ally inclined to marry or beget
children,--if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they
are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded;
and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always
embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his
other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth
or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love
and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's
sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass
their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards
the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but
of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot
tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.
Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are
lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one
another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that
when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one;
always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what
you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together,
so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common
life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world
below still be one departed soul instead of two--I ask whether this
is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain
this?'--there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would
deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one
another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of
his ancient need (compare Arist. Pol.). And the reason is that human
nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and
pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we
were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed
us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians
(compare Arist. Pol.). And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is
a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo,
like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured
on monuments, and that we shall be lik