This is done partly
to avoid monotony, partly for the sake of making Aristophanes 'the cause of
wit in others,' and also in order to bring the comic and tragic poet into
juxtaposition, as if by accident. A suitable 'expectation' of Aristophanes
is raised by the ludicrous circumstance of his having the hiccough, which
is appropriately cured by his substitute, the physician Eryximachus. To
Eryximachus Love is the good physician; he sees everything as an
intelligent physicist, and, like many professors of his art in modern
times, attempts to reduce the moral to the physical; or recognises one law
of love which pervades them both. There are loves and strifes of the body
as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he is a disciple
of Heracleitus, whose conception of the harmony of opposites he explains in
a new way as the harmony after discord; to his common sense, as to that of
many moderns as well as ancients, the identity of contradictories is an
absurdity. His notion of love may be summed up as the harmony of man with
himself in soul as well as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with
one another.
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