Plato's Myth of Aristophanes and Its Meaning

A psychiatrist and philosopher interprets Plato’s famous myth of soulmates from the Symposium.

Plato’s Symposium is one of the greatest works ever written about love. In it, a group of distinguished Athenians take turns praising Eros, the god of love. The comic playwright Aristophanes chooses not to argue philosophically, but to tell a myth. His tale of divided human beings searching for their lost halves has become one of the most influential stories about romantic love ever told.

The myth probably draws on the cosmology of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. More importantly, it helped shape the modern idea that love is the search for one’s ‘other half’.

The Myth

In the beginning, there were three kinds of people: male, descended from the sun; female, descended from the earth; and hermaphrodite, with both male and female parts, descended from the moon.

These early people were completely round, each with four arms and four legs, two identical faces on opposite sides of a head with four ears, and all else to match. They walked both forward and backward and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets.

Because they were wild and unruly and threatening to scale the heavens, Zeus, the father of the gods, cut each one down the middle ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’—and even threatened to do the same again so that they might hop on one leg.

Apollo, the god of light and enlightenment, then turned their heads to make them face towards their wound, pulled their skin around to cover up the wound, and tied it together at the navel like a purse. He made sure to leave a few wrinkles on what became known as the abdomen so that they might be reminded of their punishment.

After that, people searched all over for their other half. When they finally found it, they wrapped themselves around it so tightly and unremittingly that they began to die from hunger and neglect. Taking pity on them, Zeus moved their genitals to the front so that those who were previously androgynous could procreate, and those who were previously male could obtain satisfaction and move on to higher things.

Aristophanes explains that this is the origin of erotic desire: those of us who desire members of the opposite sex used to be hermaphrodites, whereas men who desire men used to be male, and women who desire women used to be female.

When we find our other half, we are ‘lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ that cannot be accounted for by mere lust, but by the need to be whole again, to be restored to our original nature. Our greatest wish, if we could only have it, would then be for Hephæstus, the god of fire, to melt us into one another so that our souls could be at one and share in a common fate.

Interpretation

The myth is often remembered as the origin of the idea that each of us has a soulmate. But this is only part of Aristophanes’ point.

Human beings long not merely for another person but for completeness. Love promises to heal the fundamental wound of separation that defines the human condition. Our desire is therefore not merely sexual, but metaphysical.

Yet Plato also points beyond Aristophanes. The Symposium culminates not in this myth but in Socrates’ account of love as a longing for beauty, wisdom, and ultimately the Form of Beauty itself. Romantic love may awaken the soul, but philosophy teaches it to seek something higher.

Seen in this light, Aristophanes’ myth is both profoundly true and profoundly incomplete. Human beings naturally seek wholeness in another person, yet no finite relationship can fully satisfy the longing for transcendence. The beloved points beyond itself towards truth, beauty, and the good.

That is why the myth still resonates. It expresses something universal about human loneliness while suggesting that our deepest longing may not ultimately be for another person, but for the lost wholeness that another person only seems to promise.