seen. Giving birth to virtue ought,
in fact, to involve retention rather than expulsion. So the goal, at least
insofar as it relates to the acquisition of virtue, should be pregnancy –
permanent pregnancy – rather than parturition.78
We have seen hints of this already. We recall that in Aristophanes’
speech, after the protohumans’ genitals are transposed to the front,
the sexual life of male-female and male-male couples begins to diverge:
“If a man meets a woman, they beget (γεννῷεν) and a birth (γένος)
takes place, but if a male meets a male, plenitude (πλησμονή) results”
(191c5–6). The male-male couple’s πλησμονή is clearly parallel to
­male-female ­couple’s “begetting” and “birth,” but it seems to refer,

78
For a different notion of what it should mean to “give birth” to virtue, see F. White
(2004).
 The Pregnant Philosopher 223

strictly speaking, to a liminal experience that falls between begetting and

birth, between ­conception and parturition. We recall also that Diotima,
in describing the genealogy of Eros, tells us that Penia reclined beside
Poros and became pregnant, but does not tell us that Eros was actually
born from Penia.79 We can now appreciate that Plato had good reason to
elide the parturition that we might expect to have come at the conclu-
sion to this myth: the goal for the philosopher is, in a sense, to become
pregnant with erōs, with an ongoing desire for the realm of the Forms
and the knowledge built upon it, just as a new erōs to pursue virtue is
hatched in the soul of the humbled Alcibiades in First Alcibiades.
There is another passage that also hints that pregnancy rather than
parturition is the goal – or at least one goal – of intellectual procreation.
This passage, from the end of the so-called “ascent,” has received surpris-
ingly little commentary from scholars, so we shall quote generously from
the text leading up to it:
After activities, [the guide] leads him to forms of knowledge, in order that
he [the philosopher] in turn see the beauty that resides in forms of knowl-
edge, and in order that he, by gazing at beauty that is now great, no longer
be slavish, vulgar, and petty by loving, like a slave would, the beauty resi-
dent in just one thing, such as the beauty of a boy or of some man or of
one activity, but that he, instead, by turning himself toward the great sea of
beauty and beholding it, give birth to (τίκτῃ) many beautiful and generous
logoi and thoughts in the presence of unstinting Philosophy, until he grows
strong there and grows larger and finally glimpses (ἕως ἂν ἐνταῦθα ῥωσθεὶς
καὶ αὐξηθεὶς κατίδῃ) a certain single knowledge of this sort, which is the
knowledge of this beauty. (210c6–e1)

The sequence of events is important: (1) one makes the ascent, possibly
with the assistance of a guide; (2) along the way, one gives birth to beau-
tiful logoi, which enable one to ascend to the next step; (3) one becomes
strong and large (ῥωσθεὶς καὶ αὐξηθείς); and, finally, (4) one gains a
vision of the knowledge of Beauty itself. I want to focus for a moment on
the philosopher’s becoming “strong and large” (ῥωσθεὶς καὶ αὐξηθείς)
just before beholding the final mystic revelation. For it is at this point
that one becomes truly “pregnant,” that is, after one has given birth to a
series of propaedeutic logoi.

79
The word γέγονεν at 203c2 could mean “was born,” but probably means only “became
[the follower and attendant of Aphrodite].” Even if it had to mean “was born” in this
context, Plato does not say that he was born from Penia. Similarly, when Plato says that
Eros “was begotten (γεννηθείς) on her [Aphrodite’s] birthday” (203c3), this need not
imply parturition either.
224 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

I think that Plato is inviting us, perhaps not without some ambiva-
lence, to understand not parturition but the very state of being pregnant
itself as the ultimate goal of philosophy. This hypothesis complements
the findings of other scholars. David Halperin, in developing his read-
ing of Diotima’s speech, identifies an important distinction within Greek
thought between male and female desire: male desire is oriented toward
acquisition, female desire toward creation.80 And Lesley Dean-Jones has
shown, in a study of Greek medical texts, that a woman’s creative impulse
is focused not so much on generating a product (the child) as on main-
taining a healthy ecology of fluids within her own body.81 It is likely that
Plato is thinking in similar terms. A man’s reproductive energies are
geared toward production – in the physical realm, this means producing
children who will maintain his oikos and his tomb cult; in the intellectual
realm, this might entail producing poems, laws, logoi, and dianoēmata.82
These are reproductive activities described, literally or metaphorically,
by the verb γεννάω. Women’s reproductive fantasy, by contrast, would
be motivated at least as much by the experience of being pregnant as
by the goal of producing an offspring: this is an experience of the body
as engorged, as a hoard; it is an experience of plenitude, of πλησμονή.
Myles Burnyeat has famously observed that in Diotima’s metaphor of
intellectual pregnancy and birth, we are confronted with the paradox
that pregnancy precedes sex.83 I would suggest, to paraphrase Burnyeat,
that Plato paradoxically presents parturition (e.g., of logoi) as preceding
pregnancy. I think this is where we are at the end of Diotima’s speech,
when she suggests that the philosopher will “give birth” to true virtue
(212a3–6). The word τίκτω does refer most immediately to parturition,
but must refer, in this context, to the entire feminine experience of preg-
nancy and birth. Indeed, the final two uses of τίκτω in Diotima’s speech
(and in the dialogue as a whole) describe the birth of virtue, which is not
really a product or a “child,” as we have seen, but a state of the soul.
There is nevertheless something strange about the way Plato describes
the philosopher’s body – or is it his soul? – when he finally glimpses

80
Halperin (1990) 137–42: one of the reasons, in Halperin’s view, that Socrates had to be
taught erōs by Diotima, a woman, was that only a woman could understand the creative
as opposed to acquisitive side of desire.
81
Dean-Jones (1992), used to great effect by Halperin (1990) 137–42.
82
Dyson (1986) 63–65 nicely captures the parallelism: just as individual fathers receive
tomb cult, the “fathers” of poems and laws receive honors in civic cult.
83
Burnyeat (1977) 8. But this is really true only at the very beginning of Diotima’s
speech when she suggests that men are “pregnant” with seed (206c5–6). See Pender
(1992) 74.
 The Pregnant Philosopher 225

Beauty itself: he “grows strong and grows larger” (ῥωσθεὶς καὶ αὐξηθείς).
We may start with the philosopher’s strength.84 We may recall the speech
of Aristophanes, who tells us that the double beings, “terrible in brawn and
strength (τὴν ῥώμην)” and possessed of “audacious thoughts (φρονήματα
μεγάλα)” (190b5–6), made an “assault on heaven” (εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν
ἀνάβασιν, 190b8), like the giants Otus and Ephialtes. Aristophanes’ lan-
guage here anticipates the philosopher’s pursuit of truth. Their “assault”
(ἀνάβασιν) on heaven becomes the “ladder of ascent” (ἐπαναβασμοῖς,
211c3) undertaken by the philosopher; their “audacious thoughts”
(φρονήματα μεγάλα) look ahead to the φρόνησις that Diotima’s Eros
“desires and is filled with” (203d6–7) and that constitutes part of the virtue
that the philosopher will give birth to (compare 209a3 with 212a3–6).85
Does Plato’s suggestion that the philosopher “grows strong” hint that the
intellectual ascent is a kind of “assault” on the realm of Beauty?86
The notion that the philosopher will “grow larger” (αὐξηθείς) creates
even more immediate problems. For only a few lines after Diotima utters
the phrase ῥωσθεὶς καὶ αὐξηθείς (210d6–7), she tells us that the Form
of Beauty, like all these Platonic descendants of the Parmenidean One,
does not change, come into being, perish, and, most importantly for our
purposes here, “does not grow” (οὔτε αὐξανόμενον, 211a1–2).87 Is there
not something unavoidably transgressive – or at least paradoxical – about
allowing the philosopher’s body or soul to “grow” as it makes contact
with a region that does not itself experience growth?
This paradox has at least two probable causes. First, it may be a result,
in part, of the way Plato was thinking about his Forms at this point in
his career. To the extent that one is fertilized by the Form, one does
become strong and grow large. Of course it is not Plato’s intent that
the philosopher become stronger and grow larger than the Form itself,
but the potential is present nevertheless: Plato had not yet developed
his concept of ­“participation” in the Forms in such a way as to solve the
84
Cf. also Plat. Phaedr. 238c2–4, where ῥώννυμι and ῥώμη are playfully offered as part of
an etymology of ἔρως.
85
This mention of “audacious thoughts” also refers back to Pausanias’s reference to
the “audacious thoughts” (φρονήματα μεγάλα, 182c2) of lovers like Harmodius and
Aristogeiton.
86
“Strength” is thematized one final time in the dialogue when Alcibiades describes
Socrates’ martial prowess on campaign and recalls thinking at the time that “if someone
shall touch (ἅψεται) this man, he [Socrates] will strongly (ἐρρωμένως) defend himself”
(221b5–6). “Touching” Socrates puts one in contact with a kind of “strength,” just as
the philosopher, by “touching” Beauty itself (ἅπτοιτο, 211b7; cf. ἐφαπτομένῳ, 212a5),
“becomes strengthened” (ῥωσθείς, 210d6).
87
On the Parmenidean associations, see n. 18.
226 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

problem of division, which had already worried Parmenides himself. We

are reminded again of the hydraulic image we encountered in the first
exchange between Socrates and Agathon at the beginning of the dia-
logue: If one is nourished by Beauty, is it possible to drain wisdom away
from Beauty? Second, Plato seems to be at pains, as we have seen, to avoid
explicit penetration of the philosopher’s male body, in his interaction
not only with other men but even with the realm of the Forms. Thus
the philosopher’s “intercourse” with the Form of Beauty, at the end of
Diotima’s speech, is limited to “touching” (ἐφαπτομένῳ, 212a4, 5). But
can the philosopher become pregnant merely by touching the Form?88
Is this believable? The solution that Plato appears to have stumbled on is
a merger of the philosopher with the Form. We saw hints of this already
in Aristophanes’ depiction of the sun, who is simultaneously a prototype
for the “pregnant” male and a proxy for the Forms. This is perhaps the
only way to achieve participation without division, “plenitude” without
penetration.
Plato’s pregnancy and birth metaphor in the Symposium is designed to
counter the claims made by Sophists to teach virtue and wisdom as well
as the metaphors that they used to buttress these claims. This explains,
perhaps more than anything, why Plato’s metaphor takes the form that
it does. For Plato to argue that virtue and wisdom are not acquired from
another, such as one of the sophistic teachers, but are things that each
man cultivates in his own soul, he develops a distinctively feminine met-
aphor: so no one begets (γεννάω) virtue in the body or soul of anyone
else; rather, each philosopher is pregnant with (τίκτω) his own virtue and,
indeed, seeks to remain pregnant with it. But we are unable to escape
this awkward paradox: the pregnancy metaphor, precisely because of
its feminine associations, implies a sexual partner, an external agent of
impregnation. Plato would surely reject the prospect of impregnation
from – and sexual penetration by – one of these sophistic teachers. But
is he perhaps amenable to opening the male philosopher’s body to pen-
etration – however symbolic or abstract – from other philosophers in the
practice of dialectic or, better yet, from the world of the Forms? Perhaps
Plato knows what he is doing, after all: he perhaps succumbs to the intox-
icating and irresistible pull of that promise of feminine plenitude with
his eyes – and body – wide open.

88
But cf. Aesch. Supp. 17, where Zeus is said to have gotten Io pregnant “by touch and by
breath” (ἐξ ἐπαφῆς κἀξ ἐπιπνοίας).
 7

Reading Plato’s Midwife

Socrates and Intellectual Paternity in the Theaetetus

In the Theaetetus, Plato introduces yet another variation on the sophistic

pregnancy metaphor: the one who gives birth is now assisted by an intel-
lectual midwife. Plato employs this new image of the intellectual midwife
as a way of figuring certain aspects of his current epistemological and
metaphysical thinking at the time he wrote the Theaetetus, a dialogue
long recognized as marking a major transition between the thought and
style of his middle period and that of his late period. His association of
this new role with Socrates, meanwhile, becomes a way for him to recon-
sider the legacy of Socrates in his own development as a philosopher, the
extent to which the historical Socrates was his own intellectual “father .”

Intellectual Midwifery in the Theaetetus

The Theaetetus stages a conversation about the nature of knowledge that
is imagined to have taken place, on the eve of Socrates’ trial, between
Socrates himself and the young Theaetetus, a future luminary at Plato’s
Academy. The dialogue inevitably functions as a valedictory to both:
to Theaetetus, who, we are told at the beginning of the dialogue, was
wounded in battle at Corinth and died shortly thereafter of disease,1 and
also to Socrates, who largely disappears, from this time forward, as the
dominant speaker in Plato’s dialogues.2 Early on in the dialogue, after

1
On the chronology, see Guthrie (1962–81) 5.61–62; but cf. Nails (2002) 275–77.
2
For some different approaches to Socrates’ diminished role in the later works of Plato,
see Stenzel (1940) 3–4; Wengert (1988) 6–9; Frede (1996); Long (1998) 113–18,
131–35. The one exception to this phenomenon is the Philebus, on which see Frede
(1996). The divergence between Plato’s early Socrates, probably close to the historical
Socrates, and his middle Socrates is masterfully discussed in Vlastos (1991) 45–106; but
see Long (1998) 125–26 for a brief critique.

227
228 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

Theaetetus has admitted to being unable to produce a satisfactory def-

inition of knowledge, Socrates assures Theaetetus that although he is
struggling, this does not mean that he does not have an answer within
him: “You see, you are in labor, my dear Theaetetus; you are not bar-
ren, but pregnant” (ὠδίνεις γάρ, ὦ φίλε Θεαίτητε, διὰ τὸ μὴ κενὸς ἀλλ’
ἐγκύμων εἶναι, 148e7–8). Socrates then introduces himself as an intellec-
tual midwife, eager to assist Theaetetus to “give birth” to his ­definition.
Socrates explains that he himself is “unable to father wisdom” on another
(ἄγονος . . . σοφίας, 150c4) and has in fact never produced such an intel-
lectual child (150c8–d2); the god has forbidden him from “begetting”
(γεννᾶν) and requires him instead to “serve as a midwife” (μαιεύεσθαι,
150c7–8).
Plato deploys the midwife metaphor on four other occasions over the
course of the dialogue. The first comes after Theaetetus has ventured
his first definition of knowledge (as being equivalent to perception) and
Socrates has begun the process of attempting to understand it by gaining
Theaetetus’s assent to two additional principles that Socrates suggests
are entailed by Theaetetus’s definition: one is Protagoras’s notion that
each “man is the measure” of his own reality; the other is a Heraclitean
view of the world as being in constant flux – Socrates playfully calls this
the “secret doctrine” of Protagoras himself – which is meant to guaran-
tee the subjectivity of perception and knowledge. When Socrates asks
Theaetetus if he is pleased so far by his account of the “secret doctrine,”
Theaetetus once again collapses in aporia: “I don’t know, Socrates, nor am
I able to figure out whether you are saying things that you believe or are
just testing me” (157c4–6). It is at this point that Socrates ­reintroduces
the midwife image:

You are not remembering, my friend, that I do not know anything or claim
any such ideas as my own; to the contrary, I am unable to father them (εἰμὶ
αὐτῶν ἄγονος). I am serving solely as your midwife (μαιεύομαι), and this is
why I am chanting and offering you morsels from each of the wise men to
taste, until I succeed in helping bring your idea into the light of day. And
when it has been brought out, at that time I will examine it to see whether
it shall be revealed to be a wind egg or a fertile egg (εἴτ’ ἀνεμιαῖον εἴτε
γόνιμον). (157c7–d3)

This passage hints at an important additional feature of Socrates’

­midwifery: Socrates’ midwifery does not end when Theaetetus blurts
out a first definition of knowledge at 151e2–3 but only when the defini-
tion is fully understood and, in this case, strengthened by its association
with two additional propositions, two “morsels” given by the midwife to
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 229

provide strength to the young man in the throes of intellectual labor.

What is ultimately born is not an impromptu definition, but a fully devel-
oped thesis. This passage also reasserts two assumptions about the nature
of Socratic midwifery introduced in the earlier passage: first, Socrates
himself is not the “father” of the ideas brought to birth by Theaetetus
or any other young man; and, second, it is the duty of the midwife not
only to bring a young man’s idea into the light of day but to determine
its viability after birth.
The next invocation of the midwife metaphor marks this transition
from parturition – the elaboration of Theaetetus’s thesis that knowl-
edge is perception, together with its Protagorean and Heraclitean entail-
ments – to examination of the newborn:
This, it seems, is what we [sic!], with great difficulty, have begotten
(ἐγεννήσαμεν), whatever it happens to be. Now that the birth has taken
place, we must literally, through argument, “run around” its Amphidromia
(τὰ ἀμφιδρόμια . . . ἐν κύκλῳ περιθρεκτέον τῷ λόγῳ), inspecting it to make
sure that we do not fail to notice if what is born is not worth rearing but is a
wind egg (ἀνεμιαῖον) and a falsehood. (160e6–161a1)

It is striking that Socrates speaks of the newborn as something that “we”

have begotten, and that here, where he has merged his role with that
of Theaetetus, he uses the verb γεννάω (beget), the normal word for
the male reproductive role. This word alludes to the notion, probably
popularized by one or more of the Sophists, as we saw in Chapter 4, that
the teacher could “beget” (γεννάω) wisdom or virtue in the soul of the
student, who would then “give birth” (τίκτω) to it.3 Somewhat earlier,
Socrates had suggested that Prodicus of Ceos and other Sophists made
just such promises (151b1–6), whereas he himself, as we have seen, was
prohibited by the god from “begetting” (γεννᾶν) and compelled instead
to “serve as a midwife” (μαιεύεσθαι, 150c7–8). Why does Socrates here at
160e6 apparently embrace the very role of “begetting” that he had ear-
lier disavowed and attributed to the Sophists?
We encounter our next reference to the midwife toward the end of
Socrates’ examination of Theaetetus’s first newborn. In his critique
of Protagoras’s Heraclitean “secret doctrine,” which Theaetetus has
acknowledged is entailed by his definition of knowledge as perception,
Socrates gets bogged down in a more general discussion of the doc-
trines of Heraclitus and his followers (179d2–183c3). When Theaetetus

3
The words τίκτω and γεννάω, in classical Athenian prose, generally refer to the female
and male reproductive role, respectively. See the detailed discussion in Appendix II.
230 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

proposes that Socrates and Theodorus also discuss the opposite theory,
associated with the Eleatic monists Melissus and Parmenides, Socrates
invokes his role as midwife in order to redirect the discussion to what he
sees as the main question at hand, namely whether Theaetetus’s claim
that perception is knowledge is a true or false “child” (184a2–b1). This
dodge of Parmenides by Socrates the midwife will have important philo-
sophical implications.
The final reference to the midwife metaphor in the Theaetetus occurs at
the very end of the dialogue. Socrates asks Theaetetus: “Are we still preg-
nant and in labor regarding the issue of knowledge, my dear, or have we
given birth to (ἐκτετόκαμεν) everything?” (210b4–5). Theaetetus responds
in the affirmative and Socrates concludes that “our midwifery” has shown
that all three intellectual offspring are wind eggs and not worth rearing
(210b8–9). There are a couple of striking features about this final refer-
ence to Socrates’ role as midwife. First, Socrates reverts once again to the
plural “we,” but in this case he uses words that describe the female role,
whereas at 160e6 he announced the birth of Theaetetus’s first child with a
celebratory ἐγεννήσαμεν, “we have begotten,” a description of the father’s
role in the reproductive process. Second, the perfunctory reference to the
midwife here at the end calls attention to its absence throughout the sec-
ond half of the dialogue and to the fact that it was, before now, associated
exclusively with Theaetetus’s first definition, the one most rooted in the
sensory world of perception. The fact that the midwife metaphor is men-
tioned one last time at the end of the dialogue may signal a transition from
the Theaetetus, which is presided over by the midwife Socrates, now himself
reduced to a failed “mother” (ἐκτετόκαμεν . . . ἀνεμιαῖα, 210b5–9), to the
Sophist, the next dialogue in the trilogy,4 whose conversation is led by the
more dogmatic Eleatic Stranger and produces some positive solutions to a
number of the epistemological puzzles of the Theaetetus.
It is clear from even this brief summary that the metaphor of the
Theaetetus is very different from that of the Symposium. First, Plato shifts
the focus of the metaphor from pregnancy to labor and parturition. This
shift is marked clearly in the introduction of the reproductive metaphor
in each dialogue: whereas Diotima in the Symposium introduced the preg-
nancy metaphor with the claim “you see, all men are pregnant, Socrates”
(κυοῦσιν γάρ . . . ὦ Σώκρατες, πάντες ἄνθρωποι, 206c1–2), Socrates

4
On the continuity of the trilogy, see Sedley (2004) 2–3. Although the Theaetetus was
written some years before the Sophist and Statesman, the second and third dialogues of
the trilogy, it is possible that the Theaetetus was revised later with the rest of the trilogy in
mind. Long (1998) 114 and n. 3; Sedley (2004) 1 n. 1.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 231

introduces the midwife metaphor in the Theaetetus with the observation

“you see, you are in labor, my dear Theaetetus” (ὠδίνεις γάρ, ὦ φίλε
Θεαίτητε, 148e7). Of course, intellectual pregnancy in the Symposium
will eventually lead to the “birth” of virtue,5 and likewise Theaetetus
must be pregnant in order to be in labor. But the emphasis is differ-
ent. Second, Plato changes the role played by Socrates himself. In the
Symposium, Socrates was the model of the pregnant philosopher, whereas
in the Theaetetus, it is the young Theaetetus who is pregnant. Socrates
now plays the role of midwife, but Plato also calls attention to a role that
Socrates might have played – the role of father – had the god not for-
bidden it. What does this shift in Socrates’ role tell us about Plato’s cur-
rent thinking about the philosophical legacy of the historical Socrates?
It will be our goal in the remainder of this chapter to explore these
two shifts in the metaphor from the Symposium to the Theaetetus. But
before we embark on a discussion of this evolution in the metaphor,
we set forth two methodological assumptions that will guide our discus-
sion. First, we will restrict our attention to the development and function
of the midwife metaphor within the Theaetetus. We have already consid-
ered, in Chapter 4, reasons for doubting that the midwife metaphor that
we encounter in the Theaetetus was used by the historical Socrates; the
birth metaphor that Aristophanes lampoons in the Clouds appears to be
an impregnation metaphor rather than a midwifery metaphor, and this
notion of pedagogy as impregnation was probably associated, as we have
seen, with one or more of the Sophists rather than with Socrates.6 The
Theaetetus is, after all, the only extant Platonic work in which Socrates’
method of questioning is explicitly compared to the work of a midwife.
Second, we will attempt to situate the midwife metaphor within the
larger philosophical thematics of the dialogue. Most scholars think that
the metaphor serves solely to characterize Socrates’ elenctic method.7

5
But we argued in Chapter 6 that the “birth of virtue” may not involve parturition in the
normal sense.
6
We should also resist the temptation to conclude that the midwife image is so natural a
description of the Platonic Socrates that it can be retrojected back into all of the Socratic
dialogues of Plato’s early and middle periods (pace Edmonds [2000] 266, 269–70) and
projected even into dialogues of Plato’s later period where Socrates plays a minimal role
or is even absent (pace Sayre [1992]). The temptation to see the metaphor as a Platonic
universal proved irresistible even to Plato’s first readers: see Anon. In Plat. Theaet. 47.8–
59.34 Diels and Sedley (2004) 29. Cf. Wellman (1976), who argues that Socrates func-
tions as an intellectual midwife also in the Xenophontic corpus.
7
Notable exceptions are Polansky (1992) 58–65; Dorter (1994) 76–77, 94–96; Blondell
(2002) 272–77, 293–97; and Sedley (2003) and (2004): all find thematic links between
the midwife image and the philosophical arguments of the dialogue as a whole.
232 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

But I propose to take seriously the notion that the midwife metaphor,
which, after all, turns up five times in the course of the dialogue and
punctuates the epistemological argument at important points, aims to
comment not only on Socrates’ method of question-and-answer but also
on other substantive epistemological issues, such as the role of sense per-
ception in the acquisition of knowledge, the existence of false belief,
and even Plato’s evolving understanding of the contribution made by
the historical Socrates to the development of his own epistemology and
metaphysics.

