Origins of Sex in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias: Between Nature and Artifice

1 The Politics of Procreation: Marriage as Mixture in Laws 6

Plato’s most explicit statement about the general lack of knowledge concerning procreation comes, tellingly, from a political context without any emphasis on biology. This is the case of the text from the Laws that I will use to ask the leading question of this paper. In Book 6, the Athenian Visitor discusses the arrangement of marriages and offers a notional speech addressed to ‘a son of a good family’. Here it is, with the Athenian’s comments:

‘One general advice (μῦθος) should apply to marriage: we should seek to contract the alliance that will benefit the state, not the one that we personally find most alluring. Everyone is naturally drawn to the person most like himself (φέρεται δέ πως πᾶς ἀεὶ κατὰ φύσιν πρὸς τὸν ὁμοιότατον αὑτῷ), and that puts the whole state off balance, because of discrepancies in wealth and character (ὅθεν ἀνώμαλος ἡ πόλις ὅλη γίγνεται χρήμασίν τε καὶ τρόπων ἤθεσιν), and these in turn generally lead, in most states, to results we certainly don’t want to see in ours.’

If we give explicit instructions in the form of a law – ‘no rich man to marry into a rich family, no powerful person to marry into a powerful house, the headstrong must be forced to join in marriage with the phlegmatic and the phlegmatic with the headstrong’ – well, it’s ludicrous, of course, but it will also annoy a great many people who find it hard to understand that the state should be like the mixture in a mixing-bowl (ὅτι πόλιν εἶναι δεῖ δίκην κρατῆρος κεκραμένην). When you pour in the wine it seethes furiously, but once dilute it with the god of the teetotalers, and you have a splendid combination (καλὴν κοινωνίαν) which will make you a good and reasonable drink. But almost no one is able to see that the same principle applies to the blending that produces children (τῇ τῶν παίδων μείξει). For these reasons we are forced to omit such topics from our actual laws. However, we must resort to our ‘charms’ and try to persuade everybody to think it more important to produce well-balanced children (τῶν παίδων ὁμαλότητα αὐτῶν) than to marry his equal and never stop lusting for wealth. (6, 773b4–e2)

The emphasis on mixture is clear. First, we learn that the city should be like a mixture in a mixing bowl. This is not a description, but a prescription: there should be an art of mixture analogous to the art of mixing wine. Second, if the need for such an art is not easy to grasp, it is because even fewer people realize that the city is a mixture because of the blending or mixing that occurs when the citizens make children. The city consists primarily of the characters of its citizens, and these characters are, at least initially, a mixture of properties inherited from both parents. Importantly, none of the parents plays a privileged role, which is confirmed by the recommendation to carefully select them for their antithetical qualities: the selected paternal qualities make sense only in relation to the selected maternal qualities.

Concerning biology, this does not imply the two-seed theory of generation. At the same time, although he offers no detail, the Athenian clearly assumes that the mother’s contribution impacts the nature of the child and that it does so during the period of gestation. Of course, the children are also formed by the physical exercises recommended to pregnant women and then by the activity of the nurses who take care of their nurture. However, the discussion of these exercises and activities in Book 7 stays on the level of general rules that help to produce healthy children but, importantly, do not reach down to the individual characters.^[3] That the latter should crucially depend upon the mixture produced by well-arranged marriages is indirectly but rather strongly confirmed by the sometimes overlooked fact that the properties evaluated in view of every particular marriage encompass both social status and personal temperament. It is because of the need to balance the characters and individual traits that the recommended mixing is artificial rather than natural: the political principle of marriage must go against the natural or erotic inclinations.

All this adds weight to the crucial question of how Plato understands the contribution of both sexes. My tentative conclusion will be that they both contribute to the biology of procreation, although, again, Plato nowhere advances the two-seed theory.^[4] Nevertheless, the role of the female partner seems not limited to nurturing the children once they are born. Rather, as the above-quoted passage from the Laws indicates, the mother’s constitution, including her individual temperament, contributes quite directly to the formation during the period of gestation. As a result, and importantly for Plato’s political views about marriage and procreation, any child is a mixture of the traits inherited from both parents. However, it is necessary to emphasize that the biological importance of both parents does not imply that they are treated as equal in other respects. As we will see in the Timaeus, it is possible to disconnect the alleged moral difference between man and woman from the biological difference between male and female.^[5]

At this point, we start to understand that Plato’s treatment of procreation does not consist in an explicit and unified theory that would bridge the difference between his political and his physiological remarks on the issue. True, what we learn in Laws 6 is valid for the Republic and the Statesman, regardless of the fact that the ‘best city’ of the Republic reaches the required stability by establishing a different political framework with a much narrower preselection of the sexual partners. But it is the Timaeus and also the Critias that provide us with the opportunity for a closer look at the underlying biology and its possible relation to ethics together with politics.

