I

In recent years there has been a renaissance of scholarly interest in Plato's Symposium, as scholars have again begun to recognize the philosophical subtlety and complexity of the dialogue.Footnote ² But despite the quality and quantity of the studies that have been produced few contain an extended analysis of the speech of Aristophanes;Footnote ³ an unusual oversight given that Aristophanes' encomium is one of the highlights of the dialogue. In contrast to the plodding and technical speeches that precede it, the father of Old Comedy structures his own speech around a fantastic fable in which he tells how humans, having originally taken the form of comically grotesque ‘circlemen’,Footnote ⁴ assumed their present shape after being divided in two for their impious actions against the gods. This story forms the basis of his discussion of Eros, which he claims is nothing more than a desire to return to our original form (192e–193a). One study on which commentators continue to draw heavilyFootnote ⁵ for their own interpretation of Aristophanes' encomium is that of Arlene Saxonhouse.Footnote ⁶ As the title of her article suggests, central to Saxonhouse's analysis is her interpretation of the Net of Hephaestus passage (192c–e), in which Aristophanes suggests that, if offered the chance to be welded together with their beloveds and so become circlemen once more, all humans would leap at the opportunity, thinking that this would be all of the fortune that they could ever desire. For Saxonhouse this passage, more than any other, demonstrates that, on Aristophanes' view, our original nature is one of perfection. According to Saxonhouse, our original form is the telos of human existence and the standard by which we judge the good life, because she understands circlemen as being self-complete beings entirely free from desire and need.Footnote ⁷ Put simply, to be a circleman is to be a perfect being. Eros, on this reading, as the desire for wholeness, is to be praised because it reminds us of our deficiency, and instills in us a desire to actualize our potential for perfection. But unlike Socrates' encomium, which ends with the lover realizing their potential by possessing knowledge of the divine, Saxonhouse believes that the Net of Hephaestus passage lends a tragic end to Aristophanes' speech. For Saxonhouse it is Plato's dirty trick that he turns Aristophanes into a tragedian.

According to Saxonhouse the Net of Hephaestus passage highlights the pitiableness of divided human existence, and then dangles, like a carrot in front of a mule, the possibility that the gods may show mercy and grant us wholeness once again. But as for the mule, Saxonhouse suggests, Aristophanes' carrot also presents a fool's hope. Because the Net of Hephaestus is merely a poetic invention, rather than an actual resource upon which people are able to draw, we recognize that the unity that the Net offers can only be achieved through the destruction of our bodies, and that while we live our desire for wholeness can never be satisfied. Aristophanes then concludes his speech with the imperative that we must be pious, which Saxonhouse (n. 6, 30) reads as meaning that we must resign ourselves to the inescapability of our deficiency.

I shall argue that Saxonhouse's reading of the Net of Hephaestus passage is mistaken, and misses the message of Aristophanes' encomium. Far from being a tragedy in which we are supposed to lament the impossibility of achieving perfection, I suggest that the Net of Hephaestus passage is supposed to show us that ‘perfection’ is an illusory goal that is completely foreign to human nature, and that the moral of his speech as a whole is that people can live a flourishing and satisfying existence, but only if we give up on the desire to transcend our deficiency.

II

To begin my analysis it will be useful to consider the origins of the images on which Aristophanes draws in the Net of Hephaestus passage in order to understand the purpose of this part of his speech. The story of the Net of Hephaestus is first told by the poet Demodocus to Odysseus in Book 8 of the Odyssey, where he describes how Hephaestus, having discovered that his wife, Aphrodite, is cuckolding him with his half-brother, Ares, devises the plan of chaining the two together on their love bed:

Having executed his plan, Hephaestus then calls on all the other gods to observe the lovers, now irrevocably tied in embrace. All of the male gods, though not the goddesses, assemble to laugh at the lovers' misfortune, and mock them for their pitiable predicament. The only exception to this is Hermes who, smitten by his erotic desire for Aphrodite, exclaims: ‘Archer, bind me down with triple those endless chains! | Let all you gods look down on, and all you goddesses too – | how I'd love to bed that golden Aphrodite!’ (8.340–2, tr. Fagles).

