Symposium

upright, on two legs. And if they still¹ seem to run riot and are not willing to keep quiet, I shall cut them in two again,’ he said, ‘so that they will go about on one leg, hopping.’ Having said this, he cut human beings in two, as people cut sorb-apples² 190e when they are going to preserve them, or as they cut eggs with hairs; and whomever he cut, he told Apollo to turn his face and the half of his neck round toward the cut, so that the human being, beholding his own cutting, might be more orderly; and he told him to heal the rest. And Apollo turned the face round, and drawing the skin together from all sides onto what is now called the belly, like drawstring purses, he made one mouth and tied it off in the middle of the belly, which they call the navel. And the other wrinkles, 191a the many, he smoothed out, and he shaped the chest, holding some such tool as shoemakers do when they smooth the wrinkles of the leathers on the last; but he left a few, those about the belly itself and the navel, to be a memorial of their old suffering. So when their nature had been cut in two, each, yearning for its own half, came together with it; and throwing their arms round each other and twining together, desiring to grow together, they died of hunger and of their 191b idleness besides, through not being willing to do anything apart from one another. And whenever one of the halves died and the other was left, the one left sought another and twined with it, whether it met half of a whole woman — what we now call a woman — or of a man; and so they were perishing. But Zeus took pity, and procures another device, and moves their genitals round to