2 The Timaeus on Sex: The Gap Between Biology and Morality

If Timaeus’ great speech reveals the common origin of the universe and humankind, Critias reminds us that humankind includes, no less originally, the inhabitants of the best city imagined by Socrates in both the Republic and the first part of the Timaeus. Also, these dialogues direct our attention to the fact that humankind consists of two genders, but only Timaeus simply assumes that those called ‘women’ are meant to be inferior to those called ‘men’: ‘since humans have a twofold nature (διπλή φύσις), the superior kind should be such as would from then on be called “man” (ἀνήρ)’ (42a1–3). This inferiority of women is clearly connected with the alleged inability to master emotions, namely erōs, phobos, thumos and associated feelings together with their opposites (42a6–b1). Yet this association is not straightforward at all. At 42b5–c1, Timaeus reminds us that women are born only in the second generation of humans as a result of the first generation’s failure to live a good life. And then, at 90e6–91a1, he flatly states that ‘according to our likely account, all male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice were reborn in the second generation as women.’ If so, then being born as a woman does not result from some female deficiency, but from moral failure of the earlier generation of men.^[6] Also, if the failure of mastering the fear or the anger impacts the exercise of the intellect, this is not the same as intellectual inferiority per se. Actually, stupidity together with moral innocence results in being born as a bird (see 91d6–e1). Finally, and most interestingly, the moral explanation of (the origin of) female inferiority does not seem to truly connect to the biology of the two genders, male and female. There is no doubt that sex, which the gods introduce as a tool of perpetuating humans and other animal species, can affect the use of the intellect, but this seems to be equally true of both genders. Let us take a closer look at a well-known yet much-entangled passage, which may still teach us a new lesson. The explicit goal of this text is to explain ‘how women and females in general came to be’ (91d5–6). In other words, although this account tends to focus on men and women, it is valid for all sexually reproducing species:

According to our likely account, all male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice were reborn in the second generation as women. And this explains why at that time the gods fashioned the desire for sexual union (τὸν τῆς συνουσίας ἔρωτα ἐτεκτήναντο), by constructing one ensouled living thing in us as well as another one in women (ζῷον τὸ μὲν ἐν ἡμῖν, τὸ δ᾽ ἐν ταῖς γυναιξὶν συστήσαντες ἔμψυχον). This is how they made them in each case: for the fluids we consume there is a channel, and where it receives the fluids going through the lungs over the kidneys to the bladder and expels them under pressure from air, they bored a channel to the compacted marrow that runs from the head down the neck and over the spine – the marrow, that is, that we called ‘seed’ (σπέρμα) above. This marrow, insofar as it is ensouled (ἅτ᾽ ἔμψυχος) and has been given vent [in the male member], introduced (ἐμποιήσας) a vital desire for emission in the [part] where the venting takes place and so brought an ἔρως of begetting (τοῦ γεννᾶν ἔρωτα) to completion. This is the reason why the male genitals’ nature (φύσιν) is disobedient and self-willed, like a living thing that will not listen to reason and on account of its raging desires tries to overpower everything else. And in women the wombs and uteri are said for these same reasons to be a living thing (ζῷον) within them that desires to give birth to children (ζῷον ἐπιθυμητικὸν ἐνὸν τῆς παιδοποιίας); whenever this living thing remains unfruitful for too long beyond the due season, it becomes irritated and difficult and wanders throughout the entire body and blocks off the passages of breath, and by restricting its respiration sends the body into severe difficulties and provides for all sorts of diseases, until the ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως bring [these male and female parts] together and, like plucking a fruit from the trees, sow into the womb as if into a tilled field living things that are too small to see and unformed (ἀόρατα ὑπὸ σμικρότητος καὶ ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα), and then, after having articulated them again (πάλιν διακρίναντες), they nourish (ἐκθρέψωνται) them until they grow large inside [the womb], and after this, they bring them to the light of day (καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο εἰς φῶς ἀγαγόντες), completing the generation of living things. (90e6–91d5)

For a large part, this translation is from James Wilberding’s article on Plato’s embryology, which is the most detailed treatment of this subject (some modifications are due to my different interpretation of certain issues, including the meaning of πάλιν διακρίναντες at 91d3, on which see below). To fully understand this text, we need to bear in mind Timaeus’ earlier account of the origin and nature of the seed (σπέρμα), which is given at 73b1–e1. I will not quote the whole passage, but three brief remarks are necessary.

First, this earlier text gives a precise meaning to the phrase ‘the marrow that we called “seed” (σπέρμα).’ Interestingly, this seed is not described here as what is implanted but that in which the god implants the soul, more exactly all kinds of soul, including the intellect. At the same time, the latter is also described as a seed, more exactly as ‘the divine seed’ (τὸ θεῖον σπέρμα) that the demiurge ‘sows’ into the part of the marrow called ‘brain’. Clearly, the language of ‘sowing’ a seed into ‘a field’ is not limited to describing the conception, but can also serve to describe the asexual embedding of the intellect in the marrow that constitutes the brain (and certainly nothing suggests that the brain would be analogous to a womb).

Second, the marrow is a very special kind of matter. It should have been the work of the lesser gods,^[7] but it is described as created by one male creator. True, Timaeus shifts to the singular ‘he made’ repeatedly, for instance when the liver and later the bones are made. However, the case of the marrow is different since the procedure of its creation leads back to the level of the triangles that compose the four elements. From these triangles, the god selects the undistorted and smooth ones and mixes them in a special proportion. As a result, the marrow is not a mixture of the ready-made elements but of the triangles of which the elements are also composed.^[8] Indeed, at 73e, the demiurge constructs the bones by mixing earth, marrow, fire and water, and whether the marrow could be described as a mixture of the elements is an open question since we ignore the proportion used in its creation. In any case, the marrow has a unique composition and would seem very difficult to dissolve; it is also ‘unbelievably varied’ in its constitution.^[9] The same things should be true of the marrow that Timaeus says about the four elements at 53b: ‘the god fashioned these four kinds to be as perfect and excellent as possible’ (and cf. 41a: ‘whatever has come to be by my hands cannot be undone but by my consent’).

