Tied Like a Purse
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Aristophanes — καὶ μέλλοντες ταριχεύειν, ἢ ὥσπερ οἱ τὰ ᾠὰ ταῖς θριξίν· ὅντινα δὲ τέμοι, τὸν Ἀπόλλω ἐκέλευεν τό τε πρόσωπον μεταστρέφειν καὶ τὸ τοῦ αὐχένος ἥμισυ πρὸς τὴν τομήν, ἵνα θεώμενος τὴν αὑτοῦ τμῆσιν κοσμιώτερος εἴη ὁ ἄνθρωπος, καὶ τἆλλα ἰᾶσθαι ἐκέλευεν. ὁ δὲ τό τε πρόσωπον μετέστρεφε, καὶ συνέλκων πανταχόθεν τὸ δέρμα ἐπὶ τὴν γαστέρα νῦν καλουμένην, ὥσπερ τὰ σύσπαστα βαλλάντια, ἓν στόμα ποιῶν ἀπέδει κατὰ μέσην τὴν γαστέρα, ὃ δὴ τὸν ὀμφαλὸν καλοῦσι. καὶ τὰς μὲν ἄλλας ῥυτίδας
and about to pickle them, or the way people cut eggs with hairs; and whomever he cut, he would bid Apollo turn the face and half the neck around toward the cut, so that, beholding his own cutting, the person would be more disciplined, and bid him heal the rest. And he would turn the face, and, drawing together the skin from every side onto what is now called the belly, like drawstring purses, making one opening, he tied it off at the middle of the belly— the very thing they call the navel. And most of the other wrinkles—
Continuing directly from 190d's simile of halving sorb-apples for pickling: Zeus's cutting is compared also to the way people cut eggs with hairs. As each half is cut, Zeus bids Apollo turn the face and half the neck toward the wound as a humbling reminder and heal the rest; Apollo then gathers the loose skin over the belly and ties it into a single opening — the origin of the navel.
Apollo's assignment here carries a joke Plato never explains: ὀμφαλός names the human navel invented in this very line, but the same word also names the sacred stone at Delphi, γῆς ὀμφαλός, "the navel of the earth," housed in that god's own sanctuary. Aristophanes hands the tying-off of the new opening to the one Olympian whose shrine already claims to be the center of the world, so that the small knotted scar every human carries becomes a domestic, comic double of the most famous omphalos in Greece. The pun never surfaces in the diction; it depends entirely on the audience already knowing Apollo's Delphic title, and it works precisely because the god performs the operation without comment, as if tying a purse shut were beneath remark for him.
The passage also runs two different nouns from the same verb through the same few lines: τομή, the mark or line of a cut, and τμῆσις, the act of cutting itself — one names the wound as an object to be seen, the other names what happened to the person who has it. English keeps a fossil of the second word intact: tmesis, the grammatical term for splitting a compound verb by inserting other words between its parts, is τμῆσις taken over whole by grammarians long after Plato. Aristophanes is not doing grammar here, but the myth is already doing what the Cratylus does at length elsewhere in Plato — treating a word's shape as evidence about the thing it names, down to insisting that the belly and the navel are each called what they are called for a reason the story just supplied.
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