Like the Cicadas
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Aristophanes — καὶ ἔτικτον οὐκ εἰς ἀλλήλους ἀλλʼ εἰς γῆν, ὥσπερ οἱ τέττιγες— μετέθηκέ τε οὖν οὕτω αὐτῶν εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν καὶ διὰ τούτων τὴν γένεσιν ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἐποίησεν, διὰ τοῦ ἄρρενος ἐν τῷ θήλει, τῶνδε ἕνεκα, ἵνα ἐν τῇ συμπλοκῇ ἅμα μὲν εἰ ἀνὴρ γυναικὶ ἐντύχοι, γεννῷεν καὶ γίγνοιτο τὸ γένος, ἅμα δʼ εἰ καὶ ἄρρην ἄρρενι, πλησμονὴ γοῦν γίγνοιτο τῆς συνουσίας καὶ διαπαύοιντο καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἔργα τρέποιντο καὶ τοῦ ἄλλου βίου ἐπιμελοῖντο. ἔστι δὴ οὖν ἐκ τόσου
And they would beget not into each other but into the ground, like the cicadas— so then he moved them, thus, to the front, and through these he made procreation happen between them, through the male in the female, for this reason: so that in the embrace, at once, if a man happened to meet a woman, they might beget and the race would continue; and at once, if it were a male with a male, there would at least come a satiety of intercourse, and they would pause, and turn to their tasks, and look after the rest of life. So it is, then, from that time—
Continuing directly from 191b: before Zeus's fix, the fused pairs could only beget into the ground, like cicadas, since their genitals still faced backward. The sentence now completes the relocation, explaining that Zeus moved the genitals to the front so that intercourse could serve two functions — procreation when a man meets a woman, and, when two men meet, a satisfying release that lets them return to ordinary work and life.
The cicada detail is offered as plain natural history, the same belief about cicada reproduction later systematized in Aristotle's Historia Animalium: with genitals still on the back, the fused pairs could beget only into the earth, never into one another. Zeus's second adjustment — μετέθηκε, the same relocating verb used in 191b — finally makes face-to-face intercourse possible, and Aristophanes states its purpose in a single ἵνα-clause with two branches, not one. A man meeting a woman produces offspring and keeps the race going; a man meeting a man produces no offspring at all, only πλησμονή, a filling-up or satiety, the ordinary word for having eaten or drunk one's fill. γοῦν, 'at any rate,' narrows the claim to its least controversial part: whatever else it does, same-sex intercourse at least clears the urge out of the way so the parties can return to ἔργα, their work, and the rest of life. Nothing here ranks the two outcomes; reproduction and release are named as parallel, equally intended functions of the same design.
Aristophanes reaches for the same insect that anchors one of Socrates's own myths. At Phaedrus 259b–d, Socrates tells Phaedrus that cicadas were once men so devoted to song that they forgot to eat or drink, and the Muses rewarded them with bodies needing nothing but song until death — proof, in that dialogue, that a philosophical soul should stay alert through the drowsy middle of the day rather than doze like the crowd. Here the same creature does no such work. Aristophanes cites it purely as a fact about breeding posture, with no myth built around it and no moral drawn from it. The contrast is a measure of how far the two speakers' registers sit apart even when they reach for the identical animal: one turns it into an emblem of desire refined into song, the other leaves it exactly where the natural historians found it.
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