Third, as has been often remarked, this text implies that Plato holds the encephalo-myelogenic theory of seed. So, if the construction of sexual organs uses not any kind of marrow but ‘the compacted marrow that runs from the head down the neck and over the spine,’ the seed shared in the intercourse is tailor made for accommodating the intellect. Unfortunately, Timaeus says nothing about when the intellect enters the new living being and other dialogues could lend support to different views on this matter. On the whole, I would agree with James Wilberding that the intellect might enter the new animal once the brain is formed in the fetus.^[10]

To these three remarks it should be added that another passage suggests that procreation, which guarantees the generic immortality of the living species, is at play already at the stage where the marrow including the brain is created. A hint at this future situation seems to be contained already in the term πανσπερμία, used by Timaeus in the sense of a universal marrow or seed which – exactly like the intellect – will be present in every mortal kind (this is why it is πανσπερμία, and not because the seed would originate in the whole body). That the gods think of procreation at a fairly early stage is then confirmed at 76d6–e4, where we learn that human nails are a rudimentary anticipation of claws and hoofs in future animal species that will develop ‘from men’ (ἐξ ἀνδρῶν).

We are now better equipped to return to our central text, including the crucial issue of the female role in procreation. The whole issue is complicated by the fact that the text is more eloquent about the male than the female organs of reproduction. However, there seems to be no fundamental asymmetry concerning the origin and function of these organs in the male and female sexes. Again, there is no direct connection between moral asymmetry and sex difference. There is indeed a moral reason for the very formation of the second sex, but this reason precedes the physiological and anatomical apparatus that the gods construct once there are two distinct genders. What is clearly important in the context of Timaeus’ overall story is that the gods make use of the new moral asymmetry to assign both sexes their roles in procreation as a means to make the species generically immortal. In this context, the impact of newly constructed sex difference is described in purely physiological terms: it is both a biological tool and the solution to the moral problem, not its cause.

What our central text deals with is therefore the divine construction of the sexual organs. This is why Timaeus uses the verb τεκταίνομαι, the same one that describes the demiurge’s construction of the shape of the universe (28c, 33b). After all, what is being constructed in both the male and female bodies is also a living being, a ζῷον, which is moreover qualified as ἔμψυχον. In this context, it is important to reemphasize that the gods created two different ζῷα in males and females, respectively, to orchestrate future procreation. However, Timaeus never develops this possible gap into a deeper and not only physiological difference between the sexes. Instead, he keeps treating male and female desire (ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως) in much the same way, regardless of the obvious anatomical differences.

In the male case, there is a straightforward nexus reaching from the brain through the neck and the spine to the male member, which is charged with the emission of the male seed. The description of the female organ is much more elliptic: ‘in women the wombs and uteri are said for these same reasons to be a living thing (ζῷον) within them that desires to give birth to children.’ Timaeus then appends the warning of what happens ‘whenever this living thing remains unfruitful for too long beyond the due season.’ This is, of course, the description of the wandering womb, which is arguably the most discussed motif of the whole passage. The usual focus is on the possible relation to different passages in the Hippocratic corpus, but I would like to emphasize two different things, namely two parallels to the unruliness of the female organ.

The first parallel is with an earlier use of the verb ‘to wander’ (πλανάω) that Timaeus uses, at 91c, about the womb. The earlier use is at 86e5–87a7:

When any of the acid and briny phlegms or any bitter and bilious humors wander up and down the body (κατὰ τὸ σῶμα πλανηθέντες) without finding a vent to the outside and remain pent up inside, they mix the vapor that they give off with the motion of the soul and so are confounded with it. So they produce all sorts of diseases of the soul (παντοδαπὰ νοσήματα ψυχῆς), some more intense and some more frequent than others. And as they move to the three regions of the soul, each of them produces a multitude of varieties of bad temper and dispiritedness (δυσκολίας καὶ δυσθυμίας) in the region it attacks, as well as of recklessness and cowardice (θρασύτητός τε καὶ δειλίας), not to mention forgetfulness and stupidity (λήθης ἅμα καὶ δυσμαθίας).

There is a difference between the motion of a substance such as bile and the motion of an organ, but the similarity of description is interesting, not to mention that cowardice and injustice, which were listed as causes of reincarnating as a woman, can apparently have a physiological cause. This only confirms that there needs to be nothing specifically ‘feminine’ in the cause of becoming a woman. Becoming a woman is a consequence rather than a cause of moral failure whose origin can, after all, be purely physiological.

The second parallel connects more directly to the process of procreation. In fact, the unruliness of the female organ parallels quite exactly the unruliness of the male organ. The resulting motions of both organs are obviously different, and so are the symptoms brought about by these motions. However, this difference is due to anatomy and has nothing to do with the virtues or vices of either sex. In both males and females, the disorder affects the whole organism. As Timaeus puts it, even the nature of the male organ strives ‘to dominate all’ (πάντων κρατεῖν). If there is something that may be unique to the female situation, it is hinted at by the mention of being unfruitful ‘beyond the due season’ (παρὰ τὴν ὥραν). This may hint at a periodicity due to the menstrual cycle, which Plato never mentions, but it is important to add that, more broadly, the ‘due seasons’ belong to Plato’s naturalization of human reproduction, which, as a result, is not different from the reproduction in other animal species (see below on the Republic).

