'First of all, you must learn about human nature, and what has happened to it. Long ago, our nature was not the as it is now but quite different. For one thing, there were three human genders, not just the present two, male and female. There was also a third one, a combination of these two; now its name survives, although the gender has vanished. Then "androgynous" was a distinct gender as well as a name, combining male and female; now nothing is left but the name, whih is used as an insult.
'For another thing, the shape of each human being was a rounded whole, with back and sides forming a circle. Each one had four hands andthe same number of legs, and two identical faces on a circular neck. They had one head for both of the faces, which were turned in opposite directions, four ears, two sets of genitals, and everything else was as you would imagine from what I've said s far. They moved around upright as we do now, in either direction, as they wanted. When they set off to run fast, they supported themselves on all their eight limbs, and move quickly round and round, lik tumbers who do cartwheels by keeping their legs straight as they go round and round.
'The reason why there was three genders, and why there were as described, is that the parent of the male gender was originally the sun, that of the female gender the earth, that of the combined gender the moon, because the moon is a combination of sun and earth. They were round, and so was the way they moved, because they took after their parents. They were terrible in their strength and vigour; they had great ambitions and made an attack on the gods. The story told by Homer and Ephialtes and Ottus, how they tried to climb up to heaven to attack the gods, really refers to them. Zeus and the other gods discussed what to do to them and couldn't decide. The gods didn't see how they could kill them, wiping out the human race with thunderbolts as they did they'd done with the giants; if they did that, the honours nad sacrifices the gods received from them would disappear. But they couldn't let them go on behaving outrageously. After much hard thought, Zeus had an idea: "I think I have a plan by which human beings can still exist but be too weakto carry on their wild behaviour. I shall not each of them into two; they will be weaker and also more useful to us because there will be more of them. They will walk around upright on two legs. If we think they're still acting outrageously, and they won't settle down, I'll cut them inhalf again so that they move around hopping on one leg.
'After saying this, Zeus cut humans into two, as people cut sorb-apples in half before they preserve them or as they cut hard-boiled eggs with hairs. A he cut each one, he told Apollo to turn the face aand the half-neck attached to it towards the gash, so that humans woudl see their own wound and be more orderly; Zeus also told him to heal the other wounds. Apollo turned round the face; he pulled the skin from all around the body towards what's now called the stomach (likea purse being pulled tight with a draw-string), and finished it off by making one opening in the middle of the stomach, which we call the navel. He also smoothed off the other numerous wrinkles, and shaped the chest with the kind of tool used by shoemakers when they smooth the wrinkles of leather on the last. But he left a few on the stomach round the navel, to remind them of what happened to them long ago.
'Since their original nature had been cut in two, each one longed for its own other half and stayed with it. They threw their arms round each othr, weaving themselves together, wanting to form a round living thing. So they died from hunger and from general inactivity, because they didn't want to do anything apart from each other. Whenever one of the halves died and one was left, the one that was left looked for anotherand wove itself together with that. Sometimes the one it met was half a whole woman (th half we now call a "woman"), sometimes half a whole man. In any csae, they kept on dying this way.
'Zeus took pity on them and came up with another plan: he moved their genitals round to the front; until then, they had genitals on the back of their bodies, and sexual reproduction occurred not with each other but on the earth, as in the case of cicadas. So Zeus moved the genitals round to the front and in this way made them reproduce in each other, by means of the male acting inside the female. The aim of this was that, if a man met with a woman and wntwined himself with her, they wouldreproduce and then human race would be continued. Also, if two males came together, they would at least have the satisfaction of sexual intercourse, and then relax, turn to their work, and think about the other things in their life.
Mine are staying, that's for sure 
