Ancient Greece · Plato’s Symposium
The other half: what Plato’s Symposium says about love
Dear reader,
At a dinner party in Athens, around the year 416 BC, a group of men decided to spend the evening giving speeches in praise of love. Plato wrote it down, or imagined it, in the Symposium, and one of those speeches has outlived empires.
It belongs to Aristophanes, the comic poet. Once, he says, humans were round: four arms, four legs, two faces looking in opposite directions. Some were made of two men, some of two women, some of a man and a woman. They were so strong and so whole that they threatened the gods, so Zeus cut every one of them in half.
Since then, each of us has been walking around as half of something, looking for the rest. When two halves find each other, they do not want to let go. Love, Aristophanes concludes, is simply the name we give to the desire for wholeness.
It is a joke, of course. He was a comedian. But notice what the joke takes for granted: that a man may be looking for another man, a woman for another woman, and that this longing is exactly as old, as natural and as serious as any other. Twenty-four centuries ago, at a dinner table, that was not the radical part of the story.
The radical part is the idea that we are incomplete. That strength alone is not enough. That the space between two faces, nose to nose, is where something begins to heal.
With love, from the messenger,
Boté