Two From One
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Aristophanes — ὁ ἔρως ἔμφυτος ἀλλήλων τοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ τῆς ἀρχαίας φύσεως συναγωγεὺς καὶ ἐπιχειρῶν ποιῆσαι ἓν ἐκ δυοῖν καὶ ἰάσασθαι τὴν φύσιν τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην. ἕκαστος οὖν ἡμῶν ἐστιν ἀνθρώπου σύμβολον, ἅτε τετμημένος ὥσπερ αἱ ψῆτται, ἐξ ἑνὸς δύο· ζητεῖ δὴ ἀεὶ τὸ αὑτοῦ ἕκαστος σύμβολον. ὅσοι μὲν οὖν τῶν ἀνδρῶν τοῦ κοινοῦ τμῆμά εἰσιν, ὃ δὴ τότε ἀνδρόγυνον ἐκαλεῖτο, φιλογύναικές τέ εἰσι καὶ οἱ πολλοὶ τῶν μοιχῶν ἐκ τούτου τοῦ γένους γεγόνασιν, καὶ
Love is inborn in human beings, for one another, and a reuniter of our ancient nature, attempting to make one out of two, and to heal human nature— Each of us, then, is the matching half of a human being, since we've been cut like flatfish, two from one; each one indeed always goes looking for his own matching half. Now, all the men who are a slice of the common kind — which was then called 'androgynous' — are woman-lovers, and most of the adulterers come from this kind, and—
Continuing directly from 191c: Aristophanes explains that Eros is this longing built into human beings to reunite with their missing half and heal our fractured nature; each of us is thus the matching half — the sýmbolon — of a whole person, cut in two like a flatfish, always seeking our own match. He then opens his catalogue of lovers by original kind, starting with the men split from the androgynous whole.
Aristophanes calls each surviving half a σύμβολον, and the word is not decorative. A sýmbolon in ordinary Greek life was a physical object — a bone, a coin, a shard of pottery — snapped in two so that each party to a guest-friendship or a contract kept one half; years later the two jagged edges, fitted back together, proved the bearer's identity. Plato's audience handled such tokens themselves. So when Aristophanes says ἑκαστος ζητεῖ δὴ ἀεὶ τὸ αὑτοῦ σύμβολον, ‘each of us always looks for his own matching half,' he is not gesturing at the modern, abstract sense of ‘symbol’ — an idea standing in for something absent. He means a literal, jagged, physically useless half, searching for the one other half whose broken edge happens to fit it. The English word descends from exactly this image, though by the time it reaches us the token has dissolved into pure abstraction.
The diction around it stays as plain as a naturalist's field notes. τμῆμα ('a section') and γεγόνασιν ('have come to be, are descended') describe the origin of desire the way a zoologist describes a species: adulterers and woman-lovers are not moral types anyone judges but a τμῆμα, a slice of stock, inherited the way a flatfish inherits its shape. The move recalls the myth of metals in the Republic, where a person's disposition is likewise explained by what they were made from rather than chosen over a lifetime — except Aristophanes plays his version for comedy, not civic order, and the material in question is which half of which original double-body a person happens to be cut from. The catalogue is still unfinished here: nothing has yet been said about the men split from the all-male whole, or about the ἑταιρίστριαι Aristophanes names a few lines later; the passage breaks off mid-list, on the connective καί.
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