Historicizing the Socratic Midwife

In Socrates’ extended introduction to the midwife metaphor at 148e7–
151e6, he claims to be describing the duties of the typical Greek midwife
and suggesting how these might be analogous to the role he will play
in assisting Theaetetus to formulate a definition of knowledge. Scholars
have tended to take his description of the midwife at face value, and
some have even been tempted into constructing a history of the ancient
Greek midwife on the basis of the ready-made outline that Plato supplies
here,8 especially since Plato’s is by far the most comprehensive discus-
sion of the midwife in any Greek author.9 But Plato’s description is ten-
dentious and self-serving.
Our efforts to discern how the female midwife described by Plato
diverges from real midwives working in Athens in Plato’s day are com-
plicated by the fact that the sociocultural role of the midwife seems to
have been undergoing a major change during the early fourth century
b.c.e. Before that time, our glimpses of the activities of midwives, rare
as they are, suggest a more old-fashioned female assistance network
such as we encounter in the ethnographies of preindustrial societies:
birth was probably attended not by a single professional midwife but by
several women drawn from the mother’s relatives and neighbors. It is
possible that none of these women would have answered to the name
μαῖα, unless, perhaps, she happened to be an older women.10 It does

8
See, e.g., Nutton (2006). More skeptical are Nickel (1979) 516 and King (1998)
177, 181.
9
Cf. Sor. Gyn. 1.3–4, who provides an extensive description of the personal qualities to
be looked for in a good midwife but says a good deal less about the midwife’s actual
duties.
10
The word μαῖα, etymologically speaking, is nothing more than a diminutive of the
nominal stem for “mother” (mâ-), but it is used already in Homer to designate older
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 233

not seem that there was a class of professional midwives who specialized
in offering birth assistance for a fee. We may recall, in this connection,
the birth assistance that Praxagora claimed to have offered a friend in
Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen; although it is possible that Praxagora was
rewarded for her assistance, we have no evidence that she did this for a
living, and she is never referred to as a μαῖα.11
The picture begins to change significantly by the middle of the fourth
century, when midwifery shows some signs of becoming institutional-
ized under pressure from the male medical establishment.12 A funeral
stele for Phanostrate, dating from the second half of the fourth century,
remembers her as “midwife and doctor” (μαῖα καὶ ἰατρός, IG II/III 32
6873), suggesting that the two roles in this new institutionalized world
of medicine were not necessarily opposed. Similarly, in a fragmentary
speech attributed to Lysias, it is claimed that doctors and midwives are in
agreement on some essential matter, probably the shared view that the
fetus is a living being.13 That midwives are represented here as joining
doctors and opposing the mother, who is accused of aborting her fetus,
suggests a professional realignment that succeeded in making some mid-
wives, now more formally trained and more professional than their fore-
bears, into loyal foot soldiers within the new medical ­establishment.14
The transformation we are describing is, of course, largely an urban
Athenian phenomenon: there can be little doubt that the informal
female assistance network continued to play its traditional role in the
countryside, especially among the less prosperous, and it is not clear to
what extent the new professionalism obtained in places far from Athens
and its orbit. But what is important for an evaluation of Plato’s midwife
in the Theaetetus is the changes in the role of the midwife at Athens.

women generally. See Chantraine (1968–80) 657–58 s.v. μαῖα; Leitao (2007) 263, 275
nn. 36–41. It is used in the sense of “midwife” first in Aristoph. Lys. 746; cf. also Soph.
fr. 99 TGF (μαιεύτρια); Aristoph. Lys. 695 (μαιεύομαι).
11
See discussion of this passage in Chapter 5. Economic realities make it unlikely that mid-
wives, or male doctors for that matter, could make a living exclusively by practicing their
craft. See King (1998) 176–77. If the typical midwife had earned significant income for
performing this service, she would have made a poor model for Socrates, who distin-
guished himself from the Sophists primarily by his refusal to accept payment.
12
See generally Demand (1995) 285–88.
13
Lys. fr. 10 Gernet.
14
The story of the Athenian Agnodike’s “invention” of midwifery, which may date to the
late fourth century, seems also to document this shift from informal women’s assistance
networks to professional midwives: see Hyg. Fab. 274.10–13 with King (1986) 53–55,
59–60. Many male Hippocratic practitioners remained hostile to female practitioners,
however: so Hanson (1996) 163–78.
234 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

The professionalization of some Athenian midwives in the fourth cen-

tury doubtless caught Plato’s attention: it is precisely the midwife’s new
possession of specialized knowledge that makes her an appealing model
for Socrates’ role as philosophical guide in this dialogue about knowl-
edge. Plato also gestures at some of the older, more traditional functions
of the midwife. What is so fascinating about Plato’s portrait of the mid-
wife is the extent to which he combines old and new and even incorpo-
rates some features that no Greek midwife would have recognized as
part of her job description. Indeed, it is the very fact that the midwife is
a figure in transition during the early fourth century that gives Plato the
license to select the traits that best suit his rhetorical needs. He grants
her seven major attributes, and while his description seems to develop
naturally and unobjectionably enough, the description of the midwife
that he puts into the mouth of Socrates is actually quite idiosyncratic.
He has, indeed, almost without our realizing it, completely reworked the
midwife in Socrates’ own masculine image.15 Let us consider these seven
attributes one by one.

Only Postmenopausal Women (149b5–c7)

There is little evidence, apart from this passage from the Theaetetus, to
support the notion that Greek midwives in the fourth century b.c.e. were
largely postmenopausal women. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, it is indeed
a chorus of older women that threatens to “midwife” (μαιεύσομαι, 695)
the old men, but the emasculation it threatens there is a merely met-
aphorical midwifery.16 On the other hand, Praxagora, who claims, in
Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, to have assisted one of her friends in child-
birth, is described as being a younger wife without, so far as we can tell,
any children of her own.17 Comparative evidence from imperial Rome
suggests that some, perhaps many, women began their career as an obste-
trix in their early twenties, and comparative evidence from early modern
Europe points in the same direction.18 Soranus, writing in the second
century c.e., tells us that some writers thought a midwife ought in fact to

15
This is perhaps the reason that he describes his mother, a midwife herself, as “hairy”
(βλοσυρᾶς, 149a2): her function is to serve as a prototype for her son, an intellectual
midwife. On Socrates’ mother, see also n. 107.
16
See further discussion of this passage in Chapter 5.
17
Ussher (1973) 108, 122, 135.
18
Rome: French (1986) 72. Early modern Europe: King (1998) 181.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 235

be young, though he himself thinks it is more important that the mid-

wife be vigorous, regardless of her age (Gyn. 1.4.4). One suspects that
Greek midwives actually varied quite a bit in age. But of course Plato
needs the midwife to be an older woman because he is fashioning an
intellectual midwife in the image of the seventy-year-old Socrates. The
fact that the word μαῖα was used as a general honorific for older women
certainly helped Plato finesse this point.19

Experience Giving Birth Themselves (149b10–c3)

As with the advanced age of the midwife, there is little evidence to sug-
gest that experience of giving birth was widely held to be essential for
a midwife. Soranus tells us that some people did recommend that mid-
wives have this experience, on the ground that this would make them
more sympathetic to the woman in labor, but Soranus himself explicitly
rejects this advice and the reasoning behind it (Gyn. 1.4.3). Indeed, it
has been suggested, not implausibly, that the target of Soranus’s crit-
icism is Plato’s claim here in the Theaetetus.20 If some midwives were
as young as twenty-one, as they were in Rome, then experience giving
birth could not be taken for granted. Socrates justifies this requirement
on the grounds that human beings are not naturally good at helping
others with matters in which they do not have prior personal experi-
ence, but it is clear that Plato the author uses this requirement to intro-
duce the issue of expertise, which, if there be such a thing, would lead
one to conclude that each man is not the measure of his own reality, as
Protagoras insisted.
This requirement that the midwife have had experience giving birth
herself has struck most commentators as paradoxical, given that Socrates
himself says, somewhat later in this description of his role as an intellec-
tual midwife, that he has never produced any offspring of his own. How,
then, is he qualified to serve as an intellectual midwife?21 It will be profit-
able to consider the passage in detail. After distinguishing himself from

19
On the association of this word with older women, see n. 10.
20
So Hanson (1996) 179.
21
See already Wengert (1988). Sedley (2003) 287–90 attempts to resolve the paradox by
arguing that the Socrates of the Theaetetus means to disavow all knowledge except for
the very narrow knowledge of how to be a midwife. Giannopoulou (2007) 59–76, mean-
while, argues that while Socrates is now barren of both wisdom and ordinary human
ideas, we are meant, for the purposes of this dialogue, to imagine that he was once ­fertile
long ago; similar is the interpretation of Anon. In Plat. Theaet. 53.37–54.13 Diels.
236 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

the female midwife on the grounds that he attends to men and they to
women, he to the soul and they to the body, Socrates declares:
This fate that belongs to midwives also belongs to me: I am unable to father
wisdom [on another] (ἄγονός εἰμι σοφίας), and the criticism of me that
many make, that I ask other people questions but reveal nothing on any
matter because I have no wisdom, they are right to make. But this is the
cause of it: the god compels me to serve as a midwife (μαιεύεσθαι) and pre-
vents me from begetting (γεννᾶν). And in fact I am not wise at all, nor has
any such discovery been begotten (γεγονός) as the offspring (ἔκγονον) of
my soul. (150c3–d2)

Scholars have tended to translate ἄγονος here as “barren,” but the

term in this context must refer to male and not female infertility. First,
Socrates goes on here to suggest that the god has forbidden him from
“begetting” (γεννᾶν, 150c8), which refers unambiguously to the male
role.22 Second, when he earlier described the infertility of female mid-
wives, he used different language: they must not be congenitally ­“barren”
(στερίφαις, 149b10), but merely “barren” (ἀτόκοις, 149c3) in the sense
of being beyond the childbearing age.23 Furthermore, if it is reasonable to
assume Plato’s adherence to the one-seed theory of reproduction based
on his explicit endorsement of that theory in the Timaeus (91a4–d6), we
would be required to understand ἄγονος (without seed) to designate
the infertility of the father, and not the mother, who, under this the-
ory, produces no seed. What Socrates claims here is that he has never
“fathered” ideas on others, as the Sophists claimed to do, not ­necessarily
that he has never “given birth.”

Ability to Tell Whether a Woman Is Pregnant (149c5–7)

Here we encounter the first dip in the slippery slope by which Socrates
remakes the midwife’s art into an instrument of male power. After
noting that the midwife must have experience of childbirth, Socrates
asks, “Isn’t this, then, also probable and in fact necessary, that judging
(γιγνώσκεσθαι) between women who are pregnant and those who are
not is done by midwives rather than other women?” (149c5–7). This

22
See n. 3.
23
The Greeks did use the word ἄγονος to describe the infertility of both women as well
as men. The term is used of women in a number of Hippocratic texts (e.g., Mul. 228,
Aphor. 5.59, Epid. 2.5.6), but most Hippocratic authors subscribed to the two-seed theory
of reproduction, so it would make sense, to a Hippocratic, for males and females to be
equally vulnerable to being “without seed.”
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 237

observation does not follow from what comes before, and it is marked as
being not an observation of the work carried out by actual midwives but
as a function that it is “probable and necessary” to assume. In fact, it is a
judgment that the prospective mother is most likely to make for herself.24
What Socrates is doing, of course, is attempting to lay the groundwork for
the most important feature of the male midwife: to judge (διαγνῶναι,
150b2; κρίνειν, 150b3) not only whether a young man is intellectually
“pregnant” or not but also, more importantly, whether the “child” he
gives birth to is true or false.

Ability to Induce an Abortion (149c9–d3)

Midwives, according to Socrates, apply pharmaka and sing spells in order
to induce labor, lessen the pain of labor, bring a difficult birth to comple-
tion, and induce an abortion. The first three functions of the midwife’s
pharmaka and spells are perhaps not controversial; it is not clear to what
extent Greek midwives used pharmaka and spells, but obviously the point
is to fashion an ideal midwife in the image of Socrates, a well-established
(in the Platonic corpus) peddler of pharmaka and spells.25 The reference
to the alleged role of midwives in inducing abortion, slipped in after
three relatively innocuous procedures, is the really interesting element
here. I am aware of no classical source, apart from this passage from the
Theaetetus, that suggests that midwives facilitated abortions.26 In the clas-
sical period, the use of abortifacients was attributed not to midwives but
both to male medical practitioners, who, to judge from several passages
in the Hippocratic Corpus, administered them to pregnant slaves, even
though the Hippocratic oath prohibited such a practice for those willing
to subject themselves to its strictures,27 and to expectant mothers, who

24
See, e.g., Hipp. Carn. 19, Nat. puer. 13, Superfet. 26.
25
See Charm. 156d1–157c6, 175d6–176b8; Men. 80a2–b7; Symp. 215c1–d1; cf. Leg.
659e1–5, 664b2–c2, 773d5–e2, 887d4–5. See generally Burnyeat (1977) 16 n. 17;
Tomin (1987) 99–100; Vallejo (2000) 331–32.
26
The only source I am aware of is the much later argument of Soranus that the ideal mid-
wife ought to be “not greedy for money so as not to [be tempted to] give an abortifacient
wickedly (μὴ . . . κακῶς δοῦναι) for money” (Gyn. 1.4.4). It is not clear what Soranus sees
as wicked: Is it giving an abortifacient for money or giving an abortifacient at all? It per-
haps does not matter for our purposes, for it is clear that Soranus thought that some
midwives did administer abortifacients, wickedly or not. But Soranus may reflect a later
development in the role of the midwife. On abortion in ancient Greece, see generally
Riddle (1992) 16–86.
27
Use of abortifacients by Hippocratic doctors: Preus (1975) 252. Prohibition of abortion
in the Hippocratic oath: Murray (1991).
238 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

are, in many cases, portrayed as being motivated by a desire to maintain

an active sex life.28 This, then, appears to be one more practice popularly
associated with prospective mothers that Plato has co-opted for the mid-
wife, possibly a reflection, once again, of a historical transfer of certain
aspects of maternity care from mothers themselves to medical profes-
sionals, not only midwives but also male doctors. But there is another
reason for Plato to bring up the midwife’s role in facilitating abortion,
even if this did not necessarily correspond to reality, and that is his belief
that certain children – false children – ought not to live, a decision nor-
mally made by the father.

Knowledge of How to Arrange Marriages (149d5–150a6)

Socrates claims that midwives, because of their special knowledge, are
qualified not only to facilitate a successful delivery but also to control
the mating process that leads to pregnancy, so as to help women to give
birth to the best children possible (149d6–8). This is certainly not a
function practiced by actual Greek midwives, and Socrates tells us this
explicitly. When Theaetetus reports that he has never heard of midwives
serving as matchmakers, Socrates explains that midwives avoid practic-
ing this skill because mere “procuring” (προαγωγεία, 150a2) has given
­“matchmaking” (προμνηστική, 150a3) a bad name. Why does Socrates
invent this element of the midwife’s portfolio? One reason is that he wishes
further to develop the role of knowledge in the practice of midwifery:
the best match between woman and man is something about which the
midwife has “knowledge” (γνῶναι, 149d7), just as the farmer has “knowl-
edge” (γιγνώσκειν, 149e3) not only of how to care for plants and harvest
their fruits but also of what soil is best for what kinds of plants.
But this addition of matchmaking to Socrates’ midwifery in the
Theaetetus creates an interesting problem: it assumes that there exist
teachers, perhaps men like Prodicus of Ceos (151b5), who would be
a good match, presumably because they are capable of filling a young
man with knowledge; indeed, we are given to believe that Socrates him-
self might well “beget” (γεννᾶν) children on others if he were not pro-
hibited from doing so by the god (150c7–8).29 There are two possible

28
Hipp. Carn. 19, Nat. puer. 13, Mul. 67; Lys. fr. 10 Gernet.
29
We argued in Chapter 4 that the intellectual matchmaking metaphor was perhaps
more associated with Prodicus, the beneficiary, than with Socrates, the sometime
matchmaker.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 239

solutions to this paradox. One is to conclude that Socrates is ironic in

his embrace of the matchmaker’s art: although Sophists like Prodicus
may have claimed to implant knowledge in the empty souls – perhaps
even the empty “wombs” – of the young, nothing that Plato wrote prior
to the Theaetetus would suggest that he or his Socrates would endorse
such a claim. The second is to see the matchmaking function of the
midwife as signaling a minor change in Plato’s epistemology: whereas in
earlier dialogues like the Phaedo Plato insisted that all men have innate
knowledge, in the Theaetetus Plato shows that not everyone (Theaetetus,
too, in the event) has ideas to give birth to (151b2, 210c2; cf. 148e7)
and even suggests that our minds are empty at birth (197e2–3).30 Maybe
knowledge does come from – or is stimulated by – an outside source.31
The matchmaking function would then also perhaps hint at a change
in Plato’s attitude toward Socrates: whereas other thinkers could per-
haps be the “fathers” of a young man’s knowledge, Socrates, for some
reason, remains infertile, ἄγονος. I do not think that Plato has, in fact,
retreated from his rejection of the sophistic impregnation metaphor.
But he may have still found it helpful to invoke this metaphor if only to
hint at Socrates’ inability to be a “father” of ideas. If so, these two inter-
pretations of the paradoxical matchmaker image are not mutually incon-
sistent: the notion of intellectual matchmaking could be an ironic dig at
the pedagogical claims of the Sophists, but also an acknowledgement of
Socrates’ very real infertility.
The comparison of this matchmaker-midwife to a farmer is also signif-
icant for being the strongest hint so far that Plato’s intellectual midwife
will play the role of father. Through this analogy, Plato effects a subtle
change in focalization. He begins by observing that the midwife knows
what sort of man a woman must mate with if she is to give birth to the
best children possible. The perspective here is that of the midwife, who is
looking after the best interests of the prospective mother. But the farmer
analogy shifts focus to the sower of seed and his crop. Images of sowing
turn up frequently in Greek representations of the father, and they are

30
This would mean that Plato does not here endorse the notion of recollection. Even so,
there are scattered allusions to this earlier doctrine in the Theaetetus: see, e.g., Dorter
(1994) 70–72. And Sedley (2003) 285–87, 301 has made the ingenious argument that
Plato has put into the mouth of Socrates statements that explicitly or implicitly deny the
existence of innate knowledge in order to demonstrate the gap between the epistemol-
ogy of the historical Socrates, who did not believe in innate knowledge, and Plato’s own
mature epistemology, in which the doctrine of recollection played a significant role.
31
Narcy (1994) 9 provides an elegant statement of this idea.
240 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

frequently associated, as we have seen, with a denial of the woman’s con-

tribution to reproduction.32 Here too in the Theaetetus the mother, the
object of the midwife’s ministrations, has disappeared into the soil. This
passage prepares us for the final and decisive paternal appropriation of
midwifery effected in the final two functions of the Socratic midwife.

