In Ancient Greece, a symposium was not a “meeting or conference for discussion of some subject” (“symposium”), but rather a drinking party. Plato’s Symposium was written in the fourth century B.C.E. and offers a fictitious account of a gathering of notable Greek citizens at the home of Agathon. The famous philosopher Socrates is late to the banquet because he has fallen into a philosophical reverie in the doorway of a neighboring home. Upon arriving,

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanias said, “And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday’s potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday.”

Pausanias’s comment prompts a discussion on the perennially relevant topic of “how can drinking be made easiest.” The ensuing debate is cut short, however, by the physician Eryximachus, who humbly interposes his medical opinion: “I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, if I can help, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday’s carouse.” Resolving not to drink heavily at this particular symposium, the company instead decides on a different pursuit and once again follows Eryximachus’s proposal that “each of us in turn, going from left to right, shall make a speech in honour of Love.”

When it is Aristophanes’s turn to speak, he tells a story of the origins of love itself—of the longing of one person to be with another: “Let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost.” Aristophanes’s speech, which chronicles the punishment of the “original” humans by Zeus for becoming too powerful, is reminiscent of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which the Judeo-Christian God afflicts human beings with multiple languages in order to destroy their ability to collaborate with one another and thereby minimize their power (Genesis 11, 1-9). Aristophanes’s story positions love as the byproduct of Zeus’s violent act—a simultaneously diminishing and ennobling force.

Like Genesis, this text describes the state of the original humans as quite different from their present condition. However, Aristophanes’s speech portrays a more flexible understanding of human love and desire than many other creation stories. For more information about The Symposium, please see the introductory material in Jowett’s translation of the text, available via Project Gutenberg.