The Gods at an Impasse
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Aristophanes — ποιεῖν, ὡς ἐπιθησομένων τοῖς θεοῖς. ὁ οὖν Ζεὺς καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι θεοὶ ἐβουλεύοντο ὅτι χρὴ αὐτοὺς ποιῆσαι, καὶ ἠπόρουν· οὔτε γὰρ ὅπως ἀποκτείναιεν εἶχον καὶ ὥσπερ τοὺς γίγαντας κεραυνώσαντες τὸ γένος ἀφανίσαιεν— αἱ τιμαὶ γὰρ αὐτοῖς καὶ ἱερὰ τὰ παρὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἠφανίζετο— οὔτε ὅπως ἐῷεν ἀσελγαίνειν. μόγις δὴ ὁ Ζεὺς ἐννοήσας λέγει ὅτι δοκῶ μοι, ἔφη, ἔχειν μηχανήν, ὡς ἂν εἶέν τε ἅνθρωποι καὶ παύσαιντο τῆς ἀκολασίας ἀσθενέστεροι
to do it, meaning to attack the gods. So Zeus and the other gods deliberated what they should do with them, and they were at a loss; for they could not see how to kill them and, like the Giants, blast their race out of existence — for the honors and offerings they received from men would vanish too — nor how to let them go on running riot. With effort, Zeus, thinking it over, says: ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I have a scheme,’ by which humans might still exist and stop their unruliness, made weaker —
Continuing directly from 190b's comparison of the primeval humans to Ephialtes and Otus, the mythical giants who stormed heaven, Aristophanes explains the dilemma Zeus and the other gods now face: they cannot destroy the human race by thunderbolt, as they once did the Giants, without also losing the honors and sacrifices humans pay them, but they cannot let the unruliness continue either. After much difficulty, Zeus — still within Aristophanes' narration — announces he thinks he has found a scheme, which he begins to lay out here and completes at 190d.
The reason the gods hold back is not compassion. Wedged into its own dash, two clauses down, sits the actual math: kill off the human race, and the timai and hiera — the honors and offerings — that humans pay them vanish too. Zeus needs worshippers the way a landlord needs tenants. Aristophanes had already built an entire comedy on that same premise: in his Birds, the birds block the smoke of human sacrifice from ever reaching Olympus, and the starved gods send an embassy begging for terms. Plato hands the historical comic playwright a cosmic myth that runs on his own joke.
The word Zeus reaches for, mechane, is ordinary Greek for a device or contrivance, but it is also the tragedians' word for the crane that lowered a god onto the stage to untangle a plot no human character could resolve — the machine behind what later ages called deus ex machina. Here the god himself needs one: an impossible problem — destroy them and lose their offerings, spare them and they keep storming heaven — gets solved not by force or justice but by a piece of engineering. And the behavior he is engineering against is aselgainein, not the epic hybrizein a Homeric giant would earn — a term more at home in an Athenian law court, aimed at a defendant's degenerate public conduct, than at cosmic revolt. Even mid-myth, Aristophanes keeps one foot in the register of comedy and courtroom.
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