Inspection and Exposure of a Flawed Child

(150b6–c3, 151c2–5, e5)
Although Plato prefaces his discussion of inspection and, if necessary,
exposure of a child with the acknowledgment that judgment of true
offspring from false is a function that the intellectual midwife does not
share with his female counterpart, he nevertheless speaks of inspection
and exposure as though they were natural extensions of the midwife’s
art. The transition from the midwife’s care for women to the Socratic
midwife’s testing of young men is negotiated deftly:
My practice of the art of midwifery has all the elements that the female
midwives’ art has. But it differs in that it helps men to give birth rather than
women, and it observes (ἐπισκοπεῖν) their souls in the process of giving
birth rather than their bodies. But this is the most important part of my art:
it is able thoroughly to inspect (βασανίζειν) whether the mind of a young
man gives birth (ἀποτίκτει) to a shadowy falsehood or an offspring that is
viable and true. (150b6–c3)

Plato begins by using the verb ἐπισκοπέω to describe the relation of

both female and male midwives to the bodies and souls, respectively,
of their charges. The word covers a broad semantic range, including
everything from the relatively neutral, denotative “observe” to the more
specific “minister to” or “inspect,”33 though one suspects that “observe”
or “minister to” is most appropriate, at least for female midwives. But
in the next sentence Plato shifts to a stronger word, βασανίζω (to put
to the test), and here applies it to his male midwifery alone. Plato has
taken advantage of the ambiguity of the female midwife’s “ministrations”
(ἐπισκοπέω) to make the case that “inspection” (βασανίζω) is in fact
part of, or at least a natural extension of, the midwife’s practice. The fact
that Plato speaks of jettisoning a false idea in terms of infant exposure
suggests that he wishes to remain engaged with the midwife model, even

32
For a different interpretation of the farmer image, see Polansky (1992) 60–61.
33
The first three definitions listed in LSJ s.v. ἐπισκοπέω show the range: (1) “look upon
or at, inspect, observe . . . ”; (2) “visit . . . as a friend . . . of the physician”; (3) “of a general,
inspect, review.”
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 241

as he acknowledges some ways in which the male midwife is different

from his female counterpart.
Of course, neither inspection nor the decision to expose a child was
part of the classical midwife’s métier.34 All of our literary evidence points
to the fathers or their substitutes as the ones so empowered.35 One piece
of evidence, from a later period, could be read to suggest that mid-
wives did play a role in making this determination. Soranus (Gyn. 2.10)
begins his discussion of the care of the newborn with a section on “how
to recognize (γνωρίζεται) the newborn suitable to be reared (πρὸς
ἀνατροφήν).”36 It instructs the midwife to inspect the child’s ears, nose,
mouth, limbs, and to make sure the child’s cry is vigorous. This passage
has often been seen as corroborating Plato’s description of the midwife’s
role in determining whether the newborn child is worth rearing.37 But
we should be cautious. Soranus’s midwife does not make the decision to
raise or not to raise the newborn but only makes factual determinations
about the health of the baby, which might, in turn, lead the parents or,
more likely, the father to make that decision. And Soranus’s near con-
temporary Galen interprets Plato’s claims about the role of the midwife
in inspecting the child to derive, more innocuously, from the probative
fumigations midwives actually performed (in Galen’s day at least) to
determine whether a woman could conceive,38 not as evidence for the
role of midwives in inspection and exposure. If Galen is right, it seems

34
Blondell (2002) 273 n. 97 infers from Theaet. 160e–161a that “the midwife was often
the agent of exposure” (emphasis in original). Cf. Exodus 1.15–16, where Hebrew mid-
wives are ordered to expose any male children that are born, although the decision is
made by the Egyptian pharaoh. Nevertheless I remain skeptical about how reliable Plato
is as a source for the activities of actual Greek midwives. Cf. also Stol (2006), who sug-
gests that the role of the midwife in Babylon can be illuminated by the role played by the
mother goddess in the Atrahasis myth, who helps women give birth, cuts the umbilicus,
and decides the fate of the child. But the Babylonian mother goddess surely has more
expansive powers than the mortal midwife.
35
Hdt. 1.108 (but cf. Isocr. 5. 66, 132, in which it is the mother who eventually exposes
the infant Cyrus, presumably on orders from her father Astyages); Eur. Phoen. 21–27;
Posidipp. fr. 12 PCG; Men. Perikeir. 774–813; and Plut. Lyc. 16.1, who tells us that at
Sparta the decision was undertaken by all male elders corporately. The one case in
which women do seem to play a role, at least in myth, is in the cases of illegitimate
birth, where there is no husband to make the decision. Plat. Rep. 460c, where the deci-
sion will be undertaken by all magistrates, male and female alike, is a utopian excep-
tion that proves the rule. On demographic evidence for exposure, see Golden (1981);
Pomeroy (1983).
36
The section headings, including this one, may not be by Soranus himself: see Hanson
and Green (1994) 976.
37
See, e.g., C. Patterson (1985) 113–14.
38
Gal. Comment. in Hipp. Aphor. V 62.17b.866.16–868.18 Kuhn; Hanson (1996) 179.
242 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

likely that Plato, once again, takes advantage of an actual role played
by midwives (testing a woman’s ability to conceive) and transforms it
into something with a completely different cultural valence (testing the
­viability of a woman’s child).

Running the Amphidromia (160e6–161a1)

If there is any doubt about Socrates’ gradual inscription of the father
onto his intellectual midwife, it is reaffirmed a bit later in the discussion
when Theaetetus’s thesis has been clearly stated and is ready for analysis:
“Now that the birth has taken place, we must literally, through argument,
‘run around’ its Amphidromia (τὰ ἀμφιδρόμια . . . ἐν κύκλῳ περιθρεκτέον
τῷ λόγῳ), inspecting it to make sure that we do not fail to notice if
what is born is not worth rearing” (160e7–161a1). Because Plato’s refer-
ence here to the Amphidromia has always been one of the foundations
for scholarly inquiry into the rite, Plato’s sly distortion has tended to go
unnoticed.39 Plato here suggests that mother and midwife will run the
newborn idea around, as newborn children at Athens were apparently
run around the hearth. But other sources, classical and postclassical
alike, assign no role to the mother and tell us that what the women who
assisted the mother to give birth did at the Amphidromia was purified
their hands of birth pollution.40 More importantly, most scholars believe
that it was the father who did the “running around.”41
The purpose of circumambulation in the Amphidromia is initiatory:
it is a rite of aggregation whose primary function was symbolically to

39
E.g., by Vernant (1983) 155–56; Hamilton (1984).
40
Purification of birth assistants: Schol. Vet. Plat. Theaet. 160e; Paus. Gr. s.v. Amphidromia;
Apostol. 2.56; Suda s.v. Amphidromia; Parker (1983) 51. Although a role for the birth
assistants at the Amphidromia is not improbable, this lexicographical tradition may have
been influenced by Plato’s claim in the Theaetetus that midwives played a role. These
sources shift immediately from “the day on which the women whose hands made contact
with the birth process (τὰς χεῖρας αἱ συναψάμεναι τῆς μαιώσεως) are purified” to “and
they [masc.] carry the newborn around the hearth while running (τρέχοντες)” (so Paus.
Gr.; Apostol.; Suda). The masculine participle by itself cannot be taken as proof that the
“runners” in the Amphidromia (if there even was still running in the classical period)
were male; the masculine participle may indicate merely a generalizing “they.” But the
abrupt shift from feminine to masculine participle (except in Schol. Vet. Plat. Theaet.)
strongly suggests that the people who ran the child around the hearth were ­people other
than the female birth assistants who had to purify themselves. Schol. Vet. Plat. Theaet.
160e is alone in making the participle feminine, almost certainly influenced by the
Platonic text upon which he is commenting.
41
See the survey of earlier scholarship in Hamilton (1984) 244–45, who nevertheless
rejects the consensus opinion.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 243

attach the newborn child to the hearth. The fact that hearth rituals that
aimed to incorporate a slave or daughter-in-law into the household were
performed by the father of the house suggests that the father was the
primary ritual actor at the Amphidromia as well.42 Plato suggests that
the purpose of the “running around” is to examine the newborn to
determine whether it is worth rearing. But this certainly was not the pur-
pose of the Amphidromia. The father would have made that determina-
tion immediately after the birth of the child. The fifth (or seventh) day
after birth, the date of the Amphidromia, was dedicated to feasting and
celebration.43 Purification rituals also frequently involved circumambu-
lation, and it may be this that emboldened Plato to suggest that it was
the purifying birth assistants who did the “running around,” so that this
intellectual Amphidromia begins to look more like a ritual ordeal than a
kindly rite of incorporation.44

The Paternal Midwife: Socratic Elenchus

and Platonic Epistemology
Plato’s midwife is thus a father in disguise. This observation brings us
back to a question we posed at the beginning of this chapter: Why does
Plato shift the focus of his reproductive metaphor from the pregnant
philosopher of the Symposium to this paternal midwife of the Theaetetus?
One answer is that a change in metaphor was required in order to reflect
his new approach to epistemological issues.45 Space does not permit an
exhaustive survey of the state of Plato’s theory of knowledge at the time
he wrote the Theaetetus, but we may consider briefly two more extreme
views and what appears to be a more recent, still developing, compromise

42
On the aggregatory-initiatory function of the Amphidromia, see Paradiso (1988).
Vernant (1983) 132–34, 155–58, 163 n. 23 rightly emphasizes the father’s preemi-
nence at these hearth rites: see, e.g., Ps.-Dem. 40.28, 59; Is. 8.20; but Phot. Lex. s.v.
καταχύσματα suggests that the showering of a new slave at the hearth could be per-
formed by either the master or mistress of the house.
43
See esp. Ephipp. fr. 3 PCG.
44
On circumambulation in rites of purification, see generally Parker (1983) 225–26;
cf. Brind’Amour and Brind’Amour (1975) 40–58.
45
The notion that we can discern “development” in Plato’s thought through a reading
of the dialogues and the related notion that the dialogues themselves are roughly dat-
able have come under criticism in recent years, much of it salutary. But the opposite
extreme – no discernible evolution in Plato’s thought – is equally untenable. In my
argument, I try to strike a reasonable middle ground between developmentalists and
antidevelopmentalists, following the lead of scholars such as Long (1998) and Sedley
(2003) and (2004).
244 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

consensus. We may begin with the argument of Francis Cornford, first

published in 1935, that the Theaetetus represents a more in-depth exami-
nation of a question treated more perfunctorily in earlier dialogues: Can
the senses yield knowledge? The Phaedo and Republic had distinguished
an intelligible world, populated by separate Forms, from the sensible
world, whose objects could, at best, participate in the Forms and were,
for this very reason, imperfectly “real.” But soon Plato became aware of
certain difficulties with the Theory of Forms: in the Parmenides, for exam-
ple, probably written shortly before the Theaetetus, Plato evinced dissat-
isfaction with, among other things, the vague notion of “participation.”
But rather than abandon the theory or attempt to solve this or other dif-
ficulties with it, he chose instead, in the Theaetetus, to examine, at great
length, a negative thesis, namely that the senses, in the absence of Forms,
would not be able to gain access to being and generate knowledge. The
whole point of this dialogue, according to Cornford, is to prove this
rather narrow thesis: “The discussion moves in the world of appearance
and proves that, if we try to leave out of account the world of true being,
we cannot extract knowledge from sensible experience.” And later: “The
Forms are excluded in order that we may see how we can get on with-
out them; and the negative conclusion of the whole discussion means
that, as Plato taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them
there is no knowledge at all.”46 Midwifery, for Cornford, taking his cue
from the anonymous ancient commentator on the dialogue, is another
name for the method that Socrates pursues in the Meno as a facilitator of
recollection;47 it would then be one more reminder of the world of the
Forms, whose absence from the conversation will hinder the attempts of
the young Theaetetus to derive knowledge from sense perception.
Cornford’s reading eventually came under attack by analytically
minded students of ancient philosophy such as G. E. L. Owen, who, in a
now famous article published in 1953, argued, among other things, that
in the Theaetetus Plato has moved decisively beyond his middle-period
ontology.48 Whereas Plato, in the dialogues of his middle period, imagi-
nes a radical gap between the sensible world and the intelligible world

46
Cornford (1935) 7, 28.
47
Cornford (1935) 27–28.
48
Owen (1953) 85–86. But this conclusion depends in great part on the assumption,
which is the focus of his argument in this article, that the Timaeus, in which the theory
of Forms is alive and well, was written before the Theaetetus. This main argument has
not been embraced by a majority of scholars. Another important critique of Cornford
is Robinson (1950) 3–19. On the analytic inspiration for this midcentury approach to
Plato, see N. White (1993) vii–ix; Dorter (1994) 10.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 245

and believes that Forms are the only possible objects of knowledge, by
the time he wrote the Theaetetus, according to this interpretation, Plato
is now willing to ascribe some “being” to sensible objects (185a8–9,
c4–7) and hints even that some kind of knowledge of sensibles is possi-
ble (201b8–9).49 Owen’s suggestion that the Theaetetus signals a change
in some basic assumptions of Plato’s middle-period epistemology and
ontology and reveals an interest in new epistemological issues that do
not require a theory of Forms at all has been enthusiastically followed by
a number of scholars, most notably Myles Burnyeat.50 Adherents of this
approach to the Theaetetus tend to see Socrates’ midwifery as marking
a return to the more skeptical and even aporetic approach of the early
dialogues, which they think reflects Plato’s desire to undertake a wholly
fresh investigation into the issue of knowledge.51
More recently, scholars appear to have begun to coalesce around a
compromise view: while the Theaetetus reveals some new preoccupations
and emphases on the part of Plato, it does not perhaps signal any sig-
nificant reversals of his earlier thought, including his epistemological
idealism.52 There is no denying that Plato is preoccupied with new epis-
temological interests at the time he wrote the Theaetetus. For example,
Plato’s emphasis in this dialogue is not on the objects of knowledge
(Forms vs. sensibles), but on the cognitive processes by which the mind
reaches true and false judgments about them.53 But Plato still maintains
a hierarchical distinction between knowledge, which is always true, and
belief, which, even if true, lacks the rational justification that knowledge
has.54 And although the Forms themselves are not explicitly at issue in the
Theaetetus, one can see from works that he wrote after the Theaetetus that
Plato remains an idealist, committed to a version of his theory of Forms
49
But cf. Sedley (2003) 292–98, who cautions us against reading too much of Plato’s
mature ontology into Socrates’ generic claims at Theaet. 184–86 about perceptual
objects “being” this or that.
50
See especially Burnyeat (1990) 1–19. See also Runciman (1962) 20–26; Woolf (2003)
318–19.
51
Burnyeat (1977) 10–11; Bostock (1988) 13–14; cf. Vlastos (1991) 49.
52
See the reasonable discussions of N. White (1976) 157–62; Dorter (1994) 15–17,
68–120; Sedley (2003) 281; cf. already Runciman (1962) 17–29. Cf. also the compro-
mise reading of the Theaetetus sketched at Burnyeat (1990) 61–65. What is, and has
always been, a matter debate, of course, is what qualifies as a “significant reversal.”
53
Cf. Narcy (1994) 11.
54
Theaetetus’s third definition – knowledge as true belief plus an account (logos) – assumes
precisely this distinction between knowledge and belief. Although this definition is crit-
icized and ultimately rejected at the end of the dialogue, many scholars, e.g., N. White
(1976) 183, Sayre (1983) 307 n. 37, and Sedley (2003) 279, believe that a formulation
similar to this closely approximates Plato’s own view.
246 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

(see, e.g., Soph. 250a8–259d8) and to the view that sensible objects are
ontologically inferior to intelligible objects and that knowledge of sen-
sibles is somehow less true (see, e.g., Phileb. 61d10–e4).55 Some propo-
nents of a compromise position have even argued, in a neo-Cornfordian
vein, that the Platonic Forms are in a sense “present” in the Theaetetus in
their absence. Kenneth Dorter has suggested that Plato leads the reader
to conclude that knowledge must ultimately derive from a “marriage”
of sensory data and the absent Forms.56 And David Sedley has argued
that the Theaetetus is an exploration of how much progress in solving
epistemological issues, such as the issue of false belief, the historical
Socrates could have made without the Platonic metaphysics (including
the Forms) for which he was the “mouthpiece” in the dialogues from
Plato’s middle period.57
The shift in the metaphor from pregnancy in the Symposium to partu-
rition in the Theaetetus can be explained, in part, as reflecting a shift in
interest from the source of ideas (especially recollected Forms) to their
truth-value. One of Plato’s main goals in the Theaetetus is to argue against
the popular neosophistic notion that it is impossible to hold a false belief
because all beliefs are equally true for the individuals who hold them.58 A
version of this thesis had been presented already in the fifth century by
Protagoras and possibly also by Prodicus;59 the first half of the Theaetetus
is indeed an exploration of Protagoras’s contribution to this idea. To but-
tress his argument in the Theaetetus that false belief is possible, he needs
a figure – the midwife, but invested with the powers of a father – who will
not only judge ideas, intellectual “children,” true and false, but actually
expose the false ones. In the Symposium, pregnancy is a metaphor for
how the male philosopher gained access to the Forms through a kind
of mystical union. But by the time Plato returns to the subject of epis-
temology in the Theaetetus, he seems no longer to think that this idea
of mystical apprehension constitutes the basis for an adequate theory
of knowledge. Mysticism does not explain, for example, how one might
mistake one Form for another; knowledge is not just apprehending all
the Forms as a group but knowing which ones come into play in differ-
ent circumstances, and in what relationship. These issues do not get fully

55
That Plato is still committed to the Forms at the time he writes the Theaetetus: Dorter
(1994) 15–16, 94–96; Sedley (2004) 76–79, 106–8, 115–16, etc.
56
Dorter (1994) 94–96.
57
Sedley (2003) and (2004).
58
N. White (1976) 160, 163.
59
On Prodicus, see Binder and Liesenborghs (1966); Denyer (1991) 26–27.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 247

worked out until the Sophist, but Plato seems to be heading in this direc-
tion already in the Theaetetus.
If we perhaps have a clearer understanding of why Plato now focuses
on parturition rather than pregnancy, and indeed why Plato’s intellec-
tual midwife appears to be a father in disguise, how are we to under-
stand the change in Socrates’ role from pregnant philosopher in the
Symposium to judging midwife in the Theaetetus? Does this signal any devel-
opment in Plato’s understanding of the significance of the philosophical
ideas and method of the historical Socrates? If previous scholars have
not explored the broader development of Plato’s portrait of Socrates
from the Symposium to the Theaetetus, they have considered the narrower
question of what the midwife image tells us about Plato’s attitude toward
Socrates specifically at the time he wrote the Theaetetus, and the almost
universal answer is that the midwife image represents a celebration of
the elenctic method of the historical Socrates, that Plato represents this
apparently destructive method as constructive and, we might say, even
“generative.”60 In other words, even as the philosophical discussion of
the Theaetetus signals discontinuities with Plato’s middle-period episte-
mology, his representation of Socrates the midwife is nostalgic, a point of
continuity with at least the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues.
But, if this is so, why do we encounter the midwife image for the first
time in the Theaetetus, written at the transition from Plato’s middle to
late period? Some scholars have explained that Plato was only at this
time coming to appreciate certain features of the Socratic elenchus. So
Burnyeat points out that Plato now understands that the Socratic elen-
chus does not merely test the ideas of others but, at its best, helps the
thinker to develop his idea and fully understand the consequences of it
before the idea is finally subjected to examination. In the Theaetetus, for
example, Socrates helps Theaetetus develop his notion that knowledge
is perception by attaching to it Protagoras’s credo that “man is the mea-
sure” of his own reality and a neo-Heraclitean notion that “all is flux,”
two ideas that Socrates insists are entailed by Theaetetus’s definition of
knowledge as perception.61 And Sedley has argued that the image of the
midwife celebrates not only the elenctic method of the historical Socrates
but also some of his basic philosophical assumptions and even positive

60
See, e.g., Robinson (1953) 83–84; Ryle (1966) 120–21: Burnyeat (1977); cf. also Long
(1998) 122, 130, 133–34. For a dissenting view, see Wengert (1988) 7–9, who suggests
that Plato means to contrast the destructive Socratic elenchus with the more construc-
tive approach of the mature Plato.
61
Burnyeat (1977) 11–12, (1990) 7, 9.
248 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

doctrines, which Plato believes justify calling Socrates the ­“midwife” of

Platonic philosophy.62
It is difficult not to agree that Plato’s representation of Socrates as a
midwife is, at least in part, a celebration of the Socratic elenchus and
possibly also an acknowledgment of some philosophical positions staked
out by the historical Socrates. But this cannot be the whole story. How
could a dialogue so full of departures from Plato’s middle-period the-
ory of knowledge be so uncomplicatedly nostalgic about the figure of
Socrates, especially when we consider that Plato makes Socrates yield
his role as primary interlocutor in all but one of the dialogues written
after the Theaetetus? Anthony Long has provided what I think is the
most compelling solution to this apparent paradox. He believes that
Plato had already begun “distancing himself from his own Socrates”
in the Parmenides and Phaedrus, both likely written shortly before the
Theaetetus. The Parmenides demonstrates that while Socrates, in Plato’s
middle ­dialogues, had invoked Forms and distinguished between being
and not-being and between unity and plurality, he did so, as Plato now
realizes, “with insufficient attention to their complexity, ambiguity, and
interconnections.” And the Phaedrus, with its “air of unreality or fantasy,”
signals that Plato “is taking his paradigm philosopher out of the city and
bidding him farewell.” By the time we get to the Sophist, the process is
complete: when we consider the Eleatic Stranger’s confident solution
to the problem of falsity in this dialogue, “it becomes obvious that Plato
cannot entrust the exposition to a Theaetetus Socrates who advertises
his know-nothing stance. Rather than viewing this Socratic disavowal of
knowledge as a return to Plato’s earlier models, we should interpret it
in terms of Plato’s current conception of philosophy.”63 The Theaetetus,
then, for Long, is a final Platonic “apology” for Socrates, stimulated by
Plato’s acceptance of something he had begun to sense already in the
Parmenides: he has outgrown his teacher Socrates.
Long focuses on the apologetic and celebratory aspects of the Theaetetus,
valedictory though they are, but if Plato’s rethinking of Socrates had
progressed as far as Long (I think rightly) suggests, then it would be
surprising if the Theaetetus did not also contain hints of Plato’s sense of
the philosophical limitations of the historical Socrates. One such hint is
Plato’s insistence that Socrates is ἄγονος, “unable to father children.”

