symposium   

in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more

profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they

continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and

they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two,

like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide

an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade

Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the

man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a

lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and

compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin

from the sides all over that which in our language is called the

belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the

centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the

navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the

wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he

left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a

memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of

man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their

arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow

into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and


self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when

one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought

another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the sections of

entire men or women, and clung to that. They were being destroyed,

when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts

of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their

position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like

grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the

transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the

mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race

might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and

rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the