According to Saxonhouse (n. 6, 17), Aristophanes, like Hermes, fails to understand that the story of the Net of Hephaestus ends badly for the lovers, and that because of this he inverts the tragedy of the story in his own speech. In the original story the Net is something that one would wish to avoid at all costs, but Saxonhouse suggests that the tragedy in Aristophanes' use of the story is precisely that we do not have recourse to Hephaestus' Net. Saxonhouse argues this way because she understands Aristophanes' circlemen to be perfect, and thus believes that the promise of the Net is desirable. But do we have any reason to think that Aristophanes misreads this story so completely? And is this really the picture of human nature that Aristophanes paints in his speech? I do not think that we have any reason to answer these questions positively, as once we examine the fundamental premise of this interpretation, the idea that Aristophanes' circlemen are ‘perfect’, Saxonhouse's reading falls apart. Let us begin by comparing the characters of the historical Aristophanes' plays to those of Plato's ‘Aristophanes'.’

It is an understatement to say that the characters the historical Aristophanes invents are far from perfect. Wholly unlike the great heroes of the Homeric poems, and even the noble, but flawed figures of Aeschylus' and Sophocles' invention, Aristophanes' characters revel in farting, fighting and fornicating. Even those that we would identify as the ‘best’ of them, such as Dicaeopolis or Trygaeus,Footnote ⁸ are crass immoderate self-interested simpletons who would greatly prefer the promise of food, wine and sex to the pursuit of lofty ideals such as glory, political position or wisdom. And this is true regardless of the social standing of the characters, their gender, age or even their divinity. The women of Lysistrata, for example, are only slightly less sex-crazed than the men of the play (and the hags of the Assemblywomen perhaps slightly more); in the Frogs, when faced with the imposing figure of Hades' doorman, Aeacus, the god Dionysus proves himself as much of a coward as his slave Xanthias; and similarly, in the Birds, when the Olympians are staring down the beak of an ornithic coup, Poseidon's and Heracles' first thoughts, like those of the Priest and the Informer, concern their own advantage.Footnote ⁹

In the Symposium also, Aristophanes is the figure that reminds us most forcefully of the realities of mortal deficiency. The poet's hiccups, which interrupt the orderly flow of the speeches, highlight the vicissitudes of the body, and the method by which they are cured, Eryximachus' sneeze treatment, shows that disorder, as much as order, is required to satisfy these needs.Footnote ¹⁰ In Aristophanes' speech also, neediness is very much the defining characteristic of us ‘halfmen’. Central to human existence are the requirements of nourishment and shelter, and unless we can satisfy continually our desires for such things we will all too quickly perish (191a–b).

Given the multitudinous and unending demands to which people must attend it is little wonder that Saxonhouse supposes that Aristophanes would believe that the telos of human existence is to become circlemen once more, since they are self-complete. But if Saxonhouse is correct in her suggestion that circlemen are free from desire and wholly perfect, they would be unlike any of the historical Aristophanes' poetic creations.Footnote ¹¹ It is also worth mentioning that the gods of Aristophanes' fable in the Symposium are very much like their counterparts in the comedian's plays. In his encomium they are shown to be needy beings, entirely dependent on the prayers and sacrifices of mortals, both for their power and their immortality – a common trope in Aristophanes' plays;Footnote ¹² the dismal failure of their first attempt to bring humans under their yoke demonstrates their questionable foresight (191a–b); and the reference to the story of the Net of Hephaestus reminds us that the Olympians are lusty, vengeful, jealous creatures (as we shall see below), as ripe for ridicule as the silliest human. It is important to note that these points in themselves do not lend any weight either way to the question whether the circlemen of Aristophanes' encomium are perfect, and I do not wish to suggest that they should be used as arguments for my position. They will, however, be illuminating when we consider Aristophanes' views of human nature in §4 – and they may be interesting for those who, like Dover,Footnote ¹³ are interested in Plato's approach in appropriating and adapting Aristophanes' style. To resolve this issue it will be necessary to examine Saxonhouse's arguments concerning the perfection of circlemen.