62
Sedley (2004).
63
Long (1998) 129, 130, 132. This is not to say that, in the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger is
a straightforward “mouthpiece” for Plato, or that Socratic philosophy has disappeared
altogether. See Gonzalez (2000).
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 249

Of course, Socrates has always disavowed knowledge, and this disavowal

would have special importance in the context of the Theaetetus, whose
conversation takes place on the day before Socrates’ trial for corrupting
the youth with dangerous ideas. But Socrates’ infertility is perhaps also
now a stumbling block. Plato may be thinking, in part, that the elenctic
method itself is infertile: the Theaetetus is unique among middle-period
dialogues in ending in aporia, and in the Sophist Plato allows the Eleatic
Stranger to criticize Socrates’ elenctic method as ultimately sophistic.64
But infertility is likely a characterization not only of Socrates’ method
but also of his basic philosophical beliefs: this is what Long means when
he says that “this Socratic disavowal of knowledge” is not (solely) a cele-
bration of the elenctic Socrates but reflects “Plato’s current conception
of philosophy,” which is much more expansive than what the historical
Socrates could comprehend.

Sexual Perception and the Midwife of Flux

One of the passages in the Theaetetus in which Plato seems to explore
his new ambivalence about the role of Socrates in his own development,
perhaps only subconsciously, is in the section that immediately follows
his introduction of Socrates as midwife, where he has Socrates first pres-
ent a description of a world in total flux and then a strange theory of
perception that involves chaotic “couplings” of eyes and stones, which
“beget” and “give birth to” “pairs of offspring” that constitute the very
experience of sensation (156a7–160a4). Socrates’ description of a flux-
ist theory of perception is meant, on the surface, to describe a world in
which Protagoras’s perceptual relativism would be true: if perceivers and
perceiveds are themselves constantly changing, then perceptions are not
repeatable and are therefore infallible.65 Plato here has Socrates present
an un-Platonic radical theory of flux in order to lay the foundation for
a critique of Theaetetus’s definition that knowledge is perception.66 We
are presented here with two puzzles. First, why are the world of flux and
the mechanics of perception in such a world described in reproductive

64
So Taylor (2006); but see Gonzalez (2000).
65
Sedley (2004) 42–43.
66
There has been great controversy over whether Plato himself subscribed to the percep-
tion theory he describes here or to the notion of flux that underlies it or to both. For the
range of opinions, see Modrak (1981) 35–41; Sayre (1983) 216–17; Burnyeat (1990)
8–19; Day (1997) 51–53, 76–80. I believe that Plato subscribes to neither, but either
invokes the theory of one or more other thinkers or (more likely) invents the theory
himself in order to defeat the Protagorean definition of Theaetetus.
250 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

language? Second, and ultimately more important, what conclusions are

we meant to draw from the fact that Socrates’ description of a fluxist
world of coupling, begetting, and giving birth is framed and in one place
punctuated by his description of his own role as midwife, one who pre-
sides over the “birth” of ideas?
We may begin with the reproductive metaphor of Socrates’ fluxist
theory of perception. His account commences with the general obser-
vation that “all things are the offspring (ἔκγονα) of flux and motion”
(152e8). He then goes on to describe change in the universe generally
in terms familiar from traditional mythical cosmogonies, in which parts
of the universe originate as products of sexual intercourse and birth. So
fire, which “is itself begotten (γεννᾶται) from motion and friction,” in
turn “begets (γεννᾷ) everything else” (153a8–9),67 and eventually “the
tribe (γένος) of living things grows (φύεται) from these same causes”
(153b2–3). He turns next to the issue of perception and asks what form
perception itself would take in such a world of flux. He begins by out-
lining some general principles, suggesting, for instance, that both per-
ceivers and perceiveds themselves would have to be constantly changing
(153d8–154b9). When he begins to incorporate these principles into a
full statement of his fluxist theory of perception, he returns to the repro-
ductive imagery he had introduced earlier.
The theory he now describes features a “coupling” (ὁμιλία) between a
physical object and an organ of perception, which together produce an
infinite number of “twin children” (ἔκγονα . . . δίδυμα), one a “thing per-
ceived” (αἰσθητόν) and the other a “perceiving” (αἴσθησις) (156a7–b1):
these together make up what we would call a perception. So, for example,
when the eye and a white object come together, they “beget (γεννήσῃ)
whiteness and the perceiving (αἴσθησιν) natural to it” (156d4–5). These
children briefly change the status of the parents that produced them:
the eye, for just this moment, becomes a “seeing” eye and the object,
again just for a moment, becomes a “white” object (156e4–6). He intro-
duces this account of perception as a “myth” (μῦθος, 156c4), such as
one might encounter in the “mysteries” (μυστήρια, 156a3; cf. 155e3),
perhaps because the mysteries frequently featured myths about the birth
of a miraculous child.68

67
A possible reminiscence of the abstract cosmogony of Hippon of Rhegium, discussed in
Chapter 2.
68
For the Eleusinian mysteries, see, e.g., Graf (1974) 51–77. Plato here may allude to a
folk etymology that links μυστήριον with μῦθος: see, e.g., Clem. Al. Protr. 2.13.2.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 251

Why does he describe perception in terms of “couplings” and

­“offspring”? Scholars have almost completely ignored this issue.69 The
strangeness of this theory and its reproductive idiom comes into sharp
relief when we compare the perception theory described in the later
Timaeus (45a5–47e2; 65b4–68d7), which is usually taken to be Plato’s
own.70 That theory, like all major theories of vision since Empedocles,71
also involves an interaction between perceiver and perceived, but this
interaction is not described in sexual terms, nor does it result in the
birth of offspring.72 Why does Plato use this imagery in his Theaetetus
account of perception? The answer, I think, is that reproductive imagery
helps Plato to characterize the metaphysical instability of perception in
a world characterized by total flux. One noticeable thing about the per-
ception theory of the Timaeus is that it is fully subordinated to higher
metaphysical principles.73 So the first part of the human body that
the gods create is the head, which, modeled on the spherical form of the
universe as a whole, is the most divine part of the body and home to the
two divine rotations (44d3–6); and the first organs that the gods create
are the eyes, through which flows a pure fire akin to the fire of the sun
(45b2–c2). Indeed, the primary reason that the gods created sight in the
first place, Plato argues in the Timaeus, is so that humans, by observing
the perfect rotations of celestial bodies, may gain knowledge of time and
number and indeed the nature of everything (46e7–47c4).
The Theaetetus theory, by contrast, lacks this metaphysical grounding,
and the reproductive idiom in which the theory is expressed contributes
to this sense of contingency: not only does this language represent each
perception as a fleeting embrace, but it also invokes sexual hierarchies
only to subvert them. Socrates in fact hints at a confusion of hierarchies
in his preliminary account of perception in a world in flux (153d8–
154b9). In this earlier passage, he at first describes the eye as the active

69
A notable exception is Dorter (1994) 76–78, 94–96; cf. Lee (2005) 232.
70
The theory of the Timaeus seems to be the one attributed to Plato in the later doxo-
graphical tradition: see Ps.-Plut. Placit. 4.13; Stob. 1.52; and Beare (1906) 42–56.
71
See Beare (1906) 15–18, 26–27; Taylor (1999) 208–11.
72
Many scholars have noted formal similarities between the Timaeus theory and the fluxist
theory of the Theaetetus. See, e.g., Cornford (1935) 50; Modrak (1981) 41. But I think
the similarities are dwarfed by the differences. Cic. Nat. deor. 1.19 conflates the theory
of the Timaeus with that of the Theaetetus: the Epicurean Velleius is clearly summarizing
arguments from the Timaeus (explicitly at 1.18), but he describes the five geometrical
forms as “falling . . . so as to give birth to sensations” (cadentes ad . . . pariendosque sensus),
an image that seems to be drawn from the Theaetetus.
73
So already Burnyeat (1990) 16–17.
252 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

partner (τὸ προσβάλλον, 154a1) and the object it gazes upon as the
passive partner (τὸ προσβαλλόμενον, 154a1–2; cf. 153e6–7), following
what was apparently the traditional Greek folk theory of vision, which
understood the eye to act upon objects in its environment by means of
the visual ray.74 But soon this picture is complicated. A few lines later
it becomes the object that “falls upon” (προσπεσόν) or “approaches”
(προσελθόντος) the human perceiver, and then both object and per-
ceiver are described as literally “passive” (παθόντος and παθόν, respec-
tively), even as both are grammatically active (154b2–6).
This confusion between active and passive roles becomes even more
problematic once Socrates has begun to describe perception, at 156a3,
in terms of “couplings” between eye and object and of “twin offspring”
produced as a result. He explicitly reintroduces the active and passive
roles right at the outset (τὸ μὲν ποιεῖν . . . τὸ δὲ πάσχειν, 156a6–7), but
initially leaves it to the reader to discern how these roles map onto the
process of vision he proceeds to describe. He describes “perceiving,” for
example, as something that is “begotten (γεννωμένη) along with the
thing perceived” (156b2), which leaves one unsure whether it is the eye
or the object or possibly both that do the “begetting.” A few lines later
it becomes clear that it is in fact both the eye and the object that are the
subjects of “begetting” (γεννᾷ, 156d1; γεννήσῃ, d4). But then Socrates
briefly invokes differentiated sexual roles to describe the object: at first,
he describes the white object as performing the feminine role of “giving
birth” (συναποτίκτοντος, 156e2), but then tacks abruptly to suggest that
the white object “joins in begetting” (συγγεννῆσαν, 156e4–5), a rever-
sion to the masculine role.75 Although Plato, in his summary of the flux-
ist theory of perception at 159a–e, again uses the masculine language
of “begetting” to describe the role played by both the sensory organ
and the object (γεννήσομεν, 159c8; ἐγέννησε, c15), we are left, in the
end, with a decisive reversal of sexual roles; the perceiver has become
fully passive (ὁ πάσχων, 159c8–9; τὸ πάσχον, d1) and the object active
(τὸ ποιοῦν, 159c9, c15–d1).76 Plato’s goal is not to challenge popular
belief that the perceiver “acts upon” objects in the sensible world but
rather to emphasize how metaphysically unstable both the subjects and

74
In pre-Socratic theories of vision, on the other hand, the object comes to play a more
active role. For Empedocles, effluences from objects enter the eye; for Democritus,
atoms in the object mold the surrounding air, which in turn acts upon the eye.
75
See n. 3.
76
See already Day (1997) 58. In the recapitulation of the theory at 182a4–b7, the object
remains active and the organ of perception passive.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 253

the objects of knowledge would have to be if perception really were

equivalent to knowledge.
The theme of metaphysical instability is further developed by Plato’s
description of the offspring generated by perceiver and object as “twins”
(δίδυμα). Positing a pair of “twins” allows Plato to locate sensible quali-
ties at two removes from their object. Older scientific theories of percep-
tion, such as that of Empedocles, envisioned objects acting directly and
materially on the human eye: the sensible qualities of an object are not
separated even one remove because they come from – and in a sense
are – that object. Later we encounter the theories of Democritus and
of Plato in the Timaeus, in which the object’s interaction with the eye is
mediated: for Democritus, the intermediate element is the air between
the eye and object, which is imprinted by atoms emanating from the
object; for Plato in the Timaeus, it is the fleeting juncture between light
from the eye and light from the object. Introduction of an intermediate
element introduces some contingency and the possibility of distortion
into the process.77 The fluxist theory of perception that Plato puts into
the mouth of Socrates in the Theaetetus extends the contingency of sen-
sible qualities one step further: the object’s whiteness resides not in the
object itself (so Empedocles) or in an intermediate entity between the
object and the eye (so Democritus and Plato in the Timaeus), but between
two twin “offspring” motions, which are themselves located between two
“parent” motions (object and eye). The object’s whiteness is now located
at two removes from the object.
By referring to this pair of intermediate entities as “twins,” Plato
also inevitably invokes certain folk and scientific beliefs about repro-
duction, some of which are also easily pressed into serving the theme
of metaphysical instability. One of these is the constellation of Greek
beliefs about the birth of twins itself. The Greeks explained the birth
of identical and fraternal (mono- and dizygotic) twins differently but
viewed both as unnatural events. Fraternal twins, on the one hand, were
assumed to be the result of superfecundation, almost always fathered by
two different fathers in succession (one the wife’s husband, the other
an adulterer), which explained why fraternal twins do not resemble
one another.78 Fraternal twins are what the reader of the Theaetetus is

77
See Lee (2005) 204–05. This was probably the position of Democritus, for example,
who held that the object itself does not have any perceptible qualities (e.g., white, hard)
but that these qualities arise through an interaction between atoms from the eye of the
perceiver and atoms from the object. See Democr. DK 68 B9 with Lee (2005) 210–16.
78
Dasen (1997) 50, 52.
254 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

most likely thinking of when reading Socrates’ description of percep-

tion, because the two offspring, one a “thing perceived” and the other a
“perceiving,” are apparently not identical. Identical twins, on the other
hand, were thought to be begotten by a single father, whose seed (and
possibly also that of the woman) came to be divided, contrary to nature,
in the woman’s body. The Hippocratic author of On Regimen claims that
“the nature of the woman’s womb is responsible” for the birth of iden-
tical twins, identifying specifically the bicorneal nature of the womb:
although the incoming seed usually enters one or the other of the two
horns, on rare occasions the seed can divide and produce a fetus in each
(30). The Hippocratic author of On the Nature of the Child, on the other
hand, argues that the female womb contains numerous pouches and that
seed can become lodged in just one of these pouches or many, a theory
that is capable of explaining not only human twins but multiple births
in humans and animals alike (31). Both Hippocratic theories identify
the irregular topography of the female womb as the cause of such an
event, which perhaps recalls the role that Plato, in the later Timaeus,
attributes to the Receptacle, the “nurse of all generation,” which reflects
the Forms imperfectly (49a5–6). Both kinds of twins, then, are the result
of some kind of interruption of paternity: identical twins are born when
the father’s seed (or the seed of both parents) is divided; fraternal twins
are born when the wife’s husband unwittingly shares his role with an
adulterer. Paternity is a favorite Platonic metaphor for metaphysical sta-
bility and for the Forms in particular; the birth of twins, which betokens
a division in paternity, hints at metaphysical instability.79
We have seen how the reproductive idiom of the “secret doctrine”
helps to characterize the metaphysical instability of Protagorean relativ-
ism and of Theaetetus’s theory that knowledge is identical to perception.
But does this reproductive imagery also somehow characterize Socrates
the midwife, who works in this realm of birth? What, in other words,
does the reproductive language of the fluxist theory of perception that
Socrates describes at 152c8–160d4 have to do with the reproductive lan-
guage of the midwife metaphor that frames Socrates’ account of the the-
ory (148e7–151e6, 160e2–161a4) and, on one occasion, punctuates it
(157c7–d3)? The reproductive idiom is the most obvious point of contact
between the midwife metaphor and the fluxist account of perception that
it frames, but we may first consider two other minor points of resonance.

79
For a different interpretation of the thematic importance of “twins” in the fluxist account
of perception, see Polansky (1992) 100.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 255

First is the theme of secrecy. The theory of flux, as we have seen, is

described as Protagoras’s “secret doctrine” (ἐν ἀπορρήτῳ), which is
revealed only to his own students (152c9–11), and at the heart of this
secret doctrine are “mysteries” (μυστήρια, 156a3) surrounding the gen-
eration of perception from couplings of eye and object, which cannot
be revealed to the “uninitiated” (ἀμυήτων, 155e3). Plato also uses imag-
ery of secrets and mysteries to characterize Socrates the midwife. He
has Socrates himself tell us earlier in the Theaetetus that “I practice this
art in secret (λέληθα)” (149a7), which is almost certainly an allusion
to Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates in the Clouds, probably inaccu-
rate as we have seen, presiding over a Phrontisterion (cf. the Eleusinian
Telesterion) with ritual secrets (οὐ θέμις . . . λέγειν, 140), including the
notion that an idea could be “miscarried.”80 One is tempted also to
detect an allusion to the mystical eschatology and to the notion of a
mystical communion with the Forms that Plato has Socrates describe in
the dialogues of his middle period,81 mysticism that Plato largely turns
his back on in the dialogues written after the Theaetetus. The image of
secrets and mysteries is indeed arguably more appropriate as a descrip-
tion of Socrates – even if only the Aristophanic or Platonic, rather than
the historical, Socrates – than it is as a description of Protagoras and his
epistemology.82
A second possible link between the midwife frame and the fluxist
account of perception is the image of the wind. Recall that the exam-
ple of perception that Socrates begins with is the “same wind” (ἀνέμου
τοῦ αὐτοῦ, 152b2–3), which can feel cold to one person but warm to
another. No scholar that I am aware of has wondered why Plato chooses
this example to illustrate Protagoras’s principle that man is the measure
of his own reality.83 But it seems to me that part of the answer has to do
with the fact that wind imagery too helps Plato to characterize the fluctu-
ating quality of the world of becoming. Plato himself, very soon after he
introduces the wind as an example of the privacy of perception, alludes

80
So already Tomin (1987) 99. On the mystery imagery in this and other scenes from the
Clouds, see Byl (1994).
81
Vlastos (1991) 49, 53–55 is probably right, however, to suggest that much of the mysti-
cism in Plato’s middle-period dialogues actually originates with Plato and not the histor-
ical Socrates.
82
See Lee (2005) 41.
83
It seems that most scholars assume that the example was used by Protagoras himself.
But given the extent to which post-Platonic sources for Protagoras’s man-the-measure
doctrine have been influenced by Plato’s account of it in the Theaetetus, this cannot be
proved.
256 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

to the wind’s role as a generator of motion and thus a source of life, spe-
cifically identifying a “lack of wind” (νηνεμίας, 153c7) as a cause of death
and destruction. This role for the wind cuts two ways: the wind is some-
thing positive, insofar as it promotes life, but implicitly also negative,
insofar as it is thereby linked with the world of birth and becoming.84
The role that Plato gives to the wind in his discussion of Protagoras’s
man-the-measure principle and “secret doctrine” of perception may well
recall Socrates’ suggestion only a few lines earlier, in his introduction
of himself as an intellectual midwife, that Theaetetus might give birth
not to a healthy idea but instead to a “wind egg” (ἀνεμιαῖον, 151e6).
On the one hand, a wind egg is an egg that was not fertilized by a cock,
a father, and so incapable of hatching into a chick. But the concept of
the wind egg originated in a folk belief according to which hens and
mares and other animals could be impregnated by the wind.85 Although
Plato does not allude to the fertility of the wind in the midwife passage,
where Socrates suggests that Theaetetus might give birth to a wind egg,
he certainly does in the passage a bit later when he suggests that the wind
brings life (153c7–9).
But, of course, the most important thematic resonance between
Socrates’ account of himself as a midwife and his account of a world
in total flux is the imagery of reproduction. He transitions from his
introduction of himself as midwife to investigation of Theaetetus’s def-
inition of knowledge as perception with an invitation to see “whether
it [Theaetetus’s definition] happens to be a fertile egg or a wind egg”
(151e6). This leads him immediately to discussion of Protagoras’s the-
ory about the privacy of perceptions of the wind (152b2–3) and shortly
thereafter to the notion that “all things are the offspring (ἔκγονα) of
flux and motion” (152e8). Does this hint that Theaetetus’s definition of
knowledge, too, is an “offspring of flux”? Socrates concludes his initial
development of Theaetetus’s definition with a juxtaposition even more
striking. The process of perception required by Theaetetus’s definition of
knowledge would mean that “such a Socrates [sc. an ill one] and a drink
of wine beget (ἐγεννησάτην) different [offspring]” (159e1–2) from what
84
Moreover, given that Plato is discussing the reliability of perception, an informed
reader is likely to remember that wind, in popular and scientific theories of perception,
was thought to interfere with both vision and hearing. See, e.g., Emped. DK 31 B84;
Aristoph. Thesm. 39–43.
85
See Zirkle (1936) on the Greek lore about “wind eggs.” Cf. the Christian tradition that
the Virgin Mary was impregnated “by a holy wind” (ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου) from God (Ev.
Matt. 1.18), and the Orphic notion that souls are carried by the wind into the bodies of
newborns (see Chapter 2, n. 73).
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 257

a healthy Socrates and the same drink of wine beget. “This, it seems,”
Socrates concludes, now referring to Theaetetus’s fully developed idea,
“is what we, with great difficulty, have begotten (ἐγεννήσαμεν).”
We wondered, at the beginning of this chapter, why Socrates reverts
here to a word for the masculine role in generation and why he includes
himself in the grammatical subject. Part of the reason may be that
Socrates has indeed contributed to the birth of this child and that he
indeed is, by virtue of his maieutic questions, a “father” of Theaetetus’s
fully developed thesis,86 in spite of the fact that he earlier disavowed
paternity of this or any other intellectual children. But I think Plato also
hints, perhaps subconsciously, that there is something about Socrates,
too, that best suits the world of birth and becoming, regardless of who
does the begetting and who the giving birth. Or, if this is not Plato’s con-
scious reason, it is certainly one effect of the juxtaposition.
If the fluxist theory of perception that Socrates describes suffers from
metaphysical instability, could we say the same of Socrates’ intellectual
midwifery and of Socratic philosophy more generally? Is midwifery,
which purports to describe the method of the historical Socrates, just
as much rooted in the world of birth and becoming as the fluxist the-
ory of perception, which envisions coupling eyes and objects producing
twin offspring? When Socrates first introduces himself as a midwife, at
148e6–151e6, he makes a distinction between physical childbirth, the
province of women and their midwife helpers, and intellectual child-
birth, the province of promising young men and their helper Socrates.
Socrates here attempts explicitly to exempt his midwifery from the
vicissitudes of this corporeal, feminine realm of birth. But the fluxist
theory of perception, which Socrates himself describes, leads us to won-
der whether Socratic midwifery is not exempt but rather is part of this
very realm: the historical Socrates evinced little interest in ontology and
metaphysics, and the Platonic Socrates, later in the Theaetetus, is careful
to avoid discussing Parmenides, a discussion that will be deferred to the
Sophist, where Socrates will be a mere bystander.
Socrates’ midwife metaphor, then, is something of a paradox. Plato
strengthens the midwife by investing it with paternal powers, but he also
undercuts the image, at least to the extent that Socrates inhabits the
role, by juxtaposing it to a world of birth characterized by metaphysical
instability. We may understand the representation of Socrates as ἄγονος
as reflective of a similar ambivalence: it marks both Socrates’ disavowal

86
Cf. already Benardete (1984) 1.101.
258 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

of knowledge and his intellectual limitations, his lack in particular of

the metaphysics required to understand the realm that lies beyond the
senses.87 Of course, it will be Socrates himself who, later in the dialogue,
helps Theaetetus see the limitations of perception as a basis for knowl-
edge, and, in the famous digression, it is Socrates himself who movingly
articulates the difference between the Platonic philosopher and the
rhetorician. But the issues addressed in both passages could have been
more easily and more elegantly solved with metaphysical principles from
Plato’s middle period, and the digression in particular has been thought
by many scholars to hint at the absent Platonic Forms without naming
them explicitly. The key to understanding the digression is what I should
like to call Platonic irony: we see Socrates unwittingly allude to Forms of
which the historical Socrates was ignorant; we see him describe a “flying
philosopher” that is alien to the historical Socrates, who knew his way
around Athens and its courts as well as anyone.
Whereas Sedley, as we have seen, thinks that Plato presents Socrates
as a midwife in order to suggest that he is the “midwife of Platonism,”
I think that the metaphor also hints at the limitations of Socratic phi-
losophy, a philosophical system that not only was unable to transcend
the sensory world, the world of birth and becoming, but evinced little
interest in doing so. In a sense, my reading provides a supplement (in
the Derridean sense) to Sedley’s reading: Sedley shows that the historical
Socrates could have brought Plato “this far”; but such a limit inevitably
also marks out a “no further.”

