How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers
An exclusive excerpt from Prof. Armand D'Angour and Princeton University Press
PAC would like to extend their deepest thanks to Prof. Armand D'Angour and Princeton University Press for this exclusive excerpt from How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers.
Prof. D'Angour is an esteemed guest speaker at our upcoming virtual event The Philosophy of Love and Relationships, Saturday October 25 at 1 pm EDT.
How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers
Chapter 4 Finding One’s Other Half: Aristophanes
Cured of his hiccups, Aristophanes makes his brilliantly humorous contribution to the discussion. He changes the atmosphere by spinning a fantasy-story about the meaning of love. Once upon a time, he says, humans were compound creatures each consisting of either two male or two female halves, or the combination of male and female (androgyne). These original humans were so arrogant and self-sufficient that Zeus decided to weaken them by cutting them in two, creating human beings as we are today. Once split, each half longed to be united with its missing other half, so the new human beings were pacified by being allowed to have intercourse with each other, both for the sake of pleasure and also to perpetuate their race. Human beings, says Aristophanes, still long for their original wholeness; and Love is the force that impels each of us to search for our ‘other half’.
Aristophanes picture is appealing. The notion of finding a perfect fit, one’s ideal other half, is the stuff of many a romantic tale. It is easy to understand how like is drawn to like, and to understand the warmth of the metaphor ‘half of my soul’ as used by the Roman poet Horace of his friend Virgil. The speech is also a chance to show that Love doesn’t have to be entirely serious and solemn. Just as his fit of hiccups draws attention to bodily functions, Aristophanes’ contribution shows how there is something comical about sex and the physical means of indulging in it. Yet that physical act is what allows not only for pleasure but for the perpetuation of the race. Perpetuation of the self in some form, through the creative union brought about by love, offers an answer to the tragic scenario sketched by Phaedrus. For him, heroic stance of lovers, while inspired and admirable, could be proven only by their death. Aristophanes’ picture presents two new propositions, first that love emerges out of a lack, and secondly that it aims at the perpetuation of the individual through intercourse. Both notions will be picked up by the speech of Socrates/Diotima.
Just as Eryximachus has done, Aristophanes suggests that love is a uniting force, but in his case it is one that aims to unite similar elements rather than harmonise dissimilar ones. It might seem that such a view is retrograde, since Pausanias has already indicated that Love can work a creative and ennobling effect through individuals who differ, whether through the union of young and old, male and female, educated and unformed. In this case, however, the difference points even more clearly to the notion that Love requires an inadequacy, a gap that needs to be filled. A human being is really only half a creature, and the longing for the missing half is the desire for completion that Love engenders.
Original Text
A. The original nature of human beings was not lie it is today. First, there were three sexes of human, not just the two we have now, male and female, but a third type that combined both of these. A word still exists for it, “androgynous”, indicating both male and female, and now used solely as a term of reproach, but at that time there was a type of human that was androgynous in form, which has now vanished. Secondly, the shape of the human being was completely rotund; its back and its sides were formed in a circle, and it had four hands, four legs, two identical faces on a cylindrical neck, one head with two faces facing in opposite directions, four ears, two sets of genitals, and so on and so forth as you can imagine. It could walk upright just like now, in whatever direction it needed; and when it started to run it circled rapidly round and round using what were then its eight limbs, the way tumblers fling their legs up and round when they do cartwheels.
B. The reason there were three sexes was that the male was originally the child of the sun, the female of the earth, and the androgyne of the moon, because the moon is part sun and part earth. Not only were they themelves circular, they moved that way owing to their affinity with their parents. They had impressive strength and power, and had big plans. They challenged the gods, and as Homer recounts about Ephialtes and Otus, they tried to make a path up to heaven to attack the gods. Zeus and the other gods discussed what to do with them. They were in a quandary because there was no option of killing them and destroying the race with thunderbolts as they’d done with the giants, as that would mean an end to the honors and sacrifices they received from humans; but neither could they let them defy them unrestrained. After long reflection Zeus said: ‘I’ve come up with a plan for humans to exist without this unruliness. I’ll diminish them by cutting them in two, That way they’ll be weaker, and simultaneously more profitable to us because there’ll be more of them. They will walk upright on two legs, and if they continue acting thuggishly and won’t hold their peace, I’ll cut them in half again so that they’ll go around hopping on one leg.’
C. So saying he proceeded to cut the humans in half, like sorb apples chopped in preparation for pickling, or an egg being sliced with a hair. He told Apollo to turn the face and half of the neck of each cut human round toward the cut side, so that each person observing it would act more humbly, and to heal the wounds. Apollo turned the face around and pulled the skin together from all sides, the way you pull a purse shut with drawstrings, to form what we now call the stomach. He made an opening and tied it over the middle of the stomach to form what’s now the navel. He smoothed out all the wrinkles and shaped the chest using the tool shoemakers use on their last when smoothing out wrinkles in hides, but he left a few behind in the area around the stomach and navel to be a reminder to humans of their primeval experience…
Armand D’Angour is Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He has published his research into the music, literature, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Recent books include Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (2019), How to Innovate: an Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (2021), and How to Talk about Love: an ancient guide for modern lovers (2025)
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