Aristophanes does state that circlemen are ‘complete wholes’ (Symp. 192e), but ought we to understand ‘wholeness’ here, as Saxonhouse does, to have both physical and metaphysical significance, thus implying both physical unity as well as total liberation from need and deficiency?Footnote ¹⁴ Saxonhouse in her article gives two pieces of evidence in support of her view: first, that circlemen do not procreate and second, that they are not subject to the demands of mortal existence listed above. Let us consider each point in turn.

Prima facie, the question of whether the species procreates appears to lend little support either way to the assertion that circlemen are perfect. However, Saxonhouse sees great significance in this detail, particularly when read in the light of the ‘myth of the backwards turning cosmos’, a memorable passage from Plato's Statesman (269a–274e). Here the Eleatic Stranger tells the story of the Golden Age of the world, in which time ran backwards, and all of the people's needs were provided for without any effort on their part. Significant for Saxonhouse is that during this time there was no reproduction, as people simply sprang from the earth fully grown and returned to it at the end of their lives, having regressed to the state of a newborn baby. Following Seth Benardete's analysisFootnote ¹⁵ of this passage, Saxonhouse (n. 6, 25) suggests that humans did not engage in reproduction at this time because they lacked potentiality; that is, they were born as complete as they could be. From this she concludes that, because circlemen do not reproduce, they too are in a similar state of completion to those in the Golden Age. Ignoring the issue that to be ‘as complete as one can be’ does not necessarily entail either perfection or the absence of need – and indeed, it does not even for those in the Golden Age, who still have needs; they merely require no effort to be satisfiedFootnote ¹⁶ – Saxonhouse still cannot appeal to this point to justify her claim that circlemen are self-complete, as there is good reason to think that circlemen do engage in procreation, even though she is right to say that they do not engage in sexual reproduction.

In his fable Aristophanes distinguishes between three periods in the development of human nature. In the first (T₁) people took the form of circlemen, but in the next two (T₂ and T₃) people had the shape of halfmen. T₃ is distinguished from T₂ by the introduction of sexuality, when Zeus moved people's genitals to the front and created internal reproduction. ‘Before then [i.e. sometime before T₃]’, Aristophanes tells us, ‘they used to have their genitals on the outside, like their faces, and they cast seed and made children, not in each other, but in the ground, like cicadas’ (Symp. 191b–c). For Saxonhouse's reading to be correct Aristophanes would have to be referring here to T₂, as then the agents of this cicada-like reproduction would be halfmen. But this cannot be the case. Aristophanes tells us that, at the beginning of T₂, the gods divided humans in half and turned their faces inwards, so that they might see their navel and remember this grizzly surgery (190e). However, it was not until T₃ that their genitals were also made to face inwards. The only time when both faces and genitals faced outwards, as described in the quote in question, is at T₁, when people took the form of circlemen. Saxonhouse, then, cannot appeal to their lack of reproduction as evidence of the circlemen's perfection, as this quote shows that they too engage in reproduction, and presumably in the same way as the very needy and deficient halfmen of T₂. The form of reproduction in which humans engage, therefore, has nothing to do with their being more or less perfect. A fortiori, if Saxonhouse's view of perfection is correct – that perfect beings do not reproduce – the fact that circlemen do reproduce lends support to the idea that they are deficient creatures.

Although she does not explicitly advance the idea in her article, it is strongly implied in Saxonhouse's analysis (n. 6, 22) that circlemen are perfect because they are free from the needs and desires that plague people's divided existence. In his speech Aristophanes mentions three desires felt by halfmen: those for nourishment, shelter and unity (eros). Although it follows necessarily that, if people become circlemen once again they would no longer feel eros, and even if we grant that it also means an end to our need for food and shelter – something for which there is no evidence either way in Aristophanes' encomium – it does not follow that circlemen are altogether free from desire, and therefore from deficiency. In arguing this way Saxonhouse has conflated the distinction between the basic needs of survival and desire in general, which covers a far wider range of longing.