Where Have All the Fathers Gone?

I have been arguing that Plato’s midwife marks a crossroads in his own
development: on the one hand, the midwife, invested with the father’s
power to judge true children from false, signals Plato’s new preoccu-
pation with the problem of false belief and negation, which he strug-
gles with in the Theaetetus and eventually “solves” in the later Sophist; on
the other hand, it hints at a reappraisal of the legacy of the historical
Socrates, whose elenctic method is perhaps more constructive than Plato
had realized earlier in his career – Socrates not only tested the ideas of
others but helped them to develop their ideas in the strongest form pos-
sible before testing them – but whose philosophical principles could not
87
Blondell (2002) 274 sees this issue differently: she argues that Plato is attempting “to
negotiate the tension between the elenctic Sokrates, who claims not to know anything,
and his constructive counterpart who is bursting with substantive theories.”
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 259

have led to satisfactory solutions to the issues that Plato cared most about
in the final stage of his philosophical development, even though he had
earlier, rather naïvely, presented Socrates as a natural “spokesman” for
Platonic metaphysics. In this section, I argue that Plato further explores
this idea through the image of the father, which I believe functions as a
placeholder for the Forms, metaphysical entities that he does not argue
for explicitly in the Theaetetus, as almost all scholars agree, but is never-
theless clearly still committed to in some fashion.88 But, paradoxically,
the father, like the Forms, is present in the text of the Theaetetus largely
as an absence.

Euphronius
The first missing father we meet is Euphronius, the father of Theaetetus.
His absence is introduced at the very beginning of the dialogue, when
Theodorus proposes to introduce Socrates to a promising young
Athenian who “resembles you in his snub nose and in the bulging of his
eyes, though he exhibits these qualities less than you do” (143e8–144a1).
Socrates is intrigued and asks “whose son is he?” (144b7), but Theodorus
does not remember (144b8). When the young man finally comes into
view, Socrates immediately identifies him as the son of Euphronius of
Sunion (144c5), though it will fall to Theodorus to supply the name
of Theaetetus himself (144d1). The implicit contrast that Plato casually
develops here between what Socrates knows about Theaetetus (name of
the father) and what Theodorus knows (name of the son) anticipates,
on a thematic level, two distinctions that will become important once the
discussion about the nature of knowledge begins in earnest.
The first, and perhaps most obvious, is a distinction between knowl-
edge and perception. Theodorus is presented as someone who relies,
perhaps paradoxically for a geometer,89 on perception: he is focused at
first on Theaetetus’s physical characteristics (143e8–9), which he sug-
gests are similar to those of Socrates, and he describes even Theaetetus’s
moral qualities as traits he has apprehended through his senses (ᾐσθόμην,
144a3).90 A few lines later, Plato rather pointedly contrasts Theodorus’s

88
See n. 55.
89
But cf. Rep. 510c1–511b2, where Plato points out that geometers rely on images and
diagrams (eikones) in the development of their hypotheses. On Theodorus’s use of dia-
grams, see Theaet. 147d4 and Nails (2002) 282.
90
The word ᾐσθόμην introduces, grammatically speaking, only the general observation that
Theaetetus is “naturally well endowed (sc. with talent)” (εὖ πεφυκότα, 144a3), but the
260 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

perception of Theaetetus with Socrates’ knowledge. So Theodorus says,

“I perceive (μοι δοκοῦσιν) that they have oiled up and are coming in this
direction. Consider whether you know (γιγνώσκεις) him” (144c3–4).
Socrates replies in the affirmative (γιγνώσκω, 144c5), and it soon
becomes clear that what Socrates “knows” about Theaetetus is the name
of his father. This contrast naturally anticipates Theaetetus’s first ill-fated
definition of knowledge as being equivalent to perception.91
A second distinction at play here in Plato’s reference to Theaetetus’s
missing father is one between being and becoming. The father represents
the world of being:92 Socrates tells us that when Theaetetus’s father died,
“he left behind very much ousia (οὐσίαν μάλα πολλήν)” (144c7–8), a
phrase that, in context, must refer to the “very large estate” the father had
bequeathed to his son, but which could also be understood in its denota-
tive sense as a reference to “much being.” This ontological resonance is
all the more likely given that the sentence is framed by references to what
Socrates knows and does not know: he “knows” (γιγνώσκω, 144c5), as we
have seen, the name of the father (who is the source of οὐσία later in this
sentence) and does not “know” (οἶδα, c8) the name of the son. And for
Plato, in the Theaetetus and elsewhere, knowledge is of “that which is.”93
If the father represents the world of being, then his absence condemns
the son to wallow in the world of becoming. And indeed we learn from
Theodorus that Theaetetus’s trustees “appear to be destroying his estate”
(τὴν οὐσίαν δοκοῦσί μοι . . . διεφθαρκέναι, 144d1–2). Here οὐσία, “estate”
but also “being,” is slyly juxtaposed to two different kinds of opposites,
“seeming” (δοκοῦσι) and “destruction” (διεφθαρκέναι), technical terms
that, in Plato’s high middle period, characterize the diminished episte-
mological and ontological status of objects in the sensory world. In the
argument developed in the course of the Theaetetus, written during the

γάρ clause that immediately follows this sentence, and indeed amplifies it, makes it clear
that Theodorus is thinking of moral qualities like “learned,” “gentle,” and “manly.”
91
The issue of how one can “know” Theaetetus will recur in the second half of the ­dialogue:
see 193b9–d2, 209b2–d10.
92
Cf. already Polansky (1992) 40, who suggests that Socrates focuses on the name of
Theaetetus’s father because the father is the “cause.” Use of the name implies knowl-
edge of the essence of a thing. We see versions of the same metaphor elsewhere in Plato.
In the Republic, for instance, the sun, which plays a role in the sensible world analogous
to that played by the Form of the Good in the intelligible world, is called the “child”
(τόκος, ἔκγονον) of the Good (507a3–4, 508b12–13). Cf. also Blondell (2002) 277 and
n. 111. For Plato’s use of the image of the father as a metaphor for intellectual filiation,
formal or informal, see, e.g., Rappe (2000) 284, 290–91; Burnyeat (2004).
93
E.g., Theaet. 147b2–3, 152c5–6, cf. 189b1–2. Indeed, at 147b2–3, Plato suggests that to
“know the name of something” is to know “what it is” (τί ἐστιν).
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 261

transition between Plato’s middle and late periods, these terms will have
a somewhat different valence: the focus of his critique in the Theaetetus
is not on the sensible objects themselves, which Plato is now willing to
acknowledge have some kind of being (185a8–9), but with the extent to
which we can apprehend them, and their being in particular, with our
senses (185c9–e2).
This world of becoming, seeming, and destruction is linked most
immediately with Theaetetus’s trustees, the men who are “destroying”
the οὐσία of the father. But Theodorus is also caught up in this world:
not only does he apprehend Theaetetus through perception rather
than knowledge, he also apprehends the trustees’ destruction of οὐσία
through the “seeming” (δοκοῦσι, 144d2) of perception. What is more,
his acknowledgment that he does “not recall” (μνημονεύω δ’ οὔ, 144b8)
the name of Theaetetus’s father, which Socrates “knows” (144c5), is a
likely allusion to Plato’s middle period doctrine of recollection,94 even
if Plato is no longer committed, at the time he wrote the Theaetetus, to
“recollection” as his metaphor of choice to describe how the soul acquires
­

knowledge or gains access to things it has already learned. But ultimately

all these allusions to becoming, seeming, and destruction describe the
diminished inheritance of the son, Theaetetus, who, in the absence of
his father, will possess οὐσία in an imperfect, “destroyed” form. Plato thus
hints at Theaetetus’s failure, in the absence of an ontological “father,” to
develop a successful definition of knowledge, before the young man has
even formulated it.

Protagoras
A second absent father in the Theaetetus is Protagoras, who is called the
“father of the theory” (πατὴρ . . . μύθου, 164e2–3) that is ­“perishing”
(ἀπώλετο, 164d9) under Socrates’ critique. The theory in question
is most immediately Protagoras’s claim that man is the measure of all
things, but Socrates is clearly referring also to Theaetetus’s definition
of knowledge as perception (164d9–10); it is this combined theory
that is described a couple of lines later as an “orphan” that the inter-
locutors have been kicking in the mud (164e3–4).95 Plato thus suggests
that Protagoras is not only a possible substitute father for the orphaned
Theaetetus but is in fact the absent father of Theaetetus’s intellectual

94
See n. 30.
95
Both Theaetetus’s and Protagoras’s orphaned theory are also said to have “trustees”
(ἐπίτροποι,144d2, 164e4), who are not performing their fiduciary duties.
262 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

child, which hints at the sophistic notion, alluded to earlier in the dia-
logue (151b1–6), that a great teacher could impregnate a student with
his ideas.96 But Protagoras will prove to be a false father, as we shall see.
Protagoras’s absence as a “father” performs two functions. First, it
invokes a familiar Platonic contrast between sophistic monologue and
Platonic dialogue as well as the related contrast between the written
word and oral conversation. The problem with monologue, for which
Plato had implicitly criticized Protagoras himself in the early dialogue
that bears his name (Prot. 328d3–329b5), and written philosophy is that
both make it impossible to question the author. Indeed, in the Phaedrus,
probably written not long before the Theaetetus, Plato explicitly compared
the author of a written text to an absent “father” who is unable to care
for his intellectual offspring (Phaedr. 275d4–e5; cf. 278a5–6). So, in the
Theaetetus, for Plato to call attention to Protagoras as the “father” of both
the measure doctrine and Theaetetus’s first definition of knowledge is
to emphasize how difficult it will be for the interlocutors to defend or
criticize the thesis of the absent Protagoras. But this presents a para-
dox, for Plato, at the beginning of this dialogue, had called attention
to its own status as a work of writing and to its own absent “fathers”:
­initially Socrates, the original narrator and author, whose “and I saids”
and “and I spokes” were removed by Euclides (143b8–c6),97 and ulti-
mately Plato himself.
Second, and more important, the absence of Protagoras as father
of the measure doctrine hints that the doctrine itself is metaphysically
fatherless. The context of Plato’s references to Protagoras’s orphaned
theory is a meandering discussion of conflicting appearances. Socrates
begins humorously by wondering whether pigs and baboons, which
are also (like humans) capable of perception, are also the measure of
their own reality (161c4–6). This initial, and perhaps trivial, challenge
to the privileged status of human perception really looks ahead to a
more important one: Is the perception of one human being as valid as
the perceptions not only of every other human being but also of the
gods? (162c3–6). Theaetetus naturally balks and the voice of Protagoras

96
See Chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of this sophistic trope. On Protagoras as “father”
of Theaetetus’s child, see Benardete (1984) 1.103. Blondell (2002) 282–83 also
interprets this passage as figuring an intellectual genealogy that links Protagoras and
Theaetetus, but she suggests that Plato wishes us to understand Protagoras’s “son” to be
not Theaetetus himself, but Theaetetus’s teacher Theodorus; she further argues that
Plato juxtaposes this sophistic genealogy (Protagoras-Theodorus-Theaetetus) to a more
philosophical line of descent from Parmenides to Socrates to Theaetetus.
97
So already Benardete (1984) 1.86.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 263

appears a few lines later to denounce Socrates for bringing in the gods
when Protagoras explicitly excluded them and all claims about their exis-
tence or nonexistence from his work (162d6–e2). Plato here does not
go so far as he will in the Laws (716c4–5) to claim that god, not man,
is the “measure of all things,” but his question of whether Protagoras’s
measure doctrine can apply to animals and gods is designed, I think, to
suggest that human judgment and its objects contrast unfavorably with
divine judgment and its objects, what middle Plato would have, without
hesitation, called “Forms.”
This serves as Socrates’ transition to the main problem with human
perception, the problem of conflicting appearances. He starts, rather
obliquely, with examples of one knowing and not knowing the same
thing. So if one sees the letters of a foreign language, one “knows” it
insofar as one perceives the letters, but also he does “not know” the lan-
guage because he cannot understand what the letters mean (163b1–7).
Or if one remembers something that one has seen before, one speaks
as though he “knows” that object, but in another sense he does “not
know” it because he is not presently perceiving it (163d1–164b2).
Socrates acknowledges that these objections are problematic, and it is
at this point that he suggests that the “orphaned theory” of Protagoras
is not being well served now that its father is dead (164e2–5). But after
offering an ambiguous defense of Protagoras’s position (165e7–168c5),
Socrates returns to another version of the problem of conflicting appear-
ances, which sets up the famous recoil argument: if A holds belief x,
which is, according to Protagoras, true for A, but B holds the belief not-x
(i.e., he believes A’s belief is false), which is true for B, then x can be
simultaneously true (for A) and not true (for B) (170d4–9). A fortiori,
if Protagoras concedes the truth of the view of those people who believe
that his measure doctrine is false, then he is conceding that his “On
Truth” is false for everyone including himself (171a6–c7).98
Few readers will think that these arguments are dispositive, and I sus-
pect that Plato offers them not as decisive proofs but as a way of illustrat-
ing some problems with a relative approach to truth. What is important
is that these variations on the “conflicting appearances” problem are
meant to show us that sophistic objections of this sort will not relent until
we bring an excluded guest back to the party: some kind of objective cri-
terion of truth. We should recall that it was the “conflicting appearances”
98
An excellent discussion of the recoil argument can be found now in Lee (2005) 51–57,
who points out that it works only when the truth and falsity of second-order beliefs are
brought into the orbit of the measure doctrine.
264 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

problem that served as one of the prime arguments for the existence
of the Forms in the Republic and other middle period works.99 In the
Theaetetus, this variation on the problem leads not to an explicit affir-
mative argument for Forms but to the famous digression on the life of
the philosopher at 172b3–177c2, which contains what most scholars
now take to be a clear reminiscence of Plato’s middle period ­theory of
Forms,100 though probably innocently on the part of Socrates the char-
acter.101 So when Plato describes Protagorean relativism as a theory
without a father, he is interested not so much in the fact that the great
Sophist, the “father” of the theory, is dead, but that the man-the-measure
theory posits no objective, metaphysically grounded criterion of truth.
Protagoras is thus no real substitute for Theaetetus’s biological father,
the author of “much being.” Protagoras is a false father.

Parmenides
A third absent father is the great Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides.
Socrates refers to him as “august and awe-inspiring” (183e6–7), an
explicitly Homeric tag that recalls Helen’s description of her father-in-
law Priam (Hom. Il. 3.172).102 And in the Sophist, which is presented
as a continuation of the Theaetetus,103 the Eleatic master is referred to
explicitly as “father Parmenides” (241d5; cf. 241d3, 242a1–2). Even if
Parmenides is not given that moniker explicitly in the Theaetetus, I would
argue that he nevertheless functions, in this dialogue, as a metaphysical
“father,” a placeholder for the Forms and idealist thought ­generally.104
It is Socrates who first mentions Parmenides as the only thinker of note
who does not subscribe to the theory of flux (152e2). But later, when
Theaetetus insists that Socrates discuss Parmenides and other philoso-
phers who describe a universe at rest, Socrates refuses, even though the

99
See, e.g., N. White (1976) 72–73; T. Irwin (1977a) 7–9.
100
So, differently, Cornford (1935) 85 n. 1; Runciman (1962) 57; Dorter (1994) 86–89;
Sedley (2004) 71–74, 78.
101
So Sedley (2004) 78.
102
Benardete (1984) 1.142; Palmer (1999) 121; Blondell (2002) 282. Cf. also Hom. Od.
8.22, 14.234.
103
See n. 4.
104
The function of Parmenides in Plato’s oeuvre is complex. Sometimes he represents
a sort of “father” of Platonic metaphysics, at other times Plato focuses on a destruc-
tive version of Parmenidean thought that had been taken up by eristic Sophists in the
fourth century b.c.e., who argued, among other things, that false belief is not possible
because it is impossible to form a belief of “what is not.” See generally Palmer (1999).
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 265

discussion that follows, in which Socrates suggests that it is the soul rather
than the senses that apprehends the “being and not-being, similarity and
dissimilarity, identity and difference, oneness and the rest of number” of
sensible objects (185c9–d1), would have benefited from Parmenidean
metaphysics, as it does in the Sophist when many of these questions are
explored masterfully by the Eleatic Stranger.
If the Parmenides of the Theaetetus is the quintessential “father,” the
Heracliteans, who inhabit the other end of the metaphysical spectrum,
are fatherless: “Among such men, one is not the student of another;
rather they spring up on their own (αὐτόματοι ἀναφύονται) wherever
each of them happens to be struck with inspiration” (180b9–c2). They
are reproduced not patrilineally, but parthenogenetically: they are earth-
born men.105 Their lack of subordination to a father, to an objective
standard, is reflected in their aspiration to make themselves “like one
another” (ὁμοίους αὑτοῖς, 180b7), in contrast to the true philosopher,
who strives to become “like god” (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ, 176b1).

