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Aristophanes — συμφυσῆσαι εἰς τὸ αὐτό, ὥστε δύʼ ὄντας ἕνα γεγονέναι καὶ ἕως τʼ ἂν ζῆτε, ὡς ἕνα ὄντα, κοινῇ ἀμφοτέρους ζῆν, καὶ ἐπειδὰν ἀποθάνητε, ἐκεῖ αὖ ἐν Ἅιδου ἀντὶ δυοῖν ἕνα εἶναι κοινῇ τεθνεῶτε· ἀλλʼ ὁρᾶτε εἰ τούτου ἐρᾶτε, καὶ ἐξαρκεῖ ὑμῖν ἂν τούτου τύχητε. ταῦτʼ ἀκούσας ἴσμεν ὅτι οὐδʼ ἂν εἷς ἐξαρνηθείη οὐδʼ ἄλλο τι ἂν φανείη βουλόμενος, ἀλλʼ ἀτεχνῶς οἴοιτʼ ἂν ἀκηκοέναι τοῦτο ὃ πάλαι ἄρα ἐπεθύμει, συνελθὼν καὶ συντακεὶς τῷ ἐρωμένῳ ἐκ δυοῖν εἷς γενέσθαι. τοῦτο γάρ ἐστι τὸ αἴτιον, ὅτι ἡ ἀρχαία φύσις ἡμῶν ἦν αὕτη καὶ ἦμεν ὅλοι· τοῦ ὅλου οὖν τῇ ἐπιθυμίᾳ
to weld you together into one so that being two you become one and as long as ever you live as if being one in common you both live and when you die there again in Hades instead of two you are one jointly having died together but see whether you love this and whether it satisfies you to get this hearing this we know that no one would deny it nor would seem to want anything else but simply would think he had heard this which long after all he had desired to come together and be fused with the beloved to become one out of two for this is the cause that our ancient nature was this and we were wholes so it is desire of the whole—
Continuing Hephaestus's direct-quoted offer from 192d — to weld the reunited pair into one being for life and even in death — Aristophanes now reports that no pair, hearing it, would refuse or claim to want anything else; each would recognize the very thing wanted all along: fusion with the beloved. He then names the cause: humanity's original nature was to be a whole, and the sentence trails into 193a, where that lost wholeness gives Love its name.
Hephaestus's proposal is delivered in his own shop language: symphysêsai, the verb Aristophanes gives him, is a smith's word for welding by blast, built on φυσάω, 'to blow,' the same root that names a bellows. The god does not offer romance; he offers a repair job, treating two bodies the way he treats a cracked shield rim. That flatness is the joke and the argument at once — take the sentimental language of union literally, run it through a smithy, and what comes out the other side is a single fused corpse, since even death is included in the deal (κοινῇ τεθνεῶτε, 'having died in it together'). Aristophanes' crowd does not flinch. No one, he says, would refuse the offer, and no one would name any other thing wanted — the myth has made its case so completely that its human audience is written in as already convinced.
The turn at τοῦτο γάρ ἐστι τὸ αἴτιον is where the joke stops being only a joke. The reason we cannot say what we want, Aristophanes now claims, is that the request predates language: our ἀρχαία φύσις, our ancient nature, was to be ὅλοι, wholes, and every later desire is read backward from that lost condition. The claim has a cousin outside comedy — in the Republic, Socrates argues that the best city is the one that feels pleasure and pain as a single body does, calling that unity the mark of a city's health (462a–e). Aristophanes gets there first, by fusing two people instead of a whole polis, and by forge-work instead of argument — but the shape of the claim, that the good state is the most unified one, is the same.
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