At the beginning of his fable Aristophanes tells us that circlemen, being supremely arrogant, made an attempt on the gods and assaulted Olympus (190b). This story suggests that circlemen do feel at least one desire: they desire the position of the gods. However, because Saxonhouse understands circlemen as perfect she is forced (n. 6, 22) to give the somewhat bizarre reading that the circlemen made their attack, not because of any desire on their part, but purely out of arrogance. However, she leaves the question unanswered as to why even the most supremely arrogant would attack the gods if they do not desire anything at all. We do have some evidence in the fable to explain the actions of the circlemen, as Aristophanes highlights their questionable character. Zeus unflatteringly describes the circlemen using the words ἀσελγαίνειν and ἀκολασία at 190c6 and 190c8 respectively, so in addition to being hugely strong and swift, circlemen are fundamentally ‘licentious’ and ‘intemperate’ creatures, whose behaviour is both undisciplined and brutal. We need not conclude that the circlemen attacked the gods out of arrogance alone, and that they desired nothing in doing so. Instead, we have good reason to think that they engaged in this warmongering because of their licentious nature, and that they desired the position of the gods. Like the pitiful halfmen and the capricious gods of Aristophanes' fable, the circlemen too fall far short of perfection, being licentious and arrogant. And just like these figures (and all of the various characters and creatures of the historical Aristophanes' plays), circlemen too are creatures that desire, and so are not free from deficiency.

III

In response to the conclusion of the previous section one might argue that, even though circlemen may not be perfect, perhaps they are still something which we halfmen ought to envy, as being a circleman may be better than the state in which we find ourselves. The question we must answer, then, is whether unity is an ideal for which it is good for halfmen to strive. In entertaining the line of argument, of course, we must be careful not to fall into Platonic language and say that, in becoming circlemen, one becomes more like a god, as we should not forget that the gods, in Aristophanes' fable, although powerful and immortal, are jealous, wicked and capricious creatures, and enviable only if one is happy to accept such vices in exchange for power. Prima facie, however, one may argue that there is some reason for thinking that Aristophanes believes that unity is a goal towards which it would be good for us halfmen to strive when we consider the lovers' expectations of the results of being reunified in the Net of Hephaestus passage.

It is certainly true, and should be noted, that the lovers of the Net of Hephaestus passage firmly believe that in accepting the Net they will possess everything they could ever want, and see unity as a state that they ought to pursue:

The uniformity of the lovers' expectations appears to lend justificatory force to their view, but there is evidence in the text that ought to make us feel hesitant about giving too much weight to their beliefs. Fundamental to the interpretation of this quotation is the force of the verb οἴοιτο. In Plato's dialogues, οἴεσθαι (‘to think’) does not typically carry the same cognitive force as verbs such as ἐπίστασθαι or εἰδέναι, or even γιγνώσκειν, all of which are usually translated as ‘to know’. So someone may think that there are chocolates in the grocery bags on the counter, but because they do not know this for certain they may well be mistaken. It should be noted, however, that not even Plato' Socrates uses these terms as consistently as a philosopher like Aristotle, so we may wonder, particularly if we agree that Plato here is trying to represent Aristophanes' own linguistic style as faithfully as possible, how much significance we can expect to yield from Aristophanes' use of the term. Considering the word in isolation, not very much, but in light of other evidence from this passage we can get a clearer sense of its force.

Illuminating for our present purposes is Aristophanes' description of the mindset of the lovers at the beginning of the Net of Hephaestus passage, only a few lines before the quotation in question: ‘These are people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another. No one would think [δόξειε] it is the intimacy of sex’ (Symp. 192c). Aristophanes' use of the verb δόξειε, from δοκεῖν (‘to suppose’), is significant for two reasons. First, on a purely semantic level it lends weight to the idea that the thoughts of the lovers in this passage fall into the realm of belief and opinion (δόξα), rather than that of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). Second, Aristophanes here, as with the verb οἴοιτο, uses the optative mood to describe the lovers' thought processes. Indeed, roughly a third of the verbs in this passage are in either their optative or subjunctive forms. This suggests that Aristophanes' use of the word ‘think’ in the original quotation signifies merely the wishes and hopes of the lovers being offered the Net. That is, though they believe that in becoming circlemen they will possess everything they could ever want, this is not something that they know for certain.