Sophroniscus
A fourth missing father is Sophroniscus, the father of Socrates, who
identifies himself in the Theaetetus solely by his matronymic: he is the
son of Phaenarete the midwife (149a1–2).106 If “father” still represents
the stable and objective intelligible realm, what does it mean for the
father of Socrates to be absent? One possibility is that the absence of an
earthly father for Socrates makes room for a divine one. And there are
indeed hints in the dialogue that Socrates’ real father is a god. We may
recall that Socrates first introduces himself as a midwife after reminding
Theaetetus that his mother practiced this same art.107 We immediately
assume that Socrates has “inherited” this vocation from his mother, but
we soon learn that he received it from god (150c8, d4–5, d8; 151b3–4,

105
Cf. the “earthborn” giants in the Sophist, who are described as doing “battle” with the
Forms (246a4, 248c1–2). Cf. Blondell (2002) 276, 305–13, who argues that the point
is to contrast Heracliteans, who cannot reproduce philosophically, with Socrates, who,
through Plato’s Theaetetus, does succeed, on some level, in reproducing himself.
106
Socrates is explicitly called “fatherless” at Euthyd. 298b3, but Plato’s motivations there
are different: see Rappe (2000) 284–85.
107
Some scholars have wondered if the name attributed by Plato to Socrates’ mother,
Phaenarete (“she who brings virtue to light”), is too good to be true. See Guthrie
(1962–81) 3.ii.58 n. 1. Phaenarete was also the name given in the later Hippocratic
biographical tradition to Hippocrates’ mother or grandmother. See Hanson (1996)
159–62.
266 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

d1). The subordination of mother midwife to father god is made clear

at the end of the dialogue when Socrates points out that this “god” is
the source not only of his but also his mother’s midwifery (210c6–7).108
Plato also has Socrates claim that some young men think that they are
responsible for their intellectual offspring when “it is the god and I who
are responsible for midwifing them” (150d8–e1). If Socrates’ father is
absent, it is perhaps because the divine source of Socrates’ midwifery
resides outside of this world.109
But another way to read the absence of Socrates’ father is to see Plato
as figuring the absence of metaphysics in the philosophy of the historical
Socrates. David Sedley, as we have seen, has suggested that Plato, in the
Theaetetus, is trying to understand the extent to which his own mature
ethics and metaphysics grew out of the kinds of philosophical questions
the historical Socrates asked, and Sedley believes that Plato’s emphasis
is on the continuity between teacher and pupil.110 He claims, for exam-
ple, that the historical Socrates himself recognized the role of the soul
in perception and thus posited a kind of teleological priority for the soul
in sensation.111 Socrates’ description of the soul’s coordination of the
senses in 184b7–185e9 perhaps anticipates Plato, but is metaphysically
naïve, and I think Plato clearly signals this by having Socrates plunge into
this issue just after declining Theaetetus’s request that he discuss the the-
ory of Parmenides (183d10–184a8). Socrates here effuses great respect
for Parmenides, and his official reason for not subjecting Parmenides’
theory of the One to a thorough investigation here is that there is not
time to do it justice and it would only distract them from their real sub-
ject, which is the nature of knowledge.
But it seems more likely that Plato has him decline to discuss the details
of Parmenides’ philosophy because he now recognizes that the histor-
ical Socrates could not possibly understand how Parmenides inspired
Plato’s middle-period metaphysics.112 Earlier Socrates had referred to

108
Cf. Benardete (1984) 1.100, who suggests that Socrates himself is thus a god. Blondell
(2002) 267 thinks “god” refers throughout to Artemis, who is identified as the patron
of female midwives at 149c9. But I think Burnyeat (1977) 16 n. 19 is right that Plato
has in mind a more generic subsuming divinity.
109
Another explanation for the absence of Socrates’ father is offered by Blondell (2002)
275, who suggests that this allows Socrates to be a founding “father” of his own philos-
ophy, unbeholden to any philosophical father.
110
Sedley (2004) 8–15.
111
So Sedley (2004) 113–14.
112
So Long (1998) 133; Sedley (2004) 100.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 267

the Eleatic monism of Parmenides and Melissus as an approach “I had

nearly ­forgotten” (ὀλίγου ἐπελαθόμην, 180d7–8); if this is an allusion to
the doctrine of recollection, Plato would seem to be hinting that Socrates
is unaware that there are Forms to recollect.113 What is more, Socrates’
refusal to discuss Parmenides is immediately followed by a claim that he
would like to focus on how his intellectual midwifery can help Theaetetus
produce whatever ideas he has about knowledge: midwifery is an alter-
native to Parmenidean metaphysics; midwifery marks the glass ceiling
beyond which Socrates cannot ascend.
Nowhere is this ceiling more in evidence than in the famous digres-
sion. Scholars have come to recognize a gap between the metaphysical
rhetoric Socrates gives voice to in the digression and the actual interests
and pursuits of the historical Socrates.114 The question is how we are
to understand this gap. Harry Berger thinks that Plato here ridicules
the highfalutin aspirations of some philosophers and casts his lot with
the socially embedded, practical philosophy of a man like Socrates.115
But I think this is unlikely: most scholars believe, I think rightly, that
the ideals of what Berger calls the “flying philosopher” align too closely
with those espoused by Plato in the dialogues from his middle period.
More likely is that Plato is contrasting the metaphysician that he, by
this time, had become, with the historical Socrates, interested primarily
in practical ethics. David Sedley thinks that the contrast serves never-
theless to demonstrate how close to a metaphysical theory the histori-
cal Socrates could have gotten without explicitly describing a separate
and incorporeal intelligible realm and naming its inhabitants “Forms.”
This is quite possible, but I think it is just as likely that Plato wishes to
emphasize the unbridgeability of the gap between him and Socrates
as the continuity between them. We may consider, to this end, the two
supposedly unambiguous examples of false belief that Theaetetus offers
earlier in the discussion, both with the tacit approval of Socrates: when
a madman thinks he is a god, and when a dreamer imagines that he
has wings and is flying (158b1–4). Both fantasies describe the aspira-
tions of the philosopher in the digression: he seeks “assimilation to god”
(ὁμοίωσις θεῷ, 176b1) and “disdaining [quotidian matters], he flies
(πέτεται) everywhere . . . ‘beneath the earth’ . . . and ‘above the heavens’”

113
Cf. Sedley (2003) 286–87.
114
Berger (1982) 385–86, 400; Rue (1993) 78–82.
115
Berger (1982) 385–86.
268 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

(173e4–6).116 But Theaetetus does not understand this, nor is Socrates,

in spite of being the unknowing mouthpiece of the digression, well
equipped to lead him there.

Socrates
It is perhaps not possible, or even necessary, to decide whether the
absence of a father for Socrates means that his intellectual father is a god
and the stable realm of being that god inhabits or that he is philosoph-
ically, especially metaphysically, fatherless. Plato may wish to exploit
both possibilities. The issue of Socrates’ paternity inevitably presents a
related question: Could Socrates be the intellectual father of another?
If Protagoras is clearly unsuitable as a substitute father for Theaetetus,
might Socrates be a worthy alternative? This question too cannot be
answered with certainty. The case in favor of seeing Socrates as a kind of
intellectual father to Theaetetus depends largely on the physical resem-
blance between the two, mentioned both at the beginning and at the
end of the dialogue. But we have seen that sensible qualities make a poor
foundation for knowledge.
The case against seeing Socrates as intellectual father to Theaetetus
is stronger. First, as we have had occasion to recall a number of times
already, Socrates explicitly says that he is ἄγονος and that the god has
forbidden him from “begetting” (γεννᾶν) ideas on others (150c4–8).
Second, I have argued that Plato evinces awareness in this dialogue that
the historical Socrates was ill-equipped to understand Plato’s advances
in epistemology and ontology. An even stronger claim could be made
about Socrates’ relative ignorance of mathematics: when Theaetetus
reports his solution to the problem of surds, Socrates is wowed (147d4–
148b5). Third, there is another young man present in this dialogue who,
by ­virtue of his name, is a more likely “son” of Socrates: that is the youn-
ger Socrates (147d1). In the Statesman, the third dialogue in the trilogy
that began with the Theaetetus, Socrates refers to the “kind of kinship” he
has with both Theaetetus and the younger Socrates and proposes that
the Eleatic Stranger examine the younger Socrates for the remainder of
that dialogue (257d1–258a6). But this is perhaps a misrecognition on
Socrates’ part: the homonymous younger Socrates is a fixture in Plato’s
Academy, a “friend of the Forms”; in spite of the name he shares with

116
The connection is made already by Blondell (2002) 291, who, however, sees this as
Socrates’ endorsement of the otherworldliness of the true philosopher.
 Reading Plato’s Midwife 269

the elder Socrates, the intellectual father of this Platonic idealist is not
the elder Socrates, but Plato.117 Socrates is no less a false father than
Protagoras.
But could Socrates function as a father for Plato himself? All this talk
of resemblance and absent fathers raises the general question of philo-
sophical lineage,118 and it is probably Plato’s own intellectual genealogy
that he is preoccupied with in the Theaetetus. And Plato may well think of
Socrates as a “father,” or at least a “midwife,” of Platonism. But we have
seen reasons to believe that Plato’s sense of his Socratic inheritance is
more nuanced now, that he himself is probably even ambivalent. And
the timing of this reappraisal is telling: in the Sophist, the next dialogue
in the trilogy, Plato brings on stage a new intellectual father, Father
Parmenides.

Back to the Clouds

The midwife probably attracted Plato’s attention in part because of her
increasing professional stature in fourth-century Athens: no longer a
marginal superstitious figure orchestrating cabals in the women’s quar-
ters, she was now ranked with the Hippocratic doctor as a possessor of
“scientific” expertise. But Plato ultimately uses the midwife, more ambiv-
alently, as a figure of transition: this figure is perhaps most at home in
the shadowy sensible world of becoming, of birth and decay, perhaps
even in the Symposium’s world of mystical communion with the Forms,
though by investing her with certain paternal traits, Plato can use her
to mark a turn away from the philosopher’s passive impregnation by the
Forms toward a more authoritarian concern with issues of truth and fal-
sity, logic and grammar. Plato’s absent fathers figure this ambivalence in
a different way. The father represents the noetic world of Plato’s middle
metaphysics: but some of the fathers in the Theaetetus are absent alto-
gether and others, including perhaps the paternal midwife Socrates,
are false fathers, unable to grasp this realm. Only father Parmenides,
the (absent) hero of the remainder of the trilogy, leads Platonic phi-
losophy forward. All that is clear at the end of this aporetic dialogue is

117
On the function of the younger Socrates within the Platonic corpus, see Jatakari (1990);
Blondell (2002) 261–62; Nails (2002) 269. I cannot ultimately agree with Jatakari that
the younger figure named “Socrates” in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman is not the
historical figure of that name associated with the Academy and criticized by Aristotle at
Metaph. 1036b24–32 but a fictional “mask” for Plato himself.
118
So Blondell (2002) 260–89.
270 The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor

that the father remains as far away from the mother and the sensible
world as ever.
We have seen reason to doubt that the historical Socrates was the
author of the birth-of-thought metaphor alluded to in Aristophanes’
Clouds. If it were associated with the historical Socrates, it is strange that
Plato associates Socrates with a version of the metaphor almost exclu-
sively in two dialogues, the Symposium and Theaetetus.119 If the metaphor
of the Clouds was associated not with the historical Socrates but with one
of the Sophists, it becomes easier to understand Socrates’ claim in the
Theaetetus that he has kept his vocation of intellectual midwife secret for
fear of disapproval. But, in that case, how are we to explain Socrates’
embrace of a metaphor probably associated, in the first place, with one
or more of the Sophists? We argued, in Chapter 6, that Socrates’ account
of intellectual birth in the Symposium is really an appropriation of a ver-
sion of this sophistic metaphor, retrofitted for a distinctly Platonic –
and indeed antisophistic – epistemology. Plato seems to adopt a similar
strategy in the Theaetetus: he has Socrates embrace the birth metaphor
wrongly attributed to him in the Clouds, even as he denies the accuracy
of Aristophanes’ attribution (“I practice this art in secret,” 149a7). But
Plato changes the metaphor in the Theaetetus. Socrates is no longer the
pregnant philosopher of the Symposium (or of the Clouds), but a male
midwife unable to beget children of his own, unable to have “fathered”
the mature thought of Plato. Ultimately Plato deploys the midwife image
with great ambivalence: it perhaps does allow Plato to think of Socrates
as a “midwife of Platonism,” as Sedley has argued, but at the same time to
focus on Socrates’ infertility, to see him as trapped in the world of birth
and becoming, unable, in the end, to make the flight to god.

119
Variations on the metaphor are invoked, more briefly, at Plat. Rep. 490b5–7 and Phaedr.
251e5.
 Appendix I
Did Any Thinker before Democritus Argue for
the Existence of Female “Seed”?

We suggested in Chapter 2 that the two-seed theory of reproduction,

according to which (1) the male and female contributions are the same,
(2) probably neither contribution is responsible for conferring life or
soul to the newborn, and (3) both contributions are called “seed,” was
developed first by Democritus in the later fifth century. But there is some
evidence, mostly from later doxographers, that has led some scholars
to conclude that some thinkers before Democritus also thought that
females produced “seed.”1 Aetius 5.5.1 lists Pythagoras as a pre-Democri-
tean thinker who argued explicitly in favor of “female seed,” but it is well
established that the name “Pythagoras” in the doxographic tradition,
especially in connection with biological doxai, almost certainly refers to
one or more later Pythagorean authors from the classical or Hellenistic
period.2 Censorinus De die nat. 5.3 (= DK 24 A13), meanwhile, lists
Anaxagoras, Alcmaeon, Parmenides, and Empedocles as believing that
children are born from seed contributed by both father and mother.
We argued in Chapter 2 that Censorinus’s inclusion of Anaxagoras in
this list must be mistaken, for it contradicts the clear and superior evi-
dence of the classical Aristotle, who read Anaxagoras’s book in its orig-
inal form; we suggested that Censorinus, or more likely the strand of
the doxographic tradition that he represents, misunderstood the signif-
icant role Anaxagoras had assigned to menstrual blood in determining
resemblance to mean that this female contribution was the same as the
male’s and was also called “seed.” This notice in Censorinus constitutes
our primary evidence that Parmenides, Empedocles, and Alcmaeon

1
See, e.g., Lonie (1981) 119; G. Lloyd (1983) 87; Dean-Jones (1994) 149.
2
Further complicating Aetius’s attribution is that fact that we know of some classical
Pythagoreans who insisted that the male alone produced seed. See Chapter 2, n. 40.

271
272 Appendix I

believed in the existence of “female seed”: but if it is flawed in the case

of Anaxagoras, how reliable is it for the others? With these doubts about
the usefulness of Censorinus in mind, we may proceed to consider the
other evidence for the embryological views of Parmenides, Empedocles,
and Alcmaeon.

Parmenides
The testimonia and fragments of Parmenides, who wrote somewhat ear-
lier than Anaxagoras, yield contradictory information about the think-
er’s embryology.3 Aet. 5.7.4 (= DK 28 A53) says that Anaxagoras and
Parmenides both believed that “the [contribution] from the right side
[of the body] (τὰ ἐκ τῶν δεξιῶν) is deposited (καταβάλλεσθαι) into
the right side of the womb, the [contribution] from the left side into
the left side [of the womb]; and if the [contribution] that is deposited
(τὰ τῆς καταβολῆς) is reversed, female children are born.”4 The fact
that Parmenides is here paired with Anaxagoras, who we know taught
that male children are produced when seed from the right side of the
father falls into the right side of the womb and female children are
produced when seed from the left side of the father falls into the left
side of the womb, suggests that Parmenides, too, thought that the sex
of the child was determined by the seed of the father, though in his
case not by what part of the father’s body produced the seed but by
whether the father’s seed fell into the same side of the womb as the side
of the father’s body that produced it. The language Aetius uses for the
emission of this substance (καταβάλλεσθαι, καταβολῆς) also strongly
suggests male ejaculation.5
But there is one piece of evidence, apart from the problematic notice
in Censorinus De die nat. 5.3, that suggests that Parmenides did believe
in the existence of female “seed”: this is a passage, printed by Diels as
DK 28 B18, which purports to be a translation into Latin of several
verses of Parmenides by Caelius Aurelianus (Chron. morb. IV 9), a Roman
medical doctor writing in the fifth century c.e. In this passage, we

3
On Parmenides’ embryology generally, see Kember (1971).
4
On Aetius’s use of the plural to describe this reproductive secretion, see Chapter 2,
n. 23.
5
See Chapter 2, n. 39. Kember (1971) 70 argues that the word exeat in Cens. De die nat.
5.2 (semen unde exeat . . . non constat. Parmenides enim tum ex dextris tum ex laevis partibus oriri
putavit) also implies male ejaculation.
 Appendix I 273

encounter Parmenides’ explanation for why some male children have

feminine ­qualities and some female children masculine qualities: when
the ­“qualities” (virtutes) of each parent’s contribution “do not fuse into
one,” the offspring is cursed with a “double seed” (gemino semine).6 What
is important for our purposes is the language that the Roman doctor
has used to describe the contributions of father and mother: he refers
to them first as “germs of love” (Veneris germina) and then collectively
as “seed” ­(permixto semine, gemino semine). Is Caelius’s germina or semen a
translation of σπέρμα or γονή in Parmenides’ original?
We may adduce two considerations. First, there is reason to believe
that Caelius has somewhat carelessly introduced language and concepts
from later Greek science into his “translation” of Parmenides.7 Especially
suspicious is his description of the male contribution as a product of
blood (diverso ex sanguine), a characterization difficult to imagine in
works of natural science before Diogenes of Apollonia.8 Second, the
context of B18 is the resemblance of offspring to their parents (in this
case, to the gender traits of each parent, independent of the offspring’s
biological sex), and we have seen that it was precisely the important role
that Anaxagoras and others gave to the female contribution (menses) in
determining resemblance (but not, e.g., sex) that led later doxographers
to assume, incorrectly in the event, that these thinkers called this female
contribution “seed.”
One can hardly be confident in Censorinus and Caelius Aurelianus as
the basis for a reconstruction of Parmenides’ embryology. But our evi-
dence, problematic as it is, suggests that Parmenides thought that the sex
of the offspring was determined by the region of the womb into which
the male contribution fell and that the offspring’s resemblance to its
parents was determined by the interaction between the male and female
contributions, as it was in the case of Anaxagoras, Hippon, and others.
There is no reason to believe that he thought the male and female con-
tributions were the same; if he did use the word “seed” to designate the
female contribution, as both Censorinus and Caelius Aurelianus suggest,
it described the blood contributed by the female.9
6
Cf. also Aet. 5.11.2 (= DK 28 A54) with Kember (1971) 72. Hipp. Vict. 1.28–29 presents
a similar theory to account for offspring with nonnormative gender traits.
7
See Lesky (1951) 49.
8
Of course it is possible that an analogy between male semen and female blood was part
of folk belief already in the archaic period.
9
The word “seed” was occasionally used by Greek authors to describe the different male
and female contributions (semen, blood, respectively): see Chapter 2, n. 36.
274 Appendix I

Empedocles
Empedocles was a contemporary of Anaxagoras but is thought to have
written slightly earlier.10 The clearest evidence that he was a two-seed
theorist is, once again, the problematic notice in Cens. De die nat. 5.3,
which we have addressed. But there is one additional piece of evidence
that must be considered: Aristotle, in the Generation of Animals, inter-
prets one of Empedocles’ verses as if it presented a form of the so-called
pangenesis theory, under which “seed” is produced from all parts of
the bodies of both males and females, a theory associated in particular
with Democritus. The verse is a one-line fragment that Diels-Kranz print
as DK 31 B63: “but the nature of limbs is torn asunder, one [nature]
in the man’s . . . ” (ἀλλὰ διέσπασται μελέων φύσις· ἡ μὲν ἐν ἀνδρός . . .).
Aristotle quotes this verse twice in the course of the GA, and is indeed
our only source for the fragment. But when we consider the quota-
tions in the larger context of Aristotle’s embryological argument, we
notice three striking facts: (1) at one point, Aristotle seems to suggest
that Empedocles taught that males alone produced “seed,” at least the
seed that determines the sex of the offspring in the womb (764a2–4);
(2) Aristotle acknowledges his difficulty in understanding Empedocles’
language and indeed the uncertainty of his own interpretation of it;
and (3) there is reason to believe that this verse may have come from
Empedocles’ account of anthropogony, not from an account of ontoge-
netic embryology.
The context of Aristotle’s first quotation of this line (at 722b12) is
a refutation of the Democritean theory of pangenesis. Aristotle lodges
three important objections to this theory (722b3–7): (1) If each seed
is already a miniature arm and miniature liver, how are these parts sus-
tained in the passage from sexual secretion to the formation of the fetus;
(2) what happens to the miniature sexual organ that does not get used
(for the child will be either male or female, but surely not both); and
(3) a fortiori, is it not the case that the fetus will be a double human, if
it gets a full complement of body parts from each parent? Empedocles,
Aristotle suggests, proposed a form of pangenesis that is marginally
more satisfactory: each parent contributed not a whole complement
of seeds or parts, as Democritus and others said, but only a half com-
plement. Aristotle proceeds to quote B63 (“but the nature of limbs is
torn asunder, one [nature] in the man’s. . . . ”) as evidence. We turn in a

