Aristophanes Oration On Love In Plato's The Symposium

I will argue that Aristophanes oration on Love in Plato’s The Symposium is on the lowest and highest level of knowledge on Plato’s simile of the line. First, I will present Aristophanes major points on love. Second I will explain the crietion that I will use to analyze Aristophanes oration on love, which is Plato’s simile of the line. Third, I will argue that according to Plato’s simile of the line, Aristophanes oration on love falls in the levels of images and the Forms. Aristophanes’ oration on love focused on the myth of Zeus and human beings. The myth said that long ago, there were three genders: male, women, and androgynous. Each gender had four arms, four legs, and two identical heads. These humans, “were terrible in strength and vigour…[they] made an attack on the gods”(Gill 23). The gods agreed that they could not eradicate the human race, so Zeus made a decision to “cut each of them into two; they will be weaker and also more useful to us because there will be more of them”(Gill 23). Zeus called on Apollo to heal the wounds of the splitting of the bodies, which created human features such as a naval and wrinkles around the stomach to remind the humans of this incident. This splitting of the two made the …show more content…
The oration is on the level of the images and imaging because Aristophanes’ myth about Zeus splitting the genders in half is just a story of Aristophanes’ imagination. He does not provide any logos to prove that this story actually occurred. Without any logos to back up the myth, it remains an image making it fall on the level of images and imagination. However, this oration also falls on the level of the Forms because the concept of desire and attraction between human beings transcends all cultures and has been proven to remain permanent because human beings have been attracted to humans for centuries and this still holds till present