The Healer of Our Old Nature
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Aristophanes — ἐπίκουρός τε ὢν τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἰατρὸς τούτων ὧν ἰαθέντων μεγίστη εὐδαιμονία ἂν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ γένει εἴη. ἐγὼ οὖν πειράσομαι ὑμῖν εἰσηγήσασθαι τὴν δύναμιν αὐτοῦ, ὑμεῖς δὲ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι ἔσεσθε. δεῖ δὲ πρῶτον ὑμᾶς μαθεῖν τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην φύσιν καὶ τὰ παθήματα αὐτῆς. ἡ γὰρ πάλαι ἡμῶν φύσις οὐχ αὑτὴ ἦν ἥπερ νῦν, ἀλλʼ ἀλλοία. πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ τρία ἦν τὰ γένη τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, οὐχ ὥσπερ νῦν δύο, ἄρρεν καὶ θῆλυ,
being both an ally of mankind and a physician of those ills whose healing would be the greatest happiness for the human race. So I will try to set out for you his power, and you will be teachers of the rest. But first you must learn human nature and what befell it. For our nature of old was not the same as it now is, but quite other. First of all, there were three kinds of human beings, not two as now, male and female,
Aristophanes has the floor at last — his hiccups made him yield his turn to Eryximachus the doctor — and the unit opens mid-sentence, finishing his claim that Eros is mankind's ally and physician. He then announces the myth to come and breaks off mid-sentence again: there were once three kinds of human being, not two; only male and female have been named, and the third, the man-woman, arrives in 189e.
The answer starts with a strange claim about physis. Human nature, he says, was once not the same as it is now, and he promises to teach its pathēmata — the things that happened to it. No one else at this table talks that way about our nature. For the other speakers it is simply what it is; for Aristophanes it is the residue of an event, and desire is what the event left behind. The move is close kin to the Phaedrus, where the soul once flew, lost its wings, and feels love as the ache of them pushing back through. Plato gives one version to Socrates in an inspired palinode and the other to a comedian about to tell a joke about being cut in half, and he does not tell us which he means more seriously. The sentence stops before the third kind is named: he has counted to three and given us two.
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