No Temples for Love
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Eryximachus — ἴσως μέντοι, ἂν δόξῃ μοι, ἀφήσω σε.
Aristophanes — καὶ μήν, ὦ Ἐρυξίμαχε, εἰπεῖν τὸν Ἀριστοφάνη, ἄλλῃ γέ πῃ ἐν νῷ ἔχω λέγειν ἢ ᾗ σύ τε καὶ Παυσανίας εἰπέτην. ἐμοὶ γὰρ δοκοῦσιν ἅνθρωποι παντάπασι τὴν τοῦ ἔρωτος δύναμιν οὐκ ᾐσθῆσθαι, ἐπεὶ αἰσθανόμενοί γε μέγιστʼ ἂν αὐτοῦ ἱερὰ κατασκευάσαι καὶ βωμούς, καὶ θυσίας ἂν ποιεῖν μεγίστας, οὐχ ὥσπερ νῦν τούτων οὐδὲν γίγνεται περὶ αὐτόν, δέον πάντων μάλιστα γίγνεσθαι. ἔστι γὰρ θεῶν φιλανθρωπότατος,
Perhaps, though, if it seems good to me, I'll release you. And indeed, Eryximachus, said Aristophanes, I mean to speak in some other way than the way you and Pausanias spoke. For it seems to me that human beings have entirely failed to perceive the power of Love — since if they perceived it they would have built him the greatest temples and altars, and would make the greatest sacrifices — not as it is now, when none of this happens for him, though it ought to happen more than anything. For he is the most loving of mankind of all the gods,
Eryximachus, still holding Aristophanes to account for his hiccup joke, allows that he may yet let him off. Aristophanes then launches his speech proper: he means to take a different approach from Pausanias and Eryximachus, and opens by charging that human beings have entirely failed to grasp Love's power — if they had, they would have built him the greatest temples and altars and made him the greatest sacrifices, though in fact nothing of the kind happens, despite his being the most human-loving of the gods.
Aristophanes calls Eros theôn philanthrōpótatos, "the most human-loving of the gods" — a striking claim on behalf of a god who, in ordinary Athenian religious life, had almost nothing to show for it. There was no civic temple to Eros comparable to Athena's on the Acropolis, no state altar tended by a public priesthood. His best-known Attic cult site was a modest altar at the entrance to the Academy gymnasium, bound up with the athletic and pederastic culture of young men rather than with the machinery of the polis; Thespiae in Boeotia kept an older image of him, but Athens itself gave him little of the architecture Aristophanes says he deserves. So the complaint about missing hiera and bōmoi is not empty comic bluster — an Athenian in the room could have walked the city and confirmed it.
He also marks his method before he starts. He means to speak állēi gé pēi, "in some other way," than Pausanias and Eryximachus did: Pausanias had split Eros into a common and a heavenly pair, Eryximachus had spread him across medicine, music, and the seasons as a principle of balance. Aristophanes' "other way" turns out to be neither a division nor a cosmic diagram but a story about what human bodies used to look like, and what was done to them. Calling Eros the friend of mankind here, before that story has been told, sets up the punch line in advance: the speech to come will explain exactly what kind of friend he has to be.
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