Aristophanes here does give us some reason to think that the lovers' expectations have been warped, and also hints as to why this is the case. It is important to recall that, of all of the gods who looked upon Ares and Aphrodite, the only god who could not recognize their misfortune was Hermes, and this is because he was overcome by desire for Aphrodite. In the Net of Hephaestus passage it is important to note that δόξειε here is in the aorist, rather than the present form of the optative of δοκεῖν. As it is impossible to translate δόξειε in this sentence in the past tense, we must conclude that the use of the aorist here indicates aspect, rather than tense. For Aristophanes, then, the lovers' belief that in becoming circlemen they will be free from deficiency is not one that they persistently hold, but one that is felt only at particular times. If we look to the original story we have some indication as to why the lovers hold this belief in this passage. It should be noted that in the Net of Hephaestus passage the divine smith does not approach lovers merely at any time, such as when they are at work, or having an afternoon chat; instead, we are told that the offer is given when the lovers are lying in bed together (192d), although whether in this moment they are immediately pre-coital or post-coital, or currently engaging in coitus is not made clear. Be that as it may, it seems that the lovers of Aristophanes' story, like Hermes, have been led by their eros into overestimating the promise of Hephaestus' Net, and that they may find that their lot does not improve at all when it is accepted. At other times, when their desire is less strong, it is reasonable to assume that their thinking may be clearer.

From this we can conclude that the beliefs of the lovers lend no support to the idea that circlemen are an ideal towards which we halfmen ought to strive. And in light of our discussion in the previous section we have strong reasons to doubt this idea. Like the gods of the comedian's fable, Aristophanes' circlemen are immoderate warmongers who plunge the entire cosmos into strife for their own ambitions. Although stronger and quicker than halfmen, circlemen have greater tendencies towards licentiousness and brutality than present humans, and are more likely to commit acts of impiety. As we learnt above, we cannot even claim that circlemen are free from the need for food, drink, nourishment and all of the rest of the requirements that constantly threaten our divided existence, as Aristophanes is silent as to whether circlemen themselves are free from these requirements or not. The best that we can derive from Aristophanes' speech is that we halfmen have the choice of either remaining beings who must struggle to meet the requirements of life or ridding ourselves of these needs, but at the cost of becoming more arrogant and violent. Aristophanes gives us no reason to think that such a trade is at all desirable. In his speech, therefore, Aristophanes neither demonstrates that circlemen are perfect, nor does he put forward circular existence as a state that we should idealize. All of the figures in Aristophanes' fable, therefore, whether gods, circlemen or halfmen, share strongly in deficiency, and no figures possess a nature particularly more enviable in this respect than any other.

IV

Although Aristophanes clearly does utilize the story of the Net of Hephaestus for his own purposes, in the previous two sections we have seen that there is no evidence in the text to indicate that he inverts the message of the story in the way that Saxonhouse suggests. But when we reject the idea that circlemen are perfect we can give a reading of this passage that is much more in line with that of the original story. The appeal of the story of the Net of Hephaestus for Aristophanes, I suggest, is the irony of the lovers' predicament. Aphrodite and Ares desired to come together and embrace, but when Hephaestus brought about the permanent ‘satisfaction’ of their desire, they found their lot was not improved at all and that, if anything, they were worse off than when their yearning for each other was still unsatisfied. Before the two gods came together they were needy beings, full of desire, and being encased in Hephaestus' Net did nothing to change this fact. Their desire for unity was merely replaced by an equally strong desire for separation.

The situation for the lovers of Aristophanes' speech begins in much the same way as that of the divine lovers of Demodocus' story. They too are drawn together by their desire for unity, that is, by their eros, although they differ somewhat in having the further belief that in being permanently unified they will find everything they ever wanted. Aristophanes' allusion to the story of the Net of Hephaestus leads us to understand that the lovers' fortunes will be little better than that of Aphrodite and Ares. Although their erotic desires for unity will be permanently satisfied, even in becoming circlemen they will not free themselves from deficiency and desire. The best that they will be able to achieve is to replace the desires they already have with a range of different desires. It is not – in terms of Aristophanes' speech – simply that the means by which they attempt to achieve unity is imperfect; instead, the ideal that they struggle for, unity, is itself not a state which lacks deficiency.Footnote ¹⁷ Far from showing that the telos of human nature is perfection, and that people cannot realize this potential thanks to the caprice of the gods, the Net of Hephaestus passage demonstrates that perfection is completely foreign to human nature. Aristophanes' portrait of the circlemen, and even the gods, as deficient beings shows that no matter how ‘high’ we raise ourselves, we will never attain this goal. The moral of the Net of Hephaestus is that deficiency – being a subject of desire and need – is the salient and inescapable feature of human nature.

