The Sources of the Androgyne

Abstract

The most familiar source of the word androgyne is the myth Plato recounts in the voice of the comic poet Aristophanes in the Symposium.¹ If Plato was among the first to use the word, the early modern period did not necessarily consider him to be the first to deal with what it signified; the concept was commonly believed to have even earlier sources in the book of Genesis, thereby giving the androgyne roots in both Judeo-Christian and Greek culture. Rather than thinking of these as two parallel streams, the works of Plato were often understood to owe their wisdom to Plato’s access to the Pentateuch. Eusebius (263–339 CE) argues strongly that that echoes of biblical themes in various parts of Plato’s work were not a case of the independent, accidental production of similar ideas, but instead were evidence that Greek thinkers, most especially Plato, had had access to the Hebrew Bible so that where their work resembled ideas expressed in scripture, it was because Greek philosophers had access to divinely inspired truth, albeit sometimes second hand and always without the insight of the grace that comes with faith.² The connection was explained by assertions that Plato, on a trip to Egypt, gained access to Moses’s writings.³ Moses was understood to be the direct, personal author of the Pentateuch, making a further parallel between two great men.