Cartwheeling on Eight Limbs
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Aristophanes — δύʼ ἐπʼ αὐχένι κυκλοτερεῖ, ὅμοια πάντῃ· κεφαλὴν δʼ ἐπʼ ἀμφοτέροις τοῖς προσώποις ἐναντίοις κειμένοις μίαν, καὶ ὦτα τέτταρα, καὶ αἰδοῖα δύο, καὶ τἆλλα πάντα ὡς ἀπὸ τούτων ἄν τις εἰκάσειεν. ἐπορεύετο δὲ καὶ ὀρθὸν ὥσπερ νῦν, ὁποτέρωσε βουληθείη· καὶ ὁπότε ταχὺ ὁρμήσειεν θεῖν, ὥσπερ οἱ κυβιστῶντες καὶ εἰς ὀρθὸν τὰ σκέλη περιφερόμενοι κυβιστῶσι κύκλῳ, ὀκτὼ τότε οὖσι τοῖς μέλεσιν ἀπερειδόμενοι ταχὺ ἐφέροντο κύκλῳ. ἦν δὲ διὰ ταῦτα τρία
Two faces, on a circular neck, alike in every way; and one head set above both faces, facing opposite ways; four ears, two sets of genitals, and everything else you'd guess from that. It also walked upright, just as now, in whichever direction it wanted; and whenever it rushed to run fast, the way tumblers whirl their legs up straight and cartwheel in a circle, propping themselves on their limbs — eight of them, back then — they went rushing quickly, in a circle. And for these reasons there were three —
Continuing directly from 189e's description of the proto-human's round torso, four hands, and four legs, Aristophanes finishes the catalogue: two faces on one circular neck, one head, four ears, two sets of genitals, and everything else to match. He then describes how the creature moved — walking upright as we do now, or, to go fast, cartwheeling on all eight limbs like a tumbling acrobat. The unit breaks off at the bare number 'three,' which 190b completes with the sexes themselves.
κυκλοτερής has only two attested uses in Homer, and neither one is restful. It describes Pandarus's bow bent taut into a full circle as he takes aim to break the Trojan truce (Iliad 4.124), and a grove that runs round on every side (Odyssey 17.209) — a weapon at full tension and a piece of landscape, nothing as inert as a neck. Aristophanes borrows this word, freighted with epic drawn-bow effort, for the flattest anatomical fact in his catalogue, then in the next clause compares the whole creature's fastest gait to a street performer: hṓsper hoi kybistôntes, 'just as tumblers.' The register keeps swinging from taut epic diction to circus trick and back, inside a single sentence.
The body-list around it does the same work in a plainer key. Four ears, two sets of genitals, and 'everything else you'd guess from that' all arrive in one flat breath, with no more weight on αἰδοῖα than on ὦτα — an inventory, not an indecency. That flatness matters for what comes next. This same body, cartwheeling on eight limbs like a circus turn, is about to be split down the middle by Zeus at 190d, who promises the two halves will one day walk upright on just two legs, badioûntai orthoì epì dyoîn skeloîn — the same ὀρθόν this passage has already given the whole eight-limbed body, just not yet confined to a single pair of legs. Plato lets his comic poet be funny before he asks him to be moving, and the myth is better for it: the pathos of the cut lands harder against a body we have just watched clowning.
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