Three Strains, One Cutting
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Aristophanes — ὅσαι αὖ γυναῖκες φίλανδροί τε καὶ μοιχεύτριαι ἐκ τούτου τοῦ γένους γίγνονται. ὅσαι δὲ τῶν γυναικῶν γυναικὸς τμῆμά εἰσιν, οὐ πάνυ αὗται τοῖς ἀνδράσι τὸν νοῦν προσέχουσιν, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας τετραμμέναι εἰσί, καὶ αἱ ἑταιρίστριαι ἐκ τούτου τοῦ γένους γίγνονται. ὅσοι δὲ ἄρρενος τμῆμά εἰσι, τὰ ἄρρενα διώκουσι, καὶ τέως μὲν ἂν παῖδες ὦσιν, ἅτε τεμάχια ὄντα τοῦ ἄρρενος, φιλοῦσι τοὺς ἄνδρας καὶ χαίρουσι συγκατακείμενοι καὶ συμπεπλεγμένοι
...and as many women, in turn, are man-loving and adulteresses, coming from this stock. But as many of the women as are a section of a woman these do not pay any attention to men, but are turned rather toward women, and the companions-to-women come from this same stock. And as many as are a section of a male pursue males, and for as long as they are boys — seeing they are cut pieces of the male — they are fond of men and delight in lying beside them and being embraced—
Continuing directly from 191d's sentence: Aristophanes has just named the men descended from the androgynous kind (woman-chasers, adulterers) and now completes the parallel — androgynous-descended women who are man-loving and adulteresses. Two more lineages follow: women who are the half of a whole woman, who turn toward women instead of men (the ἑταιρίστριαι, 'companions to women'), and men who are the half of a whole male, who chase after males and, while still boys, are drawn to lie beside and embrace men. The sentence runs on into 192a.
Aristophanes runs through the three surviving strains of his myth with the flat bookkeeping tone he has kept since the halving began — coming from this stock, τμῆμά εἰσιν, is the language of an inventory, not a romance. The word he coins for the double-woman's descendants, hetairístriai, appears nowhere earlier in Greek: Plato seems to be minting the term on the spot to fill a gap his own physics has just created, the way phílandroi and moicheútriai quietly rewrite ordinary words for 'wife' and 'adulteress' as symptoms of anatomy rather than character. The double-woman's line gets one flat sentence and no more; the double-man's line gets the rest of the speech.
The boys who are τεμάχια τοῦ ἄρρενος, 'cut pieces of the male,' are the ones Aristophanes lingers over, and the next few Stephanus pages will call them the best of their generation — bold, manly, drawn to what is like themselves rather than deficient in it. Diotima's speech, still to come, will insist that erōs seeks the good, not mere likeness; Aristophanes states the opposite thesis here in its purest form — desire as homecoming to a lost half — and Plato lets both accounts stand without adjudicating between them.
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