The parallelism between male and female sexual organs continues as Timaeus moves on to these organs’ proper function and, by the same token, to the starting point of reproduction. Most notable are the verbs used in plural in lines 91c7–d5. These lines describe what happens when ‘the ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως bring together’ the male and female parts. From the grammatical point of view, ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως remain the subject of the verbal plurals in these lines. The question, however, is how to understand the whole expression ἑκατέρων ἡ ἐπιθυμία καὶ ὁ ἔρως, namely whether the expression ἑκατέρων ἡ ἐπιθυμία καὶ ὁ ἔρως means that both ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως are equally present in both partners or that, rather, ἐπιθυμία characterizes the female and ἔρως the male desire. This latter option is preferred by James Wilberding, who says that ‘the male ἔρως and the female ἐπιθυμία remain the subject throughout 91c7–d5.’^[11] The advantage of this reading is that it brings to the fore the co-operation between male and female sexual organs. Again, the details of this process remain unclear, and that even if we accept the traditional view that there is only one seed that is ‘sown’ into the female body. A good example of this reading is offered by Cornford, who, like Wilberding and also Zeyl, believes that Timaeus uses ἔρως for the male desire and ἐπιθυμία for the female desire, but he justifies this reading by simply saying that ἐπιθυμία is a feminine and thus associated with the female ζῷον ἐπιθυμητικὸν ἐνὸν τῆς παιδοποιίας, whereas ἔρως is masculine and associated with the male ἔρως τοῦ γεννᾶν. To which he adds that ‘[t]he two co-operate, ἔρως sowing the seed, ἐπιθυμία nursing and bringing to birth.’^[12] Both, of course, are fully physiological processes.

For my part, I also take ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως for the subject in the rest of our central text, but I do not believe that these two nouns must be neatly distributed between the two genders. After all, the beginning of the passage connects ἔρως with the whole contraption fabricated by the gods in men and women. Inversely, Timaeus does not hesitate to talk about the male organ’s ἐπιθυμία to dominate all. There is both ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως in every individual of both genders, which would be the sense of the whole expression ἑκατέρων ἡ ἐπιθυμία καὶ ὁ ἔρως.

If so, why would some readers tend to associate ἐπιθυμία with women? Perhaps this association echoes the earlier description of ἐπιθυμία, which precedes the creation of sex and applies to every animal. At 70d7–71a3, ἐπιθυμία is located between the midriff and the navel, where the gods construct ‘something like a trough for the body’s nourishment’ and tie the corresponding part of the soul down ‘like a savage creature’ (ὡς θρέμμα ἄγριον), which is necessary for life but has to be kept as far away from the intellect as possible. This description implies no specific association of ἐπιθυμία with the female anatomy and physiology.^[13] If, in our central text, we choose to connect ἐπιθυμία with the female organs, we must rely on the metonymy that Timaeus himself employs at 69e5–70a1, where he asserts that ‘since one part of the mortal soul was naturally superior to the other, [the gods] built the hollow of the trunk in sections, dividing them the way that women’s quarters are divided from men’s.’ By projecting the two lower parts of the souls ono the division of the household, with the midriff as a wall between them, Timaeus invites us to associate ἐπιθυμία with the women’s quarters. Yet, importantly, this association has no physiological basis. Instead, it is borrowed from the political and ethical background, which is an important step towards circular reasoning: we are led from ethics to biology and back without being able to determine which comes first.

All this is why I prefer to think that ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως have the same function in both partners in sexual reproduction. Also, even if Timaeus’ description contains no two-seed theory but rather a craft-oriented summary of how the sexes procreate together, it is difficult to disagree with Cherniss and his reminder that, in Timaeus 91d2–3, ‘spinal marrow which is seed exists in both sexes, and he expressly says that both sow the unformed animals into the womb.’^[14] It needs to be emphasized again that we learn more about the divine construction and function of the male organ, and also that it is the male organ whose irrepressible desire is described in a way that clearly echoes the original description of ἐπιθυμία as a savage creature at 70e. In all, sex and sexuality receive no clean-cut distribution between the two sexes or genders, and we may surmise that the theoretical difficulties concerning the female organ follow from the fact that the womb is located inside the body and so that, by consequence, the development of the individual fetus remains at least partially subject to conjecture (non-coincidentally, this reminds us of the above-quoted passage from the Laws).

So, does the text contain any clues concerning the presence or absence of a female seed that would play an active role irreducible to being a recipient of the male seed? Not really, since the plural ‘they’ is not decisive in this respect. Plato may describe the process of conception and gestation in a way that makes it impossible for us to clearly distinguish, at each and every step, between the role of the father and the role of the mother, but this is precisely what must not be overinterpreted in the light of other theories. As I said already, what Plato’s text describes is the craft-like character of the whole process, which is a way of producing the intended result. Timaeus does not say how the womb connects to the spinal marrow. True, when he employs the metaphor of sowing the seed into a field, both partners, or their ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως, are the sowers. However, we need to be careful here, also because the metaphor of sowing or planting (verb κατασπείρω) is not limited to some technical treatment of sex and conception. In fact, Timaeus uses it earlier to inform us that the demiurge, having created the intellects, sowed or implanted them (verb σπείρω) into the celestial bodies (41e and 42d) – an act which has no sexual connotation, not in the least because celestial bodies do not multiply and are immortal.

