Aristophanes' Speech in Plato's Symposium

Abstract

Aristophanes' encomium on Eros (Smp. 189c 2–193d 5) is a story with a moral. Once upon a time, all human beings were double creatures, each with two heads, two bodies and eight limbs. Then, by the command of Zeus, each double creature was cut in half, and so humans as we know them came into being. Every one of us ‘seeks his other half’, and this search is Eros. If we are pious, we may hope to be rewarded by success in the search; if we are impious, Zeus may cut us in two again, and each of us will be like a flat-fish or a figure in relief.The story is amusingly told, and the comedies of the real Aristophanes are also amusing; but when Sykutris says that the story ‘reminds us of the plot of a comedy’ and when Robin constructs a hypothetical comedy out of it, they are confounding essence and accident. The affinities of Aristophanes' story do not lie with his own comedies or with those of his contemporaries, but elsewhere.The extant plays of Aristophanes are firmly rooted in the present, and each of them explores the possibilities of a fantasy constructed out of the present. Mythology was exploited by the comic poets—rarely by Aristophanes himself, more extensively by some others—in order to present humorously distorted versions of the myths which were the traditional material of serious poetry. Some comic titles point to theogonic myths (e.g. Polyzelos, Birth of the Muses and Birth of Dionysos) or to myths about the era before the rule of Zeus (e.g. Phrynichos, Kronos, and the younger Kratinos, Giants and Titans).