On Translating Plato’s Symposium

As an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1970s I was mesmerised by Plato’s Symposium, which was an examination set text in Greek. The brilliant mise-en-scène involving a group of men discussing the meaning of love – or, more strictly, speaking in praise of Eros, the god of love – enlivened the way the topic was presented and seemed to align it with my adolescent preoccupations. In particular, I found (as many do) the speech of the comedian Aristophanes towards the centre of the dialogue to be immensely seductive. He spins a tale about the way original human beings were once duplicates of what we are now, consisting of male-male, female-female, or male-female creatures with two bodies – four hands, four legs, and so on. So powerful and self-satisfied were they that Zeus, chief of the Olympian gods, decided to chop them in half (‘as if slicing an egg with a hair’) so as to weaken them. ‘When the original form had been cut in half’ (I translate) ‘each half desperately clung to its other half, and they threw their arms around one another in their desperation to graft themselves back on to each other.’ Love, Aristophanes concludes, is what ‘draws us back to our original nature and seeks to make one out of two and so repair human nature’. This desire to be complete and whole, then, is what Eros inspires in human beings.

I found this comically contrived myth meaningful and enchanting, and in the conviction that a girlfriend – not herself a classicist – also would, I presented ...