Symposium | Page 5

as in man. In the human body also there are two
loves; and the art of medicine shows which is the good and which is the
bad love, and persuades the body to accept the good and reject the bad,
and reconciles conflicting elements and makes them friends. Every art,
gymnastic and husbandry as well as medicine, is the reconciliation of
opposites; and this is what Heracleitus meant, when he spoke of a
harmony of opposites: but in strictness he should rather have spoken of
a harmony which succeeds opposites, for an agreement of
disagreements there cannot be. Music too is concerned with the
principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. In the
abstract, all is simple, and we are not troubled with the twofold love;
but when they are applied in education with their accompaniments of
song and metre, then the discord begins. Then the old tale has to be
repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, who must be
indulged sparingly, just as in my own art of medicine care must be
taken that the taste of the epicure be gratified without inflicting upon
him the attendant penalty of disease.
There is a similar harmony or disagreement in the course of the seasons
and in the relations of moist and dry, hot and cold, hoar frost and blight;
and diseases of all sorts spring from the excesses or disorders of the
element of love. The knowledge of these elements of love and discord
in the heavenly bodies is termed astronomy, in the relations of men
towards gods and parents is called divination. For divination is the
peacemaker of gods and men, and works by a knowledge of the
tendencies of merely human loves to piety and impiety. Such is the
power of love; and that love which is just and temperate has the
greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and friendship
with the gods and with one another. I dare say that I have omitted to
mention many things which you, Aristophanes, may supply, as I
perceive that you are cured of the hiccough.
Aristophanes is the next speaker:--
He professes to open a new vein of discourse, in which he begins by
treating of the origin of human nature. The sexes were originally three,
men, women, and the union of the two; and they were made

round--having four hands, four feet, two faces on a round neck, and the
rest to correspond. Terrible was their strength and swiftness; and they
were essaying to scale heaven and attack the gods. Doubt reigned in the
celestial councils; the gods were divided between the desire of quelling
the pride of man and the fear of losing the sacrifices. At last Zeus hit
upon an expedient. Let us cut them in two, he said; then they will only
have half their strength, and we shall have twice as many sacrifices. He
spake, and split them as you might split an egg with an hair; and when
this was done, he told Apollo to give their faces a twist and re-arrange
their persons, taking out the wrinkles and tying the skin in a knot about
the navel. The two halves went about looking for one another, and were
ready to die of hunger in one another's arms. Then Zeus invented an
adjustment of the sexes, which enabled them to marry and go their way
to the business of life. Now the characters of men differ accordingly as
they are derived from the original man or the original woman, or the
original man-woman. Those who come from the man-woman are
lascivious and adulterous; those who come from the woman form
female attachments; those who are a section of the male follow the
male and embrace him, and in him all their desires centre. The pair are
inseparable and live together in pure and manly affection; yet they
cannot tell what they want of one another. But if Hephaestus were to
come to them with his instruments and propose that they should be
melted into one and remain one here and hereafter, they would
acknowledge that this was the very expression of their want. For love is
the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.
There was a time when the two sexes were only one, but now God has
halved them,--much as the Lacedaemonians have cut up the
Arcadians,--and if they do not behave themselves he will divide them
again, and they will hop about with half a nose and face in basso
relievo. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may obtain
the goods of which love is the author, and be reconciled to God, and
find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this