Cyberdov

My college education continues, courtesy of Tamar who sent me the following:

I was doing my reading for my intro to feminist theory class and I came across this (from Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”):

“According to the Platonic myth, there were at the begining men, women, and hermaphrodites. Each individual had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two conjoined bodies. At a certain time they were split in two, and ever since each half seeks to rejoin its corresponding half”

Doesn’t this sound EXACTLY like the gemara (or midrash maybe) on the creation of man in perek aleph of bereisheet (the “shnei partsufim” thing).
I wonder if Plato and the rabbis were both building on a world myth that was in wide circulation, if they each came to the idea independently, or if Plato was actually a learned talmud scholar

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