The Myth of Aristophanes or of the Androgyne. Lecture by the philologist Paