Missing Twins

Abstract

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes offers an explanation as to why people refer to feeling ‘whole’ when they fall in love. This is due, he announces, to the fact that humans were originally twofold beings with four arms, four legs, two sets of sexual organs and ‘two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck’ (Plato, 1997: 473). These creatures, completely spherical in form, were so strong and arrogant that they saw fit to launch an offensive upon the gods of Mount Olympus. Zeus, enraged but unwilling to destroy them and thereby deprive himself of their offerings and devotions, contented himself with crippling them by splitting them in half. In this way, with a single stroke, he would make them both more numerous and less powerful, doubling their value to the gods. ‘Each of us then,’ explains Aristophanes, ‘is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him’ (474).