10
See Guthrie (1962–81) 2.128–29 n. 4.
 Appendix I 275

moment to consider whether this fragment really does describe a form

of the theory of pangenesis. But let us first take notice of how Aristotle
introduces Empedocles: “Empedocles too seems (ἔοικεν), if we must
speak in these terms [sc. in terms of the pangenesis theory], to say things
that agree for the most part with this theory, at least to an extent; but if
[sc. we must understand him] in some other way, he [seems to speak]
poorly (οὐ καλῶς)” (722b8–10).11 It is interesting that Aristotle seems
to acknowledge that his interpretation of Empedocles as a pangeneticist
may be open to objection (“Empedocles seems to say . . . ”), but suggests
that it is justifiable (if not unavoidable) given the riddling style of the
pre-Socratic author.
While Empedocles’ theory is an improvement, in Aristotle’s view,
over the standard Democritean version of pangenesis, which assumes a
double complement of body parts, including genitals, Aristotle still finds
objectionable the notion of seeds as tiny preformed body parts that are
able to survive unattached before coming together to form the fetus:
“But, as it seems, either it [seed] does not come from the whole body
or it does so just as he [Empedocles] says, i.e. the seeds that come from
each parent are not the same. This is why they need sexual intercourse
with each other. But this too is impossible, just as it is impossible for the
fully grown versions [of these parts] to survive and be alive when ‘torn
asunder,’ as Empedocles begets (γεννᾷ) them in the reign of Love, when
he says: ‘There many heads without necks sprouted up’” (722b14–20).
This quotation of Empedocles (DK 31 B57) reveals an important fea-
ture of Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy. He presents the sprouting up of
disembodied heads in the context of criticizing pangenetic embryology.
But his reference to the “reign of Love” makes it clear that Empedocles is
not talking of ontogenetic embryology, but of phylogenetic embryology,
that is, an account of primordial anthropogony. What is more, given that
this anthropogony takes place in the reign of Love, rather than the reign
of Strife, the period in which we live, it is likely that what Empedocles
is describing is a sort of anthropogony in reverse: as the reign of Love
wears on, individual bodies, objects, and elements begin merging with
one another and eventually become a single homogeneous sphere.12
Aristotle fully acknowledges that B57 comes from Empedocles’ anthro-
pogony and seems to acknowledge as well that this vision of disembodied
11
Peck (1942) 58 and Drossaart Lulofs (1965) 21 delete the Greek that lies behind “at
least . . . poorly” in my translation, as being an intrusion into the Greek text. But I can
see no grounds for doing so.
12
See Inwood (1992) 41–52.
276 Appendix I

heads was not presented by Empedocles himself as a description of pange-

netic embryology but is an example of the absurdity that the real pange-
neticists like Democritus would be required to embrace: “It is incumbent
upon those who say that it [seed] comes from the whole body to speak in
this way: just as [things happened] at that time in the earth in the reign
of Love, so [things happen] for these thinkers in the individual body”
(722b24–26). It seems that Aristotle has invoked the frightening imag-
ery of Empedocles’ B57 as part of a reductio ad absurdum of Democritus’s
claim that seeds from all parts of the bodies of both father and mother
come together to form a new organism.
One may wonder as well about the original context of the “torn asun-
der” of B63: Was this part of Empedocles’ anthropogony or his embryol-
ogy? And if it was part of his anthropogony, was it part of his account of
the origin of human beings during the age of ascendant Strife,13 in which
case it might be analogous to ontogenesis, or could this too somehow be
a description of a reverse anthropogony in the age of ascendant Love?
Unfortunately, we do not know. Even if B63 is from an Empedoclean
embryology or from an anthropogony during the age of Strife, which
might be analogous to an ontogenetic embryology, there is still abso-
lutely no evidence that Empedocles thought that both the man’s and
woman’s contributions were the same (or substantially the same) and
called them both “seed.” If Empedocles did teach that the male seed
and the female menses came from all parts of the body, he would at best
be a pangeneticist avant la lettre but certainly not a two-seed pangeneti-
cist like Democritus. But there is no real evidence (B63 included) that
Empedocles did teach that these contributions came from all parts of the
body. It appears that Aristotle quotes B63 because it is rhetorically help-
ful in discrediting the later two-seed pangenesis theory of Democritus.
Aristotle’s second quotation of fragment B63 comes in GA IV, in the
context of a discussion of sex determination. In the course of this dis-
cussion, Aristotle describes Empedocles’ basic position on the determi-
nation of the sex of the embryo: “For he says that if the seeds come into
a warm womb, a male child is engendered; if they enter a cold womb, a
female child” (GA 764a2–4).14 The fact that this statement comes imme-
diately after Aristotle describes Anaxagoras’s theory that the male alone
produces “seeds” and the female provides the “place” suggests that he
13
This is the reasonable guess of Inwood (1992) 45.
14
This theory of sex determination is confirmed by all our other evidence for Empedocles.
See, e.g., Aet. 5.7.1 and Cens. De die nat. 6.6, both printed by Diels-Kranz as part of DK
31 A81.
 Appendix I 277

believes that Empedocles, too, thought that these “seeds” come from the
male alone.15 Aristotle nevertheless suggests that Empedocles thought
that these different secretions came from all parts of the bodies of both
father and mother, and his strategy will be to show that the warm-cold
theory of sex determination is inconsistent with pangenesis, even a two-
substance (seed, blood) form of pangenesis. Empedoclean pangenesis
ought to mean that sex is determined by the mingling of preformed
male genitalia (from the contribution of the father) and female genita-
lia (from the contribution of the mother). But if that is indeed the case,
then why, Aristotle objects, would the temperature of the womb matter?
If the preformed uterus triumphs over the preformed testes, then the
child is going to be a girl, regardless of whether the womb is warm or
cold (764a15–20).16 Aristotle quotes B63 at 764b18 (cf. 764b4) in order
to remind the reader that Empedocles endorses (at least as Aristotle
reads him) a form of pangenesis and thus force Empedocles into self-
contradiction.
But the contradiction is probably only apparent: Empedocles, like
many fifth-century natural scientists, seems to have thought that the sex
of the offspring was determined by the male seed (in his case, by the tem-
perature of the womb into which the seed falls), but that resemblance
(to father and mother) was determined by some interaction between
the male and female contributions (almost certainly, seed and blood,
respectively). While Empedocles may have spoken of disembodied heads
in his reverse anthropogony in the reign of Love, there is no reason to
believe that he spoke of disembodied genitals (a penis from the father, a
womb from the mother) competing in the womb to determine whether
the child would be male or female. Aristotle describes a false contradic-
tion, which enables him both to argue against Empedocles’ view that
sex is determined by the temperature of the womb and, once again,
to discredit Democritus’s two-seed pangenesis. And here too Aristotle
betrays his own heavy-handedness in interpreting the philosophy of
Empedocles: “But it would perhaps take a long time to discuss such an
explanation [sc. Empedocles’ notion of parts “torn asunder”]. For the
whole manner of this explanation seems to be a product of the imagina-
tion (πλασματώδης)” (764b8–10). Aristotle thus calls attention to the

15
On the use of the plural “seeds” in Aristotle’s account of Anaxagoras, see n. 4.
16
Aristotle adds to this another objection to Empedocles’ warmth theory: the same part
of the womb has been known to nurture male and female twins, which proves that sex is
not determined by whether the embryo is formed in the warmer or colder parts of the
womb (764a33–b3).
278 Appendix I

difficult metaphorical language of Empedocles, and, I would suggest, his

own misunderstanding of it.
The details of Empedocles’ embryology are difficult to determine, but
if he did not articulate a form of the pangenesis theory, as seems likely,
then there is no certain basis for concluding that he weighed in on the
side of female seed.

Alcmaeon
The only evidence that Alcmaeon believed in “female seed” is the prob-
lematic notice in Censorinus. The other evidence for Alcmaeon suggests
that, to the contrary, he followed a form of the traditional two-substance
theory, according to which males contributed seed and females contrib-
uted menses. Consider the report in Aetius of Alcmaeon’s explanation
of the sterility of mules: “Alcmaeon [says that] male mules are infertile
because of the thinness and coldness of their semen (θορῆς), whereas
female mules are infertile because their wombs do not open up. For
he himself has spoken in this way” (5.14.1 = DK 24 B3). His analysis
is strangely asymmetrical: the infertility of the females has nothing to
do any material contribution they might make, as it does in the case of
males, but with their uterine anatomy.17 Moreover, the word Aetius uses
for the male’s contribution, θορή (ejaculate), is arguably appropriate
only for the male contribution;18 it is in fact likely that this was the word
used by Alcmaeon himself, and indeed Diels prints this as fragment B3,
reflecting the ipsissima verba of Alcmaeon. This passage in Aetius leads
one to suppose that Alcmaeon was not a two-seed theorist; like all think-
ers before Democritus, he believed that both males and females made
material contributions to reproduction, but he probably did not label
the female contribution “seed.”19
Indeed, it is likely that it was one of the basic assumptions of the formal
myeloencephalogenetic theory of reproduction, of which Alcmaeon may
have been the originator, that the contributions of males and females
were different. Hippon of Rhegium, for example, who taught that seed
originates in the spinal marrow, claimed that if you killed a male ani-
mal after intercourse, you would find the spinal column empty of mar-
row (Cens. De die nat. 5.2 = DK 38 A12); presumably the experiment

17
Similarly asymmetrical is the analysis of Ps.-Arist. HA 10.633b11–636b23.
18
See Chapter 2, n. 111.
19
Pace Blersch (1937) 4–11.
 Appendix I 279

would not work on a female animal. We find a similar phenomenon in

references to myeloencephalogenetic anatomy and physiology in some
Hippocratic treatises. The author of On Seed, for example, is speaking of
“the seed (γονή) of the man” (1.1) when he observes that it enters the
spinal marrow and passes by the kidneys (1.3), and, similarly, when he
says that “most of the seed flows from the head beside the ears and into
the spinal marrow” (2.2), he is trying to explain how an incision behind
the ear, especially if it produces a substantial scar, can cause sterility in
men. When the author gets around to making an argument for female
seed in On Seed 4–8, it is striking that he offers no specific anatomy to
describe the origin of this seed or its passage through the body and into
the womb. On the other hand, in his discussion of the man’s reproduc-
tive anatomy in On Seed 1–3, he ultimately links the brain and spinal
column to the body’s larger system of blood vessels, which suggests that
the myeloencephalogenetic anatomy characteristic of the human male
does eventually join the vascular system used also by females for men-
struation. This author also consistently links the pubertal appearance of
fertile seed in boys not with the appearance of this same seed in girls, but
with menarche in girls (Genit. 2, Nat. puer. 20). The Hippocratic author
of Airs, Waters, Places similarly invokes the passage of seed from the head
past the ears and down to the genitals in the context of explaining why a
certain class of Scythian men is infertile (22).20

Summary
Passages in Aristotle, Censorinus, and Aetius have suggested, to some
scholars at least, that several thinkers before Anaxagoras had argued that
women as well as men produced “seed.” But the evidence is weak, at best,
and some of it has been misunderstood. Aetius’s “Pythagoras” can hardly
be the sixth-century mystic. And Censorinus’s evidence for Parmenides,
Empedocles, and Alcmaeon is probably just as flawed as evidence for
these thinkers (and for the same reasons) as it was for Anaxagoras. The
only other evidence for Parmenides is an uncertain Latin translation by
Caelius Aurelianus in the fifth century c.e., which is at odds with other
evidence from the doxographic tradition that paints him as following
the traditional two-substance theory. In the case of Empedocles, we have
20
And yet rather than explain baldness, a condition that primarily affects men (as it is
mediated by testosterone), as a function of the man’s myeloencephalogenetic anatomy,
this author explains it in terms of pangenetic inheritance: for seed comes from all parts
of a parent’s body (Aer. 14), including, presumably, the scalp.
280 Appendix I

seen that Aristotle is willing to characterize what was almost certainly a

two-substance theory as a version of pangenesis in order to discredit the
thoughtful two-seed pangenesis theory of Democritus. And in the case of
Alcmaeon, finally, all our other evidence suggests that he believed seed
was produced by the male alone, which is what we would expect for a
thinker in the myeloencephalogenetic tradition.
 Appendix II
Women and Men as Grammatical Subjects of τίκτω

It is often said that τίκτω can be used of both the male and female roles
in reproduction. This is certainly true, especially in archaic poetry. But
sometimes the stronger claim is made that τίκτω is used, for all intents
and purposes, equally of men and women, so that when we encounter
τίκτω in Plato’s Symposium, for instance, we are not entitled to assume that
it denotes a feminine biological process any more than a masculine one.1
But the evidence does not support this stronger claim. A sample of just
five authors shows that τίκτω is used disproportionately of women, and
that the lopsidedness increases from the archaic to the classical period
and is most dramatic in prose.2 Indeed, one suspects that the use of τίκτω
to refer to men is, during the classical period, largely a poetic usage.

1
See, e.g., Dover (1980) 147; Pender (1992) 73, 83; Sheffield (2001) 14. Philipp (1980)
81–83 acknowledges the traditional feminine associations of τίκτω, but ultimately thinks
that Plato uses it metaphorically of men in such a way as to defeminize it. On τίκτω gen-
erally, see Amigues (1982).
2
The sample excludes the following five categories: (1) compound forms of the verb,
which have different connotations; (2) all participles, since many, possibly the majority,
simply denote “father” (ὁ τεκών) or “mother” (ἡ τεκοῦσα), a fossilized usage going back
to Homer; deciding which participles function nominally and which have true verbal
force would inevitably be somewhat arbitrary; (3) all metaphorical uses of this verb (a
number of examples are considered in Chapters 4 and 6); (4) instances in which τίκτω
describes Zeus’s fathering of Dionysus or Athena (e.g., Hom. Il. 5.875; Eur. Bacch. 467,
fr. 877 TGF), but not those in which he or any other male fathers offspring in the tra-
ditional way; and (5) examples in which animal reproduction is described (most numer-
ous in Arist. GA, HA, PA), as semantic usage in such cases is somewhat different than
for human reproduction (Aristotle frequently distinguishes γεννάω and τίκτω in the
same passage as referring to the male and female role, respectively [e.g., HA 546a32–33,
568b24]; but he also occasionally uses γεννάω to denote “reproduce” more generally,
without reference to sexually differentiated roles [e.g., GA 755b25, 760b35]; and he
describes the queen bee, which he thinks is male [sic], as “giving birth” asexually to off-
spring [GA 760a19], but the passage is deleted by Peck [1942] ad loc.).

281
282 Appendix II

Use of τίκτω in Used of Women Used of Men

No. (%) No. (%)
Homer 70.5a (60) 47.5 (40)
Euripides 99 (90) 11 (10)
Herodotus 21 (100) 0 (0)
Plato 9.5 (79) 2.5b (21)
Aristotle 29 (100) 0c (0)
a
 When the verb is used in the plural to describe both the mother and the father, a half
point is given to each.
b
 But the following discussion suggests that Plato, too, when he uses τίκτω to describe a
physiological role in reproduction, never uses it of men. One could thus argue that the
number here should be listed as 0 rather than 2.5.
c
 Two possible examples of men as subjects of τίκτω in Aristotle may be considered. The
first is Rhet. 1410a32: “You would have thought that he had <not> fathered (τετοκέναι)
a child, but had himself become a child.” I omit this example from my tally for Aristotle
because it is a quotation from another author, possibly a work of poetry; moreover, the
passage is probably corrupt. The second is fr. 94 Rose, an excerpt from Aristotle’s work
On Good Birth: “Whenever someone is himself a good man, but does not have such power
in his nature to engender (τοιαύτην δύναμιν τῆς φύσεως ὡς τίκτειν) many [children]
similar [sc. to himself], the beginning [of the family line] does not have such power
(τοιαύτην δύναμιν) in these [descendants].” Two considerations lead me to reject this as
an example in which a man is the subject of τίκτω. First, I think the subject of τίκτειν here
is more likely to be δύναμις τῆς φύσεως than to be “he,” the subject of the clause as a whole.
Compare Plat. Symp. 206c3–4: “When we come of age, our nature desires to reproduce
(τίκτειν ἐπιθυμεῖ ἡμῶν ἡ φύσις).” Second, when a man is clearly the grammatical subject a
few lines later, he is the subject of the verb γεννάω: “The father begot (ἐγέννησεν) a good
son not because of his own [goodness], but because he was from such a family.”

The evidence from Plato merits a closer look. Women or men are
the grammatical subjects of the verb τίκτω a total of twenty times in
the Platonic corpus.3 In eight of these cases, the word describes a met-
aphorical male “pregnancy” of the kind that is the focus of this book;4
because we are for the moment considering normal, denotative usage,
we may set these aside. Of the remaining twelve cases, the verb is used
nine times of women: in six, the reference to female parturition is unam-
biguous; in three, the pairing of τίκτω and γεννάω implies the female
and male roles, respectively.5 In the three remaining cases, a man is the
grammatical subject (or cosubject) of τίκτω, but in none does the word

3
This excludes those categories listed in preceding note
4
Symp 209a3, b2, c3, 210c1, d5, 212a3; Phaedr 274e8, Theaet 150b1
5
Unambiguously describe the female role Charm 158b4; Rep 454d10, 460e5; Theaet
149b7, d2, d8 Imply the female role ymp 191c1, 206d5; Leg 879d1 (here we find
φιτύω instead of its synonym γεννάω)
 Appendix II 283

describe his physiological role in reproduction. One passage comes from

the Republic, where mother and father together are said to “produce”
(τεκεῖν) a tyrannical son (574c8). This passage can refer neither to male
ejaculation nor female parturition, but to the reproductive process more
generally.
The other two passages are from the Laws. The first describes the cir-
cumstances in which a man should and should not attempt to repro-
duce, and is worth quoting at length:

A man is clumsy and bad at sowing “seed” (σπείρειν) when he is drunk, so

that he would likely beget (γεννῴη) offspring that are uneven, untrustwor-
thy, and not upright in either character or body. For this reason, he should
take care, throughout the year and throughout his life, but especially dur-
ing the time of his life in which he begets children (γεννᾷ), not willingly to
do anything that leads to sickness or anything that has a share of violence
or injustice. For it will necessarily result that he stamp [these qualities] on
the souls and bodies of those who are begotten [by him] (γεννωμένων)
and that he will thus produce (τίκτειν) offspring inferior in every way.
(775d1–e1)

While it is true that the man’s reproductive activities are summarized, at

the end of this passage, by τίκτω, it is striking that Plato uses traditional
terminology for the male reproductive role a number of times earlier
in the passage: γεννάω three times, and σπείρω once. Why has Plato
shifted from γεννάω to τίκτω at the end of this passage? One possi-
bility is that he desired some stylistic variation and saw τίκτω as a syn-
onym of γεννάω. But I do not think that the two are synonyms in this
passage: γεννάω and σπείρω seem to describe the physiological act of
ejaculation, which one should avoid while drunk, sick, or angry; τίκτω,
meanwhile, seems to describe not the sexual act but the process of repro-
duction more generally. We should thus probably translate τίκτειν in
this passage as “to produce” rather than “to beget.” The second passage
from the Laws, which describes the procedures a father should use if he
wishes to disown a son “whom he has produced and raised” (ὃν ἔτεκέ
τε καὶ ἐξεθρέψατο, 929a7), should probably be understood similarly. It
does not describe the father’s physiological role in reproduction, but his
social role as a father.
One could thus reasonably argue that, in Plato, τίκτω is never used of
the male physiological role in reproduction, except in the highly meta-
phorical passages of the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus.
The overwhelming feminine associations of τίκτω are confirmed by
passages where this verb is paired with γεννάω or an equivalent. When
284 Appendix II

τίκτω occurs by itself, which we might describe as an unmarked usage,

it can sometimes, though increasingly infrequently, refer to men, espe-
cially in poetic genres; but when it occurs in conjunction with γεννάω, a
marked usage, the gendered fault lines are observed punctiliously, with
τίκτω always referring to the female role in reproduction, γεννάω always
to the male role.6 Consider a few examples from the Platonic corpus. In
Rep. 460e5–6, speaking of the ages at which each sex should begin to
reproduce, Plato pairs τίκτειν with γυναικὶ μὲν and γεννᾶν with ἀνδρὶ
δέ. At Rep. 454d10–e1, we have, similarly, τὸ μὲν θῆλυ τίκτειν beside τὸ
δὲ ἄρρεν ὀχεύειν. And at Leg. 879c7–d1, Plato describes the reproduc-
tive roles of ἄρρενα ἢ θῆλυν in terms of φιτῦσαι καὶ τεκεῖν. There are
passages in the Symposium too that juxtapose τίκτω and γεννάω (e.g.,
191c1, 206d5, 209c3), and these confirm our finding.
The best way to understand Plato’s use of τίκτω in the Symposium, then,
is as follows: he assumes the standard gendered distinction between τίκτω
and γεννάω, and indeed juxtaposes the two terms frequently enough to
remind the reader of this normative usage; but as his discussion of birth
becomes more abstract and metaphorical, he takes advantage of a more
generalized use of τίκτω to denote “reproduce,” which can be used of
fathers and mothers alike, to make the transition to the notion that the
generation of ideas is analogous to female pregnancy and parturition.
All the subtlety, all the mischievous provocation are lost if we assume that
τίκτω and γεννάω are interchangeable in the Symposium.

