A Memorial of the Old Suffering
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Aristophanes — τὰς πολλὰς ἐξελέαινε καὶ τὰ στήθη διήρθρου, ἔχων τι τοιοῦτον ὄργανον οἷον οἱ σκυτοτόμοι περὶ τὸν καλάποδα λεαίνοντες τὰς τῶν σκυτῶν ῥυτίδας· ὀλίγας δὲ κατέλιπε, τὰς περὶ αὐτὴν τὴν γαστέρα καὶ τὸν ὀμφαλόν, μνημεῖον εἶναι τοῦ παλαιοῦ πάθους. ἐπειδὴ οὖν ἡ φύσις δίχα ἐτμήθη, ποθοῦν ἕκαστον τὸ ἥμισυ τὸ αὑτοῦ συνῄει, καὶ περιβάλλοντες τὰς χεῖρας καὶ συμπλεκόμενοι ἀλλήλοις, ἐπιθυμοῦντες συμφῦναι, ἀπέθνῃσκον ὑπὸ λιμοῦ καὶ τῆς
He smoothed away most of them, and shaped the chest's joints, holding some such a tool as shoemakers use, smoothing, around the last, the wrinkles of the hides; but a few he left behind, around the belly itself and the navel, to be a reminder of the old suffering. So then, once nature had been cut in two, each one, longing for its own half, came together with it, and throwing their arms around each other, and entwining with one another, desiring to grow into one, they began to die of hunger, and of the—
Continuing directly from 190e (Apollo turning the face around and drawing the skin taut over the wound, not extracted here): the god finishes the surgery, smoothing the remaining creases and shaping the chest, the way a shoemaker works leather around a last, and leaves a few wrinkles at the belly and navel as a permanent reminder of the cutting. Once nature had been split in two, each half went searching for its own other half.
The comparison Apollo's surgery gets is deliberately unglamorous: ὥσπερ οἱ σκυτοτόμοι περὶ τὸν καλάποδα — the way shoemakers smooth leather around a κάλαπους, a wooden last. LSJ cites this very sentence for the word; it barely survives elsewhere in Greek. Plato does not reach for a temple or a sculptor's workshop to picture a god's handiwork. He reaches for a cobbler's bench, the same flattening move Aristophanes used two sections earlier when Zeus halved fruit for pickling. And σκυτοτόμος is itself built from σκῦτος ('hide') and τέμνω — the identical cutting-verb that names Zeus's division of the whole human race. The craftsman who finishes the wound and the god who opened it are named with the same root.
What survives the finishing work is the navel, called a μνημεῖον τοῦ παλαιοῦ πάθους — a memorial of the old suffering. Every human body still carries, at its center, the permanent record of a wound nobody now living experienced firsthand. That is the shape Aristophanes gives to erōs before he even names it: a longing whose object no longer exists as itself, only as a missing half, and a species whose founding myth is stamped onto its own skin. The scene that follows — halves clutching each other and starving rather than separate — reads as comic exaggeration, but the myth insists it is not: this is what desire looks like when it is traced back to its literal, physical origin rather than dressed up as admiration for a beautiful soul, the picture Socrates will offer in his own speech later in the dialogue.
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