Round on Every Side
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Aristophanes — ἀλλὰ καὶ τρίτον προσῆν κοινὸν ὂν ἀμφοτέρων τούτων, οὗ νῦν ὄνομα λοιπόν, αὐτὸ δὲ ἠφάνισται· ἀνδρόγυνον γὰρ ἓν τότε μὲν ἦν καὶ εἶδος καὶ ὄνομα ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων κοινὸν τοῦ τε ἄρρενος καὶ θήλεος, νῦν δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἀλλʼ ἢ ἐν ὀνείδει ὄνομα κείμενον. ἔπειτα ὅλον ἦν ἑκάστου τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τὸ εἶδος στρογγύλον, νῶτον καὶ πλευρὰς κύκλῳ ἔχον, χεῖρας δὲ τέτταρας εἶχε, καὶ σκέλη τὰ ἴσα ταῖς χερσίν, καὶ πρόσωπα
But there was also a third kind, common to both of these, whose name still remains, but the thing itself has vanished. For 'man-woman' was then one, in shape and name, common from both, the male and the female, but now it doesn't exist, except as a name lying in reproach. Next, the whole shape of each person was round, with back and sides curved in a circle, and it had four hands, and legs to match the hands, and faces—
Continuing directly from 189d's account of male and female, Aristophanes introduces the lost third original sex, the ἀνδρόγυνον ('man-woman') — a plain name once, he notes, but now a name that survives only as a slur, since the form itself has vanished. He then begins describing this original humanity's anatomy: round in shape, with back and sides in a circle, four hands and four legs, and faces — breaking off mid-list (the count and arrangement of the faces continue in 190a).
Aristophanes draws attention to his own word choice as he uses it. Andrógynon, 'man-woman,' is the word for the third original sex, but in the same sentence he says the word has outlasted the thing: the form itself 'has vanished' (ēphánistai), and only the name is left, 'lying in reproach.' By Plato's time andrógynos worked mainly as an insult for an effeminate man, and Aristophanes' phrasing catches that shift happening inside the myth itself — a plain descriptive term for an entire vanished class of people, demoted to a slur that nobody living has any grounds to apply, since nobody living has ever seen one.
The shape he gives these creatures already had philosophical weight before Aristophanes used it. A body with no privileged front or back, able to face any direction, is the shape Parmenides gave to Being ('well-rounded like the mass of a well-rounded sphere') and the shape Empedocles gave to the Sphairos, the primal unity before Strife pulled the elements apart. Plato's own Timaeus later calls the sphere the most perfect and self-similar of all figures, fit for a cosmos that needs nothing outside itself. Aristophanes gives that same shape four hands and four legs: his humans are round because roundness was already, before he wrote a line of comedy, the mark of something complete in itself, needing no one else — the condition Zeus is about to end.
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