Hephaestus Stands Over Them
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Aristophanes — δήλη ἐστίν, ὃ οὐ δύναται εἰπεῖν, ἀλλὰ μαντεύεται ὃ βούλεται, καὶ αἰνίττεται. καὶ εἰ αὐτοῖς ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ κατακειμένοις ἐπιστὰς ὁ Ἥφαιστος, ἔχων τὰ ὄργανα, ἔροιτο: τί ἔσθʼ ὃ βούλεσθε, ὦ ἄνθρωποι, ὑμῖν παρʼ ἀλλήλων γενέσθαι? καὶ εἰ ἀποροῦντας αὐτοὺς πάλιν ἔροιτο: ἆρά γε τοῦδε ἐπιθυμεῖτε, ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ γενέσθαι ὅτι μάλιστα ἀλλήλοις, ὥστε καὶ νύκτα καὶ ἡμέραν μὴ ἀπολείπεσθαι ἀλλήλων? εἰ γὰρ τούτου ἐπιθυμεῖτε, θέλω ὑμᾶς συντῆξαι καὶ
is plain, though it cannot say but it only guesses what it wants, and hints at it. And if, as they lay together in the same place, Hephaestus, holding his tools, stood over them and asked: 'What is it you want, you two, to get for yourselves from each other?' And if, finding them at a loss, he asked again: 'Is this indeed what you desire — to be with each other in the same place as much as possible, so that neither night nor day would you be parted from each other?' For if this is your desire, I am willing to fuse you together and...
Continuing 192c's suspended sentence: the soul's want is ‘plain’ even though it cannot say what it is, only divine it and hint. Aristophanes now stages Hephaestus, tools in hand, standing over a reunited pair to ask what they really want from each other, and pressing again when they cannot answer. His offer, once he guesses right, runs on into 192e.
Aristophanes' fantasy god is exactly wrong for the job, and the mismatch is surely deliberate. Hephaestus is the Olympian smith, married to Aphrodite herself — the goddess whose name gives τῶν ἀφροδισίων συνουσία, ‘the intercourse of Aphrodite's things,’ its plain word for sex, the very answer 192c has just ruled out. Homer's Odyssey (book 8) tells how Hephaestus once caught Aphrodite and Ares in an invisible net of his own forging — his marriage is the standing Greek joke about erotic humiliation. Bringing him in, ὄργανα in hand, to press the question of what the reunited pair actually want is Plato's private irony: the one god with no stake in believing desire is really about bodies is also the one god who can only answer it with a craftsman's fix, heat and weld two into one. The verb given to the soul a few lines earlier works the same seam from the other side. μαντεύεται does not mean ‘guesses’ the way English guesses; it is the verb for what a seer does — reading a sign without being able to say outright what it means. The soul does not know its desire the way it knows a fact; it divines it, the way an oracle divines a god's will from smoke or entrails. Diotima, still several speeches away, will turn out to be an actual prophetess (201d) — and this early, comic wording already treats erōs as closer to a reading than an appetite, a signal the soul catches long before it can put the signal into words. That is exactly the gap Hephaestus's tools cannot close.
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