Children of Sun, Earth, and Moon
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Aristophanes — τὰ γένη καὶ τοιαῦτα, ὅτι τὸ μὲν ἄρρεν ἦν τοῦ ἡλίου τὴν ἀρχὴν ἔκγονον, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ τῆς γῆς, τὸ δὲ ἀμφοτέρων μετέχον τῆς σελήνης, ὅτι καὶ ἡ σελήνη ἀμφοτέρων μετέχει· περιφερῆ δὲ δὴ ἦν καὶ αὐτὰ καὶ ἡ πορεία αὐτῶν διὰ τὸ τοῖς γονεῦσιν ὅμοια εἶναι. ἦν οὖν τὴν ἰσχὺν δεινὰ καὶ τὴν ῥώμην, καὶ τὰ φρονήματα μεγάλα εἶχον, ἐπεχείρησαν δὲ τοῖς θεοῖς, καὶ ὃ λέγει Ὅμηρος περὶ Ἐφιάλτου τε καὶ Ὤτου, περὶ ἐκείνων λέγεται, τὸ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν ἀνάβασιν ἐπιχειρεῖν
The sexes, and of this kind: the male was originally an offspring of the sun, the female of the earth, and the one sharing in both, of the moon, since the moon too shares in both. They themselves were round, and so was their way of moving, because they were like their parents. So they were terrible in strength and might, and their ambitions ran great, and they made an attempt on the gods. And what Homer says about Ephialtes and Otus, is really said about them — the attempt to make an ascent into heaven.
Completing 190a's suspended count of three, Aristophanes names the sexes and traces each to a heavenly parent — the sun for the male, the earth for the female, and the moon, itself a partaker of both, for the third, androgynous kind. He then explains that these round creatures, formidable in strength and ambition, attacked the gods — the very assault Homer tells of the giants Ephialtes and Otus.
Aristophanes gives each of the three sexes its own parent star: the sun for the male, the earth for the female, and the moon — which itself ‘partakes of both’ — for the third, androgynous kind. It is comic etiology dressed as cosmology, the same move natural philosophers of the day were making with sun and moon in earnest; Aristophanes borrows their vocabulary, metéchein, ‘to partake,’ and spends it on a joke about ancestry. The violence that follows is stock epic material — a race so deinà, ‘terrible,’ in strength that it assaults the gods — and Plato has already told us elsewhere what he thinks of stories like it. At Republic 2.378c, Socrates bars tales of gods and giants at war from the guardians’ education, on the ground that children who hear them grow up thinking violence toward one’s betters is ordinary. Aristophanes tells exactly that story here, played for laughs, in the dialogue where Socrates is a guest at dinner rather than a censor.
The name Aristophanes reaches for is not neutral. Ephialtes is one of the Aloadae, the giant twin who with Otus tried to pile Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa to reach heaven (Odyssey 11.305–320); the same pair, in the Iliad, once shut Ares in a bronze jar for thirteen months (5.385ff). But ephiáltēs is also the ordinary Greek word for a nightmare — the incubus believed to leap onto a sleeper’s chest and pin him down, a sense the word still carries in Modern Greek. Render the line as simply ‘Ephialtes and Otus’ and this is lost: the same syllables name both the giant who tries to climb into heaven and the terror that sits on you when you cannot move. The proto-humans’ assault on Olympus, told a moment earlier as slapstick with cartwheeling bodies, ends on a name that means, in ordinary speech, a bad dream.
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