Also, and contrary to some interpretations, I would like to insist that the female womb is not like chōra, and not only because, by definition or the lack of definition, nothing can be ‘like’ chōra.^[15] The female organs are as clearly and artificially articulated as the male ones, and their fabrication is the same procedure. When Timaeus says that ‘it is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring’ (50d2–4), he offers a comparison to but not a blueprint of the sexual generation. The conventionality of this comparison makes the primordial chōra partially graspable, but this says nothing about the construction and function of sexual organs in fully formed human beings. When Timaeus characterizes the chōra as ‘some kind of invisible and shapeless figure’ (ἀνόρατον εἶδός τι καὶ ἄμορφον, 51a7), he comes closer to his own description of the content of the seed than to what he says about the mother’s womb.^[16]

This brings us to the last and crucial part of the progressively unwinding sentence: the desires of both parents sow ‘living things that are too small to see and unformed (ἀόρατα ὑπὸ σμικρότητος καὶ ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα), and then, after having articulated them again (πάλιν διακρίναντες), they nourish them until they grow large inside, and after this, they bring them to the light of day (καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο εἰς φῶς ἀγαγόντες), completing the generation of living things.’

This sequence summarizes the whole process from conception to birth, still with the same grammatical subject. The perspective thus stays the same: we are told about the stages of care given to the embryo. The easiest reading consists of understanding this care as a process that is encoded already in the parental seed and successively decoded through the process in the womb. In this regard, the most telling expression is πάλιν διακρίναντες, which easily evokes the unfolding of what was compacted in the seed. The first stage, one of the invisible ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα, implies that Plato is not a preformist but an epigenesist, which makes sense because of the ultimate origin of the seed in the brain. This seed is described as coming from the male partner, but it seems that both partners play their own role in the formation of the fetus. This is not contradicted by the fact that Timaeus does not explain what exactly happens in the womb and he is equally silent about the causes that determine the sex of the offspring.

From conception to birth, the embryo, or fetus, is thus the object of constant care. First, it is being articulated into the shape proper to its species (this process is not unlike the artisanal tupousis and kosmēsis of the animal species in the myth of Protagoras 320d–e). Second, it is nurtured or reared just like the animal offspring is (verb ἐκτρέφω). Third, and finally, ‘they’ bring it to the light of day (verb ἄγω), almost like midwives.^[17] As I said already, it seems logical to read this whole sequence as a complex activity shared, to an unspecified degree, by the male seed and the female physiology. To reinforce this reading, I will now turn to a text that develops the same story and offers its own complement to Timaeus’ account. Although it uses a very different narrative device – and the first half of the story even replaces human mother by the earth –, I believe that its relevance is undeniable, for it consists of Critias’ description of how the female goddess Athena and the male god Hephaestus, who shared their workshop, helped to produce the best citizens of them all, the ancient Athenians.

3 Sex and Divine Interventions in the Critias

This production and the successive oversight of every step in the nurture and education of the Athenians remind the reader that the city in question is actually the one of the Republic, a city whose animal-like image (ζῷον) introduces the whole Timaeus–Critias and tasks them to animate this image with real actions (19b3–20d3). Animation through craft is the thread that runs through both dialogues, connecting their main subjects, including the origins of sex and sexual generation. In this context, and to relate Critias’ twice-told story to our central text, it is useful to keep in mind the possible craft connotations of ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα, which seem to fit well with the subsequent use of the verb διακρίνω. H. R. Rankin was probably the first to suggest that we consider the full semantic range of the noun ζῷον, noting that ‘the translators have not taken into account the important second-order meaning of ζῷον as a work of art. As a painting or piece of sculpture, a ζῷον is not alive but is intended to seem alive.’ Rankin also notes Plato’s awareness ‘of the equivocation between ζῷον as living creature and ζῷον as work of art’, which is clear at the beginning of the Timaeus, where Socrates compares the best city in speech to painted animals and wishes that city to become a living creature in motion (19b).^[18] Socrates’ playful remark is not just a joke, for this ambiguity permeates Timaeus’ speech as a whole: the created cosmos is a living being but also a work of divine art, an image of the intelligible living being (νοητόν ζῷον).^[19] In this context, the sexual apparatus, including the ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα in the seed, is an artful creation that allows the basic shape or likeness characteristic of each living species to perpetuate. What ἐπιθυμία and ἔρως do when they work on the ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα is to ensure that the articulation of the embryo follows the blueprint of each species in all its outlines.

