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Aristophanes — ἄλλης ἀργίας. διὰ τὸ μηδὲν ἐθέλειν χωρὶς ἀλλήλων ποιεῖν. καὶ ὁπότε τι ἀποθάνοι τῶν ἡμίσεων, τὸ δὲ λειφθείη, τὸ λειφθὲν ἄλλο ἐζήτει καὶ συνεπλέκετο, εἴτε γυναικὸς τῆς ὅλης ἐντύχοι ἡμίσει— ὃ δὴ νῦν γυναῖκα καλοῦμεν— εἴτε ἀνδρός· καὶ οὕτως ἀπώλλυντο. ἐλεήσας δὲ ὁ Ζεὺς ἄλλην μηχανὴν πορίζεται, καὶ μετατίθησιν αὐτῶν τὰ αἰδοῖα εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν— τέως γὰρ καὶ ταῦτα ἐκτὸς εἶχον, καὶ ἐγέννων
...for the rest of their listlessness— their unwillingness to do anything apart from one another. And whenever one of the halves died and the other was left, the one left behind would go looking for another and embrace it, whether it happened to meet the half of a whole woman —which we now call a 'woman'— or of a man; and so they kept perishing. But Zeus, taking pity, provides another device: he moves their genitals around to the front— for until then they had these too on the outside, and would beget—
Continuing directly from 191a: the desperate double-bodied humans, still fused in an embrace, die of starvation and mutual inertia whenever either half will not act without the other; Zeus, pitying them, invents a second remedy and moves their genitals from the back to the front of the body, noting in an aside that until then they had always faced outward.
Aristophanes breaks his own myth to gloss a word: ὅ δὴ νῦν γυναῖκα καλοῦμεν, ‘which we now call a woman,’ treats gynē as if it were freshly minted at this exact moment of cosmic history, the leftover half of something that used to be whole. It is the same trick Socrates plays straight-faced in the Cratylus, pretending a common word still carries its origin story and seeing what falls out. Here what falls out is comic: ordinary Greek for ‘woman’ turns out, on Aristophanes’ telling, to be a fossil of catastrophe, no stranger than calling a stump ‘the tree.’
The mechanics stay just as plain. πορίζεται is the ordinary verb for a household procuring its own supplies, and μετατίθησιν means simply ‘relocates’ or ‘repositions,’ the word a builder uses for moving a beam. Zeus does not redesign the body so much as adjust one part of it, continuing the deflating technique from the previous section, where he halved people the way a cook halves fruit. The relocation sets up the myth’s real point, which Aristophanes states outright a few lines on: what looks here like a plumbing fix for a dying species is the origin of erōs itself, desire aimed at recovering one’s own missing half rather than at any stranger’s body.
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