6
For examples, see Aesch. Prom. 850–51; Soph. El. 1411–12; Plat. Rep. 460e4–7, cf. Leg.
673d, 775d; Arist. GA 741a15–18.
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 Index

abortion, 233, 237–38 embryology of, 1, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24–25,
Acusilaus, 191, 192, 201 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 35–36, 51,
adoption, 5, 58, 82, 95, 99, 168, 172 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 167, 184, 271–72,
Aeschylus, 23, 61, 85, 100, 123, 127 273, 276, 279
Danaids, 44, 45 theory of substance of, 31–33, 49–50
Eumenides, 19, 20, 22, 52–55, 56, Anaximander, 45, 51
167–68 Anaximenes of Lampsacus, 142–43
Semele, 61, 65, 152 Anaximenes of Miletus, 38, 45
Aesop. See dung beetle, Aesop fable about Anonymus Iamblichi, 135
Aether, 43, 46, 192. See also aithēr anthropological approaches, 4–7
Aetius, 26–28, 29, 30, 43, 271, 272, Antiphon the Sophist, 134, 135, 136, 141
278, 279 Aphrodite, 87, 107, 153, 193–94
agriculture as mother of Dionysus, 63, 87
as metaphor for sexual reproduction, as mother of Eros, 191, 193, 194
22, 24, 53, 136, 239–40 birth of, 23, 35, 49, 106, 193, 200
as metaphor for teaching, 134–36, 141, Urania, 47, 49, 193–94
182. See also pedagogy, as planting of Apollo, 57, 68, 117, 168, 169, 199
seeds embryology of, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides,
aithēr, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 48, 94, 95, 19, 20, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 167
101, 113, 114, 117, 192. See also Archilochus, 125, 127
Aether Aristophanes, 3, 150, 152
Alcibiades, 183, 210–12, 214–15, 220, Assemblywomen, 1, 7, 16, 145, 146–50,
221–22, 223 152–53, 156–65, 176–77, 181, 219,
Alcmaeon, 21, 30, 40, 50, 271, 272, 233, 234
278–79, 280 Banqueters, 102, 126, 127
allegoresis, 49, 60, 78, 79–80, 81, 94, 99, Birds, 47, 98, 130, 180, 192
107, 108–17, 118, 122, 128. See also Clouds, 102–5, 125–27, 128–29, 130,
myth, rationalization of 134, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145,
Amphidromia, 153, 229, 242–43. See also 148, 231, 255, 270
birth rituals; naming, of infant Frogs, 123, 150–51
anal birth, 8, 16, 145, 146–47, 156, Knights, 125, 127, 158, 161, 162, 181
173–76, 180, 181 Lysistrata, 150, 151–52, 153–56, 174–75,
Anaxagoras, 19, 26, 44, 109, 113, 116, 178–79, 180–81, 234
190, 274 Peace, 177, 178, 181
cosmology of, 42, 43, 44, 48, 107, 108, as speaker in Plato’s Symposium, 194–99,
110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 128, 200, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222,
190, 191 225, 226

301
302 Index

Aristophanes (cont.) of virtue, 16, 17, 100, 104, 105, 128,

Wealth, 158 139, 140, 141–42, 144, 187, 188, 201,
Women at the Thesmophoria, 155 202–5, 207–8, 209–10, 212, 213, 214,
Aristophanes of Byzantium, 96 222, 224, 229, 231
Aristotle, 13, 14, 18, 20, 27, 29, 40, 41, birth, grammatical formula for, in
98, 174, 175, 208, 271, 279, 280, epic, 114
281, 282 birth rituals, 169. See also Amphidromia;
as “author” of Rhetoric to Alexander, naming, of infant
142–43 blood
Generation of Animals, 24–25, 33, 34, menstrual, 20–21, 22–23, 24, 25, 27–28,
35–36, 41, 51, 198, 274–78 33, 36, 52, 53, 271, 273, 277
History of Animals, 154, 198 as metaphor for kinship, 22–23, 55
Arnobius, 95 semen as form of, 23, 30, 55, 273
Artemidorus, 11, 163, 174 Burkert, Walter, 9–10, 14, 80
Asclepius, 58 Burnyeat, Myles, 104, 224, 245, 247
Athena, 52, 98, 122, 151–52, 153, 170,
171, 172 Cadmus, 64, 75–79, 81–83, 84, 91,
birth of, 2, 7, 9–10, 15, 21, 54, 55, 66, 171, 172
108–13, 116, 118, 122, 147, 153–56, Caelius Aurelianus, 272–73, 279
165, 166–73, 174–75, 181, 193, Cantabri, 165–66, 173, 181
200, 215 Censorinus, 25, 26–27, 35, 272, 273,
Tritogeneia, 110, 112, 113 278, 279
autochthony, 93, 168, 169, 170–71, 172, Chronus, 46, 48, 175
173. See also earth, birth from Chrysippus, 111–13
avian birth, 173–74, 175, 176, 180, 211, Chthonie. See Gaea
213 cicadas, 194, 196–98, 199, 201
citizenship, 7, 10, 13, 16, 58, 59, 67, 81,
Bacchylides, 64 84, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100. See also
Bachofen, Johann, 4–5, 6, 10 Pericles’ citizenship law
balanos (acorn, bolt, or glans penis), 149, cloacal theory of birth, 8, 173–74, 178
160–61 comedy, 64, 65, 66, 100–5, 124–27, 129,
Berger, Harry, 267 146–65, 175, 176–81, 211–12
Bettelheim, Bruno, 8, 9 constipation, 16, 147–48, 149, 157, 158,
birth 159–61, 162, 163, 181, 219
of inventions, 201 Cornford, Francis, 244, 246
of knowledge, 105, 128, 129, 213, 228, cosmology, masculinist, 15, 36–45, 48, 49,
229, 239, 250, 256, 257 58, 100, 190, 200–1
of laws, 16, 100, 101, 117–18, 186, 188, couvade, 5–6, 15, 88–89, 93, 121, 165–66
201, 203, 209, 222 as metaphor for claiming of
of logoi, 185, 187, 188, 201, 202, authorship, 126
205–07, 218, 222, 223 Cratinus
masculine vs. feminine “styles” of, 189, Nemesis, 211–12
200–01, 205, 215, 224 Pytine, 102, 124–26, 127, 143
of perception, 249, 250–54 creation, 36, 40, 41, 42–45, 46, 47, 58,
of plans, 101, 118–19 114, 116, 119, 122, 174
of poetry, 16, 100, 101–2, 104, 105, of animals, 37–39
120–27, 128, 148, 186, 188, 201, 203, of humans, 37–39, 194–96, 199, 251,
209, 222 274, 275, 276
of political change, 159, 162–63, by means of semen, 23, 46, 48–49, 106
173, 181 by means of thought, 105–8, 113, 116,
of technē, 112, 116, 122, 141, 142 117, 192
of thought, 1–2, 16, 17, 100, 102, 104, of plants, 39–40
105, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116–17, creator god, 37, 41–42, 46–49, 58, 100,
122–23, 128, 144, 145, 148, 270 105, 107, 108, 116, 122, 175
 Index 303

Cronus, 42, 47, 113–15, 119, 166, 174 Electra, 54–55, 126–27
Ctesilochus, 66 Empedocles, 23, 24, 32, 50, 51, 107, 251,
Cybele, 9, 85–88, 95 252, 253, 271, 272, 274–78, 279
ensoulment, of embryo, 3, 18, 29–31,
Dean-Jones, Lesley, 224 33–36, 51, 58. See also eschatology
defecation, 147–48, 149, 156, 157, 160, epiklēros. See heiress
174, 176–77 Erichthonius, 169–70
demigods, 58, 59, 67–69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 80 Eros, 42, 46, 48, 107, 108, 116, 140,
Democritus, 19, 26, 28, 29, 50, 52, 56, 180, 189, 190, 191–92, 193–94,
110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 252, 253, 199–200, 201, 215, 218, 220, 221,
271, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280 222, 223, 225
Derrida, Jacques, 12, 13, 258 erōs, 183–84, 189, 194, 199, 201, 211, 213,
Derveni Papyrus, 2, 42, 46–47, 48–49, 80, 215, 219–20, 223
87, 96, 106, 113–17, 118, 119, 174, eschatology, 18, 20, 34, 43–44, 139, 175,
175, 192 179–80, 212, 213. See also ensoulment,
Diodorus Siculus, 44, 61, 65, 78–79, 97–98 of embryo; immortality; rebirth
Diogenes of Apollonia, 16–55, 107, 111, Euenus of Paros, 142
136, 273 Euripides, 3, 41, 59, 82, 87, 150, 152, 155,
Diogenes of Babylon, 30–31, 110 192, 282
Dione, 63, 87, 193 Andromache, 101–2, 120–22, 123,
Dionysus, 57, 63, 94–95, 125 124, 127
birth of, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15–16, 22, Auge, 151–52, 153, 156, 162
54, 58–99, 100, 148, 174, 178, Bacchae, 15, 16, 58, 60, 63, 67, 68, 69,
200, 215 77–78, 80, 81–98
cult of, 67, 76, 79, 84, 85, 180 Chrysippus, 43–44, 45
Dithyrambus, 89, 92 Electra, 54–55, 127
Eiraphiotes, 61, 62 Erechtheus, 170–71, 172
as a mortal, 60, 68, 70, 72, 75, 76–78, Heraclidae, 101, 118–20
79, 87, 96 Ion, 56–57, 168–70, 172, 173
dithyramb, 64–65, 67, 125, 155, 180 Medea, 144
doctors, 149, 158, 159, 173, 219, 220, Melanippe Sophe, 44, 45, 50, 189–91, 200
233, 237, 238, 269, 272, 273 Orestes, 55–56, 127
Dorter, Kenneth, 246 Phoenician Women, 171–72
Dover, Kenneth, 104, 126 Suppliant Women, 102, 124
duBois, Page, 12, 13–14 exposure, of infant, 17, 97, 102, 126, 190,
dung beetle, Aesop fable about, 177–79, 240–42, 246
180–81
fathers, 5, 7–8, 9–10, 17, 22–23, 24, 30,
Earth. See Gaea 41, 45, 50, 57, 67, 82, 90, 92, 98, 115,
earth, birth from, 43, 82–83, 93, 100, 168, 140, 166, 200, 238, 239, 241–43,
169–72, 194, 195–97, 200, 265, 276 246, 247, 253, 259–70, 283. See also
economy, Athenian, 158, 159–63, 181 paternity
egg, birth from, 47–48, 173, 175, 176, firstborn (god), in Orphic theogonies. See
177–78, 180, 192, 196–97, 201, 211, Protogonos
212, 228. See also wind eggs Freud, Sigmund, 3, 7–8, 9, 10
Egypt
myth of, 37, 46, 48, 58, 64, 80, 100, Gaea, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 87, 106, 113,
105–06, 107, 116, 140–41, 174 114, 116, 119, 166–67, 170
religion of, 69–71, 73–74, 76, 78–79, 80 Galen, 241
Eileithyia, 16, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, Ge. See Gaea
153, 156, 157, 168, 173, 219 γεννάω, 53, 185–86, 187–88, 201, 205,
Eleatic philosophy, 32, 39, 230, 248, 215, 224, 229, 230, 252, 282, 283, 284
249, 264, 265, 266, 268. See also Great Goddess, 87, 88, 95. See also Cybele;
Parmenides Gaea; Hera; Hipta; Rhea
304 Index

Halperin, David, 14, 224 Mansfeld, Jaap, 112

heiress, 56, 82, 84, 98, 168, 171 marriage, 11, 90, 91–92, 93, 147, 163,
Hepat. See Hipta 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173,
Hera, 45, 63, 85, 87, 92, 93–95, 96, 97, 181, 238
98, 119, 167 as metaphor for student-teacher
Heracles, 16, 60, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71–73, 74, relationship, 130, 132
75, 76, 95, 98, 119–20, 151 matchmaking, 238
Heracliteanism, 228, 229, 247, 265 intellectual, 104, 130, 131–33, 136,
Heraclitus, 51, 229 238–40
Hermippus, 66, 155–56 maternity, 53, 88–89, 122, 155, 164, 165,
Herodotus, 3, 15, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 68, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 191. See also
69, 77, 78, 80–81, 87, 92, 96, 135, mothers
172, 282 matriarchy, 4–5, 16, 147, 148, 150, 163,
Hesiod, 2, 21–22, 23, 24, 31, 35, 42, 44, 164–67, 181
45, 47, 49, 53, 68, 69, 86, 101, 106, matrilineal descent, 4, 85, 165, 166, 167,
108, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 136, 168, 169, 172, 173, 181, 197, 200
166–67, 170, 173, 186, 191, 192, Melampus, 76, 78
193, 203, 205, 208, 222 Metis, 48, 111, 112, 116, 156, 167, 174,
Hippias of Elis, 131, 133 200. See also mētis
Hippocrates, 112 mētis (cleverness), 111, 112, 116. See also
Hippocratic Corpus, 18, 20, 26, 28, 237 Metis
Airs, Waters, Places, 279 Metrodorus of Lampsacus, 3, 109–10, 111,
Lex, 134, 136 112, 113, 116–17, 122
Nature of Man, 51 midwifery, 66, 149, 157, 159, 162, 168,
On the Nature of the Child, 254 179, 180, 188, 232–33, 234–35,
On Regimen, 254 237–38, 240–42, 265, 269
On Seed, 279 intellectual, 17, 103, 104, 128, 129, 131,
Hippon, 19, 21, 26–29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 213, 227–43, 244, 245, 247–48, 257,
42, 48, 49, 273, 278 258, 265, 267, 269, 270
Hipta, 86, 87, 95 political, 159, 162–63, 173, 181
Homer, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 45, 63, 66, 86, miscarriage, intellectual, 102, 103, 105,
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 122, 186, 128, 138, 144, 145, 255
203, 204, 205, 208, 222, 264, 282 monism, 13, 16, 31, 32, 36, 49–51, 230,
Homeric hymns, 61–63, 69 266–67
Homeridae, 96 mothers, 8, 9, 52, 85–87, 189–92, 193,
hostage, in myth interpretation, 94, 95–96 194, 199, 200, 215, 237, 238, 239,
265. See also maternity
images, in Plato, 187, 208, 214 mules, sterility of, 278
immortality, 35, 184–85, 187, 197, 208–9, myeloencephalogenetic theory of
213, 215. See also reproduction, 21, 22, 26, 29–30, 33,
eschatology 34, 278–79, 280
initiation, 9, 58, 59, 140, 180, 255 mysteries, 79, 179, 180
in deme or phratry, 92, 96–97, 98 intellectual, 185, 186, 202, 204, 205,
Isocrates, 143–44 207, 208, 215, 250, 255
myth, rationalization of, 15–16, 67, 69, 78,
Kerenyi, Karl, 9, 14 81. See also allegoresis
Kumarbi, 174
naming, of infant, 92, 169. See also birth
Long, Anthony, 248–49 rituals
Loraux, Nicole, 12–13, 14 Near East, myth of, 18, 37, 46, 49,
Lydia, 77, 81, 87, 88, 89–90 58, 100
Lydias, river in Macedonia, 90, 92 Night, 46, 47, 119, 192, 201
Lysias, 123, 138–39, 140, 141–42, 143, Nous, 41–42, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113,
144, 212, 233 114, 115, 116, 117, 128
 Index 305

nous (mind), 34, 35, 109, 111, 112, as planting of seeds, 134–36, 182, 203,
116, 117, 122 210, 211. See also agriculture, as
metaphor for teaching
one-seed theory of reproduction, 15, role of nature vs. nurture in, 135
18–21, 24–36, 49, 50, 58, 100, 127, Pender, Elizabeth, 184, 188
167, 184, 189, 190, 236 Penia, as mother of Eros, 200, 221, 223
in tragedy, 52–56, 57 Pericles’ citizenship law, 16, 67, 96, 98,
opposites, 37, 51 169. See also citizenship
Orestes, 19, 52, 54, 55, 56, 85, Persephone, 23
126–27, 167 as mother of Dionysus, 68–69, 80, 87,
Orpheus, 79, 106, 113, 115 95, 96, 99
Orphics, 80 Pherecydes of Syrus, 45, 46, 48
cults of, 180 Philiscus of Miletus, 123, 124, 127
theogonies of, 46–49, 68, 79–80, 87, 95, Philochorus, 68, 75, 87, 196
96, 106, 107–08, 109, 113, 115, 116, Philolaus, 19, 29–30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 49. See
119, 174, 175, 180, 192 also Pythagoreans
Osiris, 70, 79. See also Dionysus Pindar, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69,
Owen, G. E. L., 244–45 122, 135
Plato, 2, 3, 13–14, 29, 64, 112, 129, 143,
Pan, 69–74, 75 144, 146, 151, 181, 282–83
pangenesis, 19, 33, 50, 51, 274–75, 276, Charmides, 204
277, 278, 280. See also two-seed theory Cratylus, 110–11, 112, 113, 116, 117
of reproduction doctrine of recollection, 140, 141, 212,
Parmenides, 18, 32–33, 36, 37, 42, 49, 50, 215, 239, 244, 246, 261, 267
51, 58, 106–08, 116, 191–92, 194, First Alcibiades, 210–12, 213, 219, 223
225, 226, 230, 257, 264–65, 266–67, Gorgias, 204
269, 271–73, 279. See also Eleatic Laws, 263, 283
philosophy Meno, 244
parthenogenesis metaphysics, 227, 232, 244–45, 260–61,
female, 42, 167, 195, 197 263–64, 266, 267, 269
male, 54, 143, 189, 193, 196, 200, Parmenides, 244, 248
201, 265 Phaedo, 244
paternity, 1, 4, 5, 6, 14, 16, 78, 88, 90, Phaedrus, 13, 34, 117, 139–42, 143, 144,
92, 94, 120, 122, 164–65, 166, 167, 175–76, 179, 180, 212–13, 248, 262
168–69, 171, 172, 173, 254, 268. See Protagoras, 137, 262
also fathers Republic, 16, 164, 187, 188, 196, 221,
as metaphor for authorship of ideas, 14, 244, 283
141, 190, 219, 257, 261–62 Sophist, 230, 247, 248, 257, 258, 264, 269
as metaphor for authorship of literary Statesman, 268
work, 7, 14, 122, 126, 127, 142 Symposium, 1–2, 7, 11, 13, 16–17, 117,
as metaphor for authorship of 136–38, 139, 143, 145, 176, 182–226,
plans, 120 227, 230–31, 243, 246, 247, 269, 270,
as metaphor for metaphysical realm, 281, 284
254, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, Theaetetus, 1, 7, 13, 16, 17, 103–4, 128,
265, 269 129–31, 132, 133, 134, 135–36, 139,
as metaphor for role of teacher, 14, 17, 145, 183, 213, 227–70
227, 268–69 theory of Forms, 41, 188, 194, 196, 199,
patrilineal descent, 7, 54, 119, 167, 168, 207, 212, 220, 221, 223, 225–26, 227,
171, 172, 173, 200, 265 244–47, 248, 254, 255, 258, 259, 263,
pedagogy 264, 267, 268–69
as impregnation, 16, 100, 105, 128, 131, theory of knowledge, 182–83, 187, 227,
132, 136–38, 139, 145, 182, 203, 210, 230, 232, 239, 243–47, 260–61, 270
211. See also sex, between males, as theory of love, 183–84, 206–7
pedagogical method Timaeus, 41, 46, 184, 236, 251, 253, 254
306 Index

plenitude, 199, 217, 218, 219, 220–21, elenchus of, 137, 231, 247, 249, 258
222–23, 224, 226 infertility of, 228, 229, 231, 235–36,
plesmonē (plenitude). See plenitude 239, 248–49, 257–58, 268, 270
potnia (mistress), 150, 152, 156 as matchmaker, 129–30, 131, 132–33,
pre-Socratics, 1, 2, 3, 49–50, 51. See also 136, 238–39
individual thinkers as midwife, 103–5, 129, 131, 213,
Prodicus, 3, 68, 80, 129–34, 135–36, 227–43, 244, 245, 246, 247–48, 249,
137–38, 139, 145, 176, 213, 229, 238, 254, 255, 256, 257–58, 265–66, 270
239, 246 as son of Phaenarete, 234, 265
Protagoras, 80, 135, 137, 228, 229, 235, as son of Sophroniscus, 265–68
246, 247, 249, 254, 255, 256, 261–64, as teacher of Plato, 17, 227, 231,
268, 269 247–49, 257–59, 266–69
Protogonos, 47, 48, 106, 108, 116, Socrates the Younger, 268
119, 192 Solon, 117, 118, 186, 203, 204, 205,
psychoanalytic approaches, 4, 7–14 208, 222
Pythagoras, 29, 271, 279 Sophists, 1, 2, 3, 16, 17, 80, 94, 100, 104,
Pythagoreans, 18, 29, 33, 34, 37, 51, 271. 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133,
See also Philolaus 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144,
145, 146, 176, 181, 182, 183, 202,
rebirth, 179–81, 197. See also eschatology 203, 204, 205, 208, 210, 211, 212,
reclining, as alternative to sexual 213, 214, 218, 226, 227, 229, 231,
penetration, 216, 217–19, 220, 221 236, 239, 246, 249, 262, 263, 264,
resemblance, familial, 20, 24, 25, 50, 51, 270. See also individual figures
54, 126–27, 172, 253, 259, 268, 269, Sophocles, 65, 67, 68
271, 273, 277 Oedipus Tyrannus, 101, 117–18
Rhea, 85–86, 87, 95 Soranus, 234, 235, 237, 241
Rhetoric to Alexander, 142–43 Sown Men, of Thebes, 82–83, 172
Stesimbrotus, 3, 59–60, 69
Seaford, Richard, 83–84 sun, 7, 13, 40, 41, 48, 49, 195, 251, 260
Sedley, David, 246, 247, 258, 266, Sun, 114, 196, 201, 226
267, 270
seed teaching. See pedagogy
in Anaxagoras’s theory of substance, technē (skill), 109, 110, 112, 116, 122,
31–33, 36, 39, 43, 49, 53 123, 124
as metaphor for sexual secretion, 22, 24, Thales, 45
53, 82, 136, 239–40 Theophrastus, 39–40, 43
of wisdom, 134–36, 138, 141, 204, 205, thigh, 9, 22, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 92,
212, 227 93–94, 174
Semele, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64–66, 68–69, 70, τίκτω, 53, 55, 62, 90, 178, 184, 185, 187,
72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 188, 201, 205–6, 210, 215, 224, 230,
85, 86–87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 252, 284
99, 155 Timotheus, 64–65, 155
sex determination, of embryo, 24–25, Tiresias, 60, 78, 80, 81, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96,
26–28, 51, 272, 273, 276–77 97, 98, 99
sex, between males, 140, 145, 161–62, tragedy, 42–44, 45, 52–57, 64, 65–66,
175–76, 216–17, 226 77–78, 81–98, 100–3, 147, 149–53,
as pedagogical method, 131, 132, 156, 167–72
136–38, 176, 203, 213, 214. See also transvestism, 147, 149, 157
pedagogy, as impregnation twins, birth of, 190, 250, 252, 253–54
penetration in, 215–16, 217 two-seed theory of reproduction, 19–20,
Socrates, 128–29, 130, 140, 144, 145, 183, 26, 27, 28, 29, 50, 52, 236, 271, 274,
187, 196, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 276, 277, 278, 280. See also
220, 227, 231, 247, 249, 255, 257, pangenesis
266, 267, 270 in tragedy, 56–57
 Index 307

Uranus, 23, 24, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 106, wind eggs, 154, 213, 228, 229,
113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 166, 167, 230, 256. See also egg,
190, 193, 200 birth from
wings, growth of, 175, 176, 180,
vaginal lubricant, 20, 26, 27, 28 212, 213
virtue, 123, 130, 135, 136–37, 138, 139,
140, 142, 144, 176, 182, 186, 201, Xenophanes, 16, 67, 107
202, 208, 210, 213, 222. See also Xenophon, 131–34
birth, of virtue
Vlastos, Gregory, 1, 206 Zeitlin, Froma, 165