This reading can also relate to the earlier mention of πανσπερμία, the universal marrow or seed, whose creation precedes the diversity of animal species. The verb διακρίνω, which describes what happens to the ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα, would convey both the process of selection and the process of articulation into parts. The task is to select the best of the ἀδιάπλαστα ζῷα for further care, which will shape them into the given species and, at some point, into either a female or a male individual. The puzzling πάλιν in πάλιν διακρίναντες may therefore imply the reconstitution of the likeness to the parents of the same species. As a result, we obtain a clear nexus that encompasses the entire process of the creation of human beings (and other animal species), including their ability to further reproduce themselves. Just as the human body with its sexual organs is a teamwork of ‘the gods’, the embryo is shaped by the male seed and the female womb that work together as a team to complete the embryonic body and bring it to its full shape.^[20]

This interpretation agrees with Plato’s constructivist view of nature, which permeates Timaeus’s story and of which the introduction of women and sexual reproduction is a perfect example. On Timaeus’ account, the first generation of women could not have been born sexually or ‘naturally’. Like the first generation of men, the other sex was constructed by the gods, like an ensemble of Hesiodic Pandoras, but with complete female physiology. This is the Platonic solution to the riddle of female origins in Hesiod, where the female sex is also introduced into the world as an artefact, although in Hesiod’s case, the first woman is a stunning artificial maiden, who is originally endowed with ‘a dog’s mind and a thievish character’ (Works and Days 67–68, trans. Most 2006). Where Timaeus’ women result from the earlier vices of men, Hesiod introduces Pandora as a ‘beautiful evil’ (Theogony 585) whose physiology and hence the origin of human sexuality remain obscure, although it is clear that human sexuality basically copies the divine sexuality of the Olympian gods.^[21] As a result, both Hesiod and Plato blur the line between artificial and natural birth, since we cannot tell exactly where the former ends and the latter begins. In Plato, sex and natural childbirth must be subjected to strict control, which picks up the thread of their artificial origins. Without this control, the same thing would happen that happens in Hesiod and the badly governed cities: generation after generation of humans, unchecked sexual desire runs wild with all the negative consequences.

This perspective explains why the Critias is not an unfinished appendix but an integral part of the story told in the Timaeus. Critias’ complementary story of human origins brings both male and female sexuality into sharper focus as a reflection of different sexual mores on Mount Olympus. Not coincidentally, at the heart of this reflection is the revelation that the ancient Athenians were produced, non-sexually, by the divine craft of Athena and Hephaestus. Indeed, this is why they are the best of humans.

The story in question is the well-known tale of the Athenian autochthony, which Plato not only appropriates and refashions for his own purposes but also contrasts with another story of divine intervention in human procreation. Plato’s use of autochthony is not limited to the Timaeus and the Critias. It plays a well-known role in Menexenus 237b3–238b6, where Earth alone is the parent of the Athenians, who then benefit from the later care of other gods.^[22] It is also prominent in the political myth about the citizens ‘really being fashioned and nurtured inside the earth’, which Socrates makes into a cornerstone of civic ideology in Republic 3, 414b–415d. These are much commented-upon texts. In contrast, the connection between Critias’ version of the Athenian autochthony and Timaeus’ account of human (artificial) origins has been rarely explored in detail.

The first thing to note is that in all of his versions of Athenian origins, Plato erases the violent sexual part of the story. As the Egyptian priest informs Solon, both of their cities were established by Athena, but ‘yours she obtained by a lot first, a thousand years before ours, when she had received from Earth and Hephaestus the seed from which your people were to come’ (Timaeus 23d7–e2). This whitewashed summary leaves out that, in the earlier version of the myth, Athena visits Hephaestus to obtain new weaponry, and when Hephaestus attempts to rape her, she fights him off, and his seed falls on her leg and then on the Earth from which Erichthonios will be born and then raised by Athena.^[23] Even this mythic version tends to conflate the Athenian territory with Hephaestus’ workshop, and Plato develops precisely this implication. First, Athena selects and occupies the region with the best climate, a region ‘that was likely to bring forth men (ἄνδρας) most like herself’ (24d1–2). Second, she produces or helps to produce precisely these ‘men’. In the Timaeus, Critias offers no further details, and it should be added that the noun σπέρμα, which is what Athena is said to receive, has a range of meanings, including the newly born offspring (see LSJ, σπέρμα, II, 2–3). This meaning would imply a real proximity to the mythical version of autochthony. However, the revised story told in the Critias shifts towards both Athena and Hephaestus as artisans who seem to shape humans in much the same way as the anonymous ‘gods’ of the Timaeus.^[24]

In the Critias, Plato sets out to distinguish between ‘the condition of the Athenians of that age and the adversaries with whom they waged war’ (109a4–6), namely the inhabitants of Atlantis. And it will soon become clear that the political and moral contrast between these two groups of citizens stems from their different origins. The ultimate contrast will be between the art of deliberately producing or crafting the best humans on the one hand and the unruly sexual desire as the cause of the wrong mixture on the other hand.

This contrast mirrors the initial division of the earth and the establishment of divine rule over different regions. The general description of this process and its results simply states that ‘as [the gods] received what was naturally theirs in the allotment of justice, they began to settle their lands (κατῴκιζον τὰς χώρας). Once they had settled them, they began to raise us as their own chattel and livestock (κτήματα καὶ θρέμματα), as do shepherds their sheep’ (109b5–7). More precisely, the gods begin to order (verb κοσμέω) their new possessions, which is what Athena and Hephaestus do as well, working together as a team:

Now in other regions other gods received their allotments and were ordering them (ἄλλοι μὲν οὖν κατ᾽ ἄλλους τόπους κληρουχήσαντες θεῶν ἐκεῖνα ἐκόσμουν), but since Hephaestus and Athena possessed a common nature (κοινὴν φύσιν), both because she was his sister of the same father and because they had entered the same pursuits in their love of wisdom and the arts (φιλοσοφίᾳ φιλοτεχνίᾳ), they both received this land as their portion in a single lot, because it was congenial to their character and was naturally suited to them in its excellence and intelligence (ἀρετῇ καὶ φρονήσει πεφυκυῖαν). Then, having made in it the autochthons who were good men, they imposed on their mind the order of their constitution (ἄνδρας δὲ ἀγαθοὺς ἐμποιήσαντες αὐτόχθονας ἐπὶ νοῦν ἔθεσαν τὴν τῆς πολιτείας τάξιν). (109c4–d2)

Here, the autochthons do not grow in the Earth from Hephaestus’ seed. Instead, Athena and Hephaestus produce them in their land. This is the meaning of the peculiar, almost oxymoronic phrase ἐμποιήσαντες αὐτόχθονας. As a result, it is impossible to determine where and when the sex difference steps in. The first humans created by the two gods are simply described as ‘good men’ (ἄνδρας δὲ ἀγαθούς), which need not be gender-specific. The first human beings in the Timaeus are also described as ‘men’, regardless of the fact that this label can only have a moral and not a biological sense.^[25] This then leaves room exactly for what Timaeus told us about the origin of sex. It would be the two gods who would, at a given time, produce the male and female organs, thus making the humans even more like themselves.

Two comments on this last point. First, the text leaves unresolved the puzzle of the first and possibly asexual humans, who seem to exist before the divine rule is established in various parts of the world and before sex enters the play. This is rather reminiscent of Hesiod, which, and this is my second point, reminds us that the sexual life of the Olympian gods precedes human sexuality. This may help us to answer the question of the role of different divinities in Timaeus’ story. Some readers of the Timaeus assume that it is only the celestial gods created directly by the demiurge who create human beings, but the introduction of the sex organs suggests the involvement of the Olympian gods. This would agree with the problematic status of sexuality, which has no intelligible model and remains difficult to handle – quite like the Olympian gods themselves, about whom Timaeus complains that, besides their sexually explicit genealogy, they belong to neither the intelligible nor the sensible realm (40e5–41a6). In other words, they defy any clean-cut ontology.

If this makes the Olympians into the agents who are equipped to introduce the sex organs and the whole realm of sexuality, it is no less important that the female members of the pantheon are certainly not obedient mothers and housewives. In fact, some of them, including Athena, reject sexual activity as such. Athena may be female, but she is, first and foremost, a virgin, born not from the womb but from her father’s head. This is also why her city, once established as the common residence of both sexes, looks up to her as the perfect warrior and philosopher. That this example is meant to exhort men and women alike is emphasized by Critias in a way that refers back to the treatment of women in the Republic and also to Socrates’ summary of it at the beginning of the Timaeus. In the Critias, the even more concise summary of this summary, dressed as an ancient history, has an interesting biological framing:

Consider too the character of the goddess Athena and her statue (τὸ τῆς θεοῦ σχῆμα καὶ ἄγαλμα). At that time the military pursuits of women and men were common. For this reason the people of that time displayed the goddess as armed (ὡπλισμένην) to reflect that ancient custom – an indication that all the female and male animals that live together in a flock can very well pursue in common, as much as is possible, the special talents that belong to each species (τὴν προσήκουσαν ἀρετὴν ἑκάστῳ γένει). (110b5–c2)

If the Republic repeatedly compares the care for the best city’s next generation to the rearing of domestic animals, Critias takes a broader view. On his account, the human condition becomes just one instance of a more general zoological rule. If each gregarious species possesses its own specific talent or ‘virtue’, and this talent is equally distributed between its male and female members, then the insistence on the shared occupation of both sexes in the best city comes not from above, from Athena, but from below, from being herd animals. What the gods should do is recognize this biological feature and apply it in a political context. This is why Critias tells us, right at the beginning of his story, that the gods are shepherds who should lead their respective human flocks as humans will lead their animal herds, only not by force but by persuasion. This, of course, is a variation on the duality of human nature, which has its animal and its potentially godlike side.

Critias therefore moves in two opposite directions: he evokes Athena as a divine paradigm while naturalizing all shared human activity, including reproduction. This is not contradicted in the next lines, where Critias, following the Republic and its summary in the Timaeus, separates the male and female guardians from the rest of the city (110c3–d4). The need for this separation arises we look more closely at one gregarious species, humans. The common activity proper to our species does not contradict its composition from different individual natures or talents contributing to the common task. The important thing is that the division of these natures is not along the lines of gender. As a result, and as the Republic amply confirms, the matters of sex and generation are fully integrated into (or indeed subordinated to) the political art. If the process of generation contains some obscure biological ingredients, the remedy for this is to make the reproduction as close to a technē as possible, regardless of the fact that the Republic recognizes the epistemic limits of this effort.^[26]

Unlike Socrates in the Republic, Critias offers no guidelines for the art of selecting and blending the right human natures at the right time. Instead, he contrasts Hephaestus’ and Athena’s craftsmanship with the actions of another god, Poseidon, who received as his domain the island of Atlantis, where ‘he established dwelling places for the children he had fathered of a mortal woman’ (113c3–4). This coupling with a mortal is literally the first thing we hear about Poseidon’s rule. Then, at 113c8–d5, we learn exactly who she was: Clito, a daughter of Evenor and Leucippe. Evenor was one of the ‘men originally born of the Earth’ (τῶν ἐκεῖ κατὰ ἀρχὰς ἐκ γῆς ἀνδρῶν γεγονότων) of Atlantis; of Leucippe, we are told nothing. So Clito is at least half autochthonous, and she becomes the human ancestor of the whole Atlantean lineage living under Poseidon’s rule. Critias also tells us that Clito’s parents were dead when Poseidon took her. This means that Atlantis knew nothing similar to the artisanal care for the autochthons that Athena and Hephaestus practiced in Athens. As a result, we get a neatly established polarity between controlled and uncontrolled procreation, and thus between the good city of crafts and the bad city of sexual desire.^[27]

Importantly, this contrast only reveals itself over time and through genetics. At first, and for a long time, Atlantis grows and prospers, becoming the richest city on earth (114d1–6).^[28] This flourishing was due to the fact that ‘for many generations and as long as enough of their divine nature (ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ φύσις) survived, they were obedient unto their laws and they were well disposed to the divinity they were kin to (πρὸς τὸ συγγενὲς θεῖον)’ (120e1–3). But, inevitably, ‘when the god’s portion (ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ μοῖρα) in them began to grow faint as it was often blended with great quantities of mortality (πολλῷ τῷ θνητῷ) and as their human nature gradually gained ascendancy (τὸ δὲ ἀνθρώπινον ἦθος ἐπεκράτει), at that moment, in their inability to bear their great good fortune, they became disordered’ (121a8–b2). The desire for possessions and power increases, while virtue is lost. The problem is not only that human nature prevails, in its both male and female form, but that Atlantis lacks the divine craft as a blueprint for repairing the growing damage.

The decline of Atlantis brings us back to our introductory quotation from the Laws and its emphasis on the political art of ensuring the right mixture of properties that come from both parents. That such a mixture is a sine qua non of long-term political stability is also clear from other passages, including Statesman 310d6–e2, which is a warning against passing unmixed (ἄμεικτος) moral qualities down through the generations (e.g., courage must be mixed with moderation). Again, this does not mean that Plato holds the two-seed theory of generation, but the repeated insistence on mixing or blending, which clearly extends to moral issues, is different from assuming that the woman is merely a vessel for the male seed. Here we could speculate about similarities with the theories of Democritus and especially Alcmaeon, but our knowledge of their relevant texts is too limited to draw any firm conclusions. This last point is especially true of their views on heredity, which, for Plato, provides the link between biology and ethics together with politics. In this respect, and regardless of the embryological details we find in the Timaeus, the Critias is one of Plato’s texts that explicitly evoke the direct impact of reproductive processes on long-term prosperity. Unfortunately, Plato’s remarks on this issue remain at the level of whole cities (as in Laws 6, 773b4–e2). And while there is no doubt that this level is conditioned by the moral state of the city’s inhabitants, we are offered no specific explanation of how the biological dimension projects into individual virtues and vices.^[29]

4 Conclusions

We have seen from different angles that the lack of such explanation is the reason why Plato’s biology offers no justification for treating the difference between men and women as a general moral difference. No such justification is derived from the mixture of the features of both parents, since Plato never suggests any kind of difference in the development of male and female embryos. Instead, Plato seems to derive his notion of female inferiority from the difference between male and female adults, more exactly from their roles in the present cities. While the Republic offers a criticism of these gender-based roles, Plato’s cosmogony and mythical history have therefore little to say about this subject. Indeed, the Timaeus offers no direct connection between its biology and its description of woman as an incarnation that expresses the moral fault of the previous male generation. On the one hand, it can then be argued that Timaeus’ cosmogony ‘posits a masculine human prototype’ that functions ‘as a fecund generative force in the cosmos.’^[30] On the other hand, the masculine actions are also a morally degenerative force that will result in establishing sexual difference in humans and, correlatively, other animal species.

The resulting scheme of things contains no specifically female virtues or vices, nor any more generally female souls. From a cosmic perspective, ‘the conditions that govern, both then and now, how all the animals exchange their forms’ (92c1–2) are conditions that allow for a broad spectrum of intergenerational transitions between species and genders. This is why this cosmic framework offers no blueprint for translating the sexual difference into the language of (mostly masculine) civic virtue, regardless of the fact that some less careful readers may have found here an incentive for reducing women to mothers existing solely for the sake of their offspring. Interestingly enough, this is precisely the step that Plato, in both the Republic and the Laws, refuses to take. In this respect, the Republic is especially eloquent in bypassing biology and determining instead the citizens’ roles through gender-neutral craft connected to strictly individual talent.

Admittedly, this turn does not imply a perfect equality between women and men in Socrates’ best city. A discussion of this issue and the possible prejudices at play is beyond the scope of this article, whose conclusions are nevertheless not only negative. It is significant that Plato tackles sex and procreation in a way that makes it difficult to conceptually interlock, rather than juxtapose, the biological explanation with ethical or political realms. How to address this gap is a question that unavoidably resonates in our reception of ancient thought. This gives further prominence to those passages where Plato comes close to admitting that the alleged female inferiority has no direct biological basis and results instead from social order. This article is thus an invitation to reread these passages and to do so with an eye to the importance of the artisanal model that Plato uses, quite uniquely, in his treatment of ethical questions, including those that concern sex and gender.