In one important respect this reading of the Net of Hephaestus passage parallels that of Saxonhouse: on this interpretation also this passage shows us that we cannot overcome our deficiency. However, we need not draw the conclusion that Saxonhouse does, that this passage lends a tragic end to the comedian's speech. For Aristophanes, a deficient state is hardly a pitiable one, or something that should be feared. Despite all of their flaws – and they have many – the heroes of Aristophanes' plays have quite valuable quotidian virtues. They are pacifists and humanitarians who, despite often insulting each other, care for their loved ones; while primarily self-interested, they also have a strong concern for the welfare of the wider community; though often cowards, they are willing to stand up to tyrants; and despite their lack of wisdom, they can spot a ‘bullshit artist’ from a mile away. In his speech in the Symposium also, Aristophanes is not as ready to look down upon deficiency as are his fellow symposiasts, Phaedrus, Agathon and particularly Socrates, all of whom contrast the deficient hoi polloi to those who are either truly virtuous, entirely beautiful or wholly wise. In Aristophanes' speech all people share in deficiency, a state that none can rise above, and all are subject to the same desires and needs. In his encomium halfmen can only be compared to circlemen and gods, and neither of these beings is particularly different in nature to halfmen in respect of deficiency. Though they may be stronger or quicker than halfmen, circlemen too are deficient creatures, filled with desire. In the Net of Hephaestus passage Aristophanes makes light of the ideals that the other speakers set as the telos of human existence, showing them to be illusory goals, wholly foreign to human nature. But by offering nothing with which to contrast it, deficiency, in Aristophanes' speech, loses its negative value, as sickness would without health, or weakness if there was no such thing as strength. Deficiency, for Aristophanes, falls outside the realm of value, and so it would make as much sense to criticize a person for being deficient as for having two, rather than four eyes. Both are mere facts of human nature.

V

With our analysis of the Net of Hephaestus passage in place we now have a clear understanding of Aristophanes' conception of human nature: deficiency is the salient feature of our existence. In light of this, in the final section of this paper I wish to say a few words about the role that Aristophanes sees for eros, as a desire for wholeness, in human life. Given what we have learnt in the previous section it would be reasonable to assume that Aristophanes would have few good things to say about eros, but this is not the situation we find in his speech. In the preamble to his encomium Aristophanes calls Eros the ‘great healer’ of mankind (189d), and in concluding his speech he claims that eros promises the ‘greatest hope of all’ (Symp. 193e): that one day the gods may restore our original nature, so that we may finally attain eudaimonia. In this section I will attempt to reconcile these claims with the conclusions of the previous section, and to do this it will be useful to turn to Aristotle's Poetics.

Unfortunately, the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which concerned the nature of comedy (that is, Old Comedy), is lost, but he does make some references to comedy in the extant first book, and particularly relevant to our discussion is his etymological analysis in chapter 4.Footnote ¹⁸ Here Aristotle says that the ‘iambic’ metre got its name because it was the rhythm of choice for comic poets, who ‘lampoon’ (ἰαμβίζειν) one another (1448b30–5). Regardless of whether Aristotle is correct in this assertion, what is important here is that Aristotle identifies comedy as the poetic form in which poets lampoon, parody and satirize one another, and in the Symposium there is good reason to think that Aristophanes follows this tradition. Unlike Phaedrus, whose encomium of Eros was most likely pre-prepared, Aristophanes' speech appears to be (at least in part) an off-the-cuff satire of the speeches that precede it. This point is well recognized in the literature, and it is often argued by commentators that Aristophanes' description of Eros as a ‘healer’ at the beginning of his speech, and his descriptions of surgery and welding throughout his encomium, is added to mock the doctor Eryximachus; and that, despite Aristophanes' weak protestations to the contrary (193c), in his discussion of ‘manly’ halfmen – those who are the halves of wholly male circlemen – at 192a he is indeed poking fun at Pausanias and Agathon – a fact for which we can be left in no doubt after Agathon's own encomium, in which he argues himself the ‘softest’ and ‘gentlest’ of all people (195e).Footnote ¹⁹ In light of our previous analysis we have good reason to think that Aristophanes' comments in praise of eros are similarly farcical.

In the preamble to his own speech in the Symposium the tragedian Agathon argues that the previous speakers have not praised Eros in his own right, but only for the benefits that he bestows upon mankind. And indeed, the first three speakers are liberal with their praise. Phaedrus suggests that eros is a perfectly adequate substitute for virtue, and can inspire courage in even the most miserable cowards (178e); Pausanias argues that eros – or rather, Uranian Eros – can excuse a lover from even the most disgraceful or shameless behaviour, such as using subterfuge to lure his beloved to bed, or debasing himself entirely before the object of his affection, provided that he does it because of eros (184c); and Eryximachus even goes so far as to state that eros brings peace and harmony to the entire cosmos (188d). Aristophanes' claims that eros can lead us to wholeness, and therefore eudaimonia, mirror the fantastic claims of the previous speakers, but through his allusion to the story of Demodocus in the Net of Hephaestus passage, Aristophanes shows the hollowness of such unrestrained praise. Eros can no more do the things that the previous speakers suggest than the fact of being welded together with their beloveds can make people perfect. Aristophanes' suggestion that eros offers us the greatest hope of all is one thick with irony. However, I do not believe that Aristophanes' assertion ought to be taken wholly as a joke. Although the comedian clearly does not believe that eros offers humans the promise of perfection, I wish to suggest that Aristophanes does see an important and genuinely praiseworthy role for eros in human life (and so satisfies Phaedrus' agenda that all speakers should praise Eros), though for far more modest reasons than the first three speakers in the Symposium would have us believe. In order to demonstrate this it will be necessary to consider which people Aristophanes considers to be the most likely to achieve eudaimonia.

Despite his belief in the uniformity of human nature, Aristophanes, like the other symposiasts, does paint some of the characters in his speech in more positive light than others. Unlike the other speakers, however, who praise those who attempt to overcome their deficiency, it is precisely these people who come in for particular ridicule in Aristophanes' speech. The lovers of the Net of Hephaestus passage are mocked for their absurd belief that in being welded together they will possess everything they could want; the gods are portrayed as jealous oligarchs, whose primary interest is to be undisputed rulers of the cosmos; and we have little sympathy for the arrogant circlemen, whose hopeless and pointless warmongering doomed not only them but all future humans to a divided existence.Footnote ²⁰ And in typical Aristophanic style the audience of his speech does not escape criticism either. Towards the end of Aristophanes' encomium Plato has the comedian make an anachronistic reference to the division of Arcadia by the Spartans in 385 B.C.E., an event that took place thirty years after the dramatic date of the Symposium.Footnote ²¹ This reference would have made the story of the circlemen all the more poignant for an Athenian audience, as it reminds the readership of their own suffering, which came about because of the desire of some Athenians and Spartans to unify all of Greece under their own military hegemony.

Of all the characters in Aristophanes' speech the only ones that escape ridicule are those halfmen that he mentions at 191d who after sex are able to stop embracing and attend to the needs of life. Aristophanes finds such people praiseworthy, I suggest, because they are (temporarily) free from the absurd desire to perfect themselves, and are thus able to attend to those things that truly matter in human existence. In the Symposium Socrates describes Aristophanes as someone who ‘thinks of nothing but Dionysus and Aphrodite’ (Symp. 177e), and the comedian's own behaviour at the feast confirms this. In the dialogue Aristophanes is shown to be a man concerned primarily with wine, food and revelry: he is happy to go ‘over his head’ at a celebration and return again to indulge in a second day of merriment (176b); and Aristodemus places the blame for Aristophanes' hiccups on the comedian's liberal indulgence in food (185c). In reading his plays we also get the strong impression that Aristophanes believes that, through the grace of the two gods with whom Socrates associates the comedian, people are able to live perfectly happy and valuable lives, even within the boundaries of our deficient nature; satisfaction of needs, rather than rising above need, is what is important here. Although we are creatures full of desire, provided that we are well supplied with food and wine, love and sex, and shelter and peace, we can live a life of eudaimonia. And the comedian is no ascetic: the more we have of these things, and the greater our ease of access to them, the happier we will be. In being able to free themselves temporarily from the hopeless task of achieving unity the halfmen of 191d are the people in Aristophanes' speech who give the most thought to these basic needs of life, as they do not spend their time pursuing the unattainable goal of perfection, and so are the ones most likely to achieve eudaimonia.Footnote ²²

For Aristophanes there are many psychological states that distract people from attending to the basic needs that are so important for a happy life, and instil in them a desire for a more ‘elevated’ existence. In his plays some recurring examples of such pathê are greed and jealousy, and another example prominent in his speech in the Symposium also is ambition. In both his plays and his encomium of Eros Aristophanes leaves us in little doubt that he has a great distaste for such feelings, but regardless of the considerable negative consequences that follow from acting on these desires – both for the subject of these feelings and others – at the time in which humans were first split in two (T₂) the worst of all was eros. At this time, Aristophanes tells us, people would die of hunger and idleness, as their eros drove them to neglect all concerns other than being wrapped in embrace with their beloved (191a–b). At this point there was nothing more antithetical to eudaimonia than eros. With the invention of sexuality, however, the situation changed dramatically. Through sexual congress people were able temporarily to satisfy their desire for unity, and having done this they stop embracing, and now, free from the constant pull of their erotic desires, they are able to attend to the ‘needs of life’ (191c–d) – those desires whose satisfaction is central to eudaimonia. In sexuality humans have a benign outlet for their absurd desire for unity. Of course, sexuality itself is not a perfect solution to the problems that eros poses. First, our erotic desires are only temporarily satisfied, and will return eventually; and second, sexuality leads to a number of new complications, including the tribulations that attend entering (and leaving) relationships, and particularly as children are often the result of such unions. All of these issues at times pose some impediment to the pursuit of the happy life. We must remember, however, that for Aristophanes something ought not be criticized for being imperfect; instead, we should simply acknowledge that the trials of love and sexuality are less harmful than the results of other expressions of our desire to overcome deficiency, such as jealousy, greed and ambition. For Aristophanes, eros is praiseworthy because, in sexuality, it is a desire that negates itself in its satisfaction. That is, eros is a desire for unity that leads to sexual intercourse, which in turn liberates us from our desire for perfection. Although Eros cannot raise us to a world in which there is no possibility of being shat on every now and then, it at least ensures that we are not looking up, so we will not be hit in the eye.

In his volume on the Symposium Richard HunterFootnote ²³ suggests that in one important stylistic respect the speech Plato creates for Aristophanes differs from the historical comedian's plays. Where the latter frequently end with a celebration of now happy heroes, Aristophanes' encomium ends – he argues, in parallel with Saxonhouse's interpretation (n. 6, 70) – with a hope that cannot be fulfilled: that one day we may become perfect. Although Hunter is right in his assessment that Aristophanes believes that perfection is beyond human endeavour, he is wrong in his assessment of the mood at the end of Aristophanes' encomium. For the attentive reader the message of the comedian's speech is that we ought not to busy ourselves pursuing a state that is wholly contrary to our nature. But eros does offer humans the greatest hope of all, as in its propensity to nullify itself we find the means to put our desire for unity to one side for a while, and attend to those desires the satisfaction of which can make us truly happy and lead us to eudaimonia. Although his speech does not end in the same way as the Acharnians or Lysistrata, the lives of those who have understood Aristophanes' speech will, as, if one follows the advice of the comedian, to embrace one's deficiency, one's life will be a happy one, one that is an orgy of food, wine and sex.