Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 2 (Gorgias, Phaedo, Meno)

Eryximachus is ready to do both. After prescribing a cure for the hiccups, he speaks as follows:

He agrees with Pausanias in maintaining that there are two kinds of love, but his own art has led him to the further conclusion that the empire of this double love extends over all things, found in animals and plants as well as in humans. In the human body, there are also two loves; the art of medicine reveals which is the good and which is the bad love, persuading the body to accept the good and reject the bad, thereby reconciling conflicting elements and making them friends. Every art—gymnastics and agriculture as well as medicine—is the reconciliation of opposites. This is what Heracleitus meant when he spoke of a “harmony of opposites,” although, strictly speaking, he should have referred to a harmony that succeeds opposites, for an agreement of disagreements is impossible. Music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. In the abstract, all is simple, and we are not troubled by the twofold love; but when applied in education with their accompaniments of song and meter, then the discord begins. The old tale must then be repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, the latter of whom must be indulged sparingly, just as in my own art of medicine, care must be taken that the taste of the epicure be gratified without inflicting upon him the attendant penalty of disease.

There is a similar harmony or disagreement in the course of the seasons and in the relations of moist and dry, hot and cold, hoar frost and blight. Diseases of all sorts spring from the excesses or disorders of the element of love. The knowledge of these elements of love and discord in the heavenly bodies is termed astronomy; in the relations of men toward gods and parents, it is called divination. For divination is the peacemaker between gods and men, and it works by a knowledge of the tendencies of human loves toward piety and impiety. Such is the power of love; and that love which is just and temperate has the greatest power and is the source of all our happiness and friendship with the gods and with one another. I dare say I have omitted many things which you, Aristophanes, may supply, as I perceive you are cured of the hiccups.

Aristophanes is the next speaker. He professes to open a new vein of discourse, in which he begins by treating the origin of human nature. The sexes were originally three: men, women, and the union of the two.