I had to analyze “First Interlude: Aristophanes and His Hiccups” and “The Speech of Eryximachus”. In the first part, Aristophanes comes down with a case of hiccups and begs someone else to speak before him. Eryximachus, who is a physician, agrees to speak in his stead until his hiccups are gone. In his speech, Eryximachus states that there are two types of love. He thinks that they are not only found in humans but in plants and animals. He says that love is ever-present in our lives and influences us to do good things. He has many main points to back this up. As a physician, he states that there are two types of love in the body, love from health and love from disease. His job is to distinguish the two and take out the diseased part. He says…show more content… It’s our job to be able to distinguish the two and not go overboard. To achieve natural attunement, there must be a mixture of both the common and the vulgar. Eryximachus uses many metaphors for his points. He compares the two types of love to rhythm and harmony. We need to have both to create music. He brings in his field of medicine as a metaphor, saying that too much of one love can be like the diseased part of the body a physician must take out. He also compares the seasons to the two types of love. If there is more vulgar love, then winter will rage, but a balance of both will bring spring. I found a lot of this passage to be confusing. On page 127, Eryxmachus says, “He who knows how to instill Eros where it is not present but ought to be, and to remove it where it is present and ought not to be, is the good practitioner”. He is just saying that for someone to be healthy, they can’t have too much of one love over the other. Many of the sentences were like this and I had to read it over and over for comprehension. Much of his speech is in metaphors, which makes it difficult to grasp his ideas. I had to look up online or ask peers what they thought of this section to truly understand what he was
