Every civilization has something that captivates its members. Our current civilization has either music or movies. The middle ages had religion. The Romans had powerful generals. The ancient Greeks had stories and plays. There is one thing in common with each of these. The answer is simply myth. Some movies are just different adaptations of myth. Religion is just one big belief that has its origins in myth. The generals would try to become similar to the gods in myth. The ancient Greeks stories would rely heavily on myth. What this essay is interested in however is myth in ancient Greece. Just like a language can have many different dialects, their can be many different myths about the same subject. One question that many people have asked and that has been addressed by myth is “Where did humans come from?” My favorite answer to this was written in Plato’s Symposium. It is a little difficult to establish who is the author of this myth. It is true that most myths do not have authors but even if we know who the author is without a shadow of a doubt, this is an exception. The problem arises because, the book is written by Plato, however, he tells us that it is Aristophanes who tells the story. We also can’t know if this account is true since there is a great gap between the time that the story was told by Aristophanes and the time it was written down by Plato. Apparently the symposium (Greek for drinking party) where Aristophanes spoke took place around 416B.C. but there is evidence that Plato did not write it down until after 385B.C. Around this period in time all the stories that were written were usually entered in contests as plays. This would have been no exception. The Symposium mainly focuses on talk of Eros, Greek for passionate love. It is from this that Aristophanes speech on the origin of humans comes from. The one thing that people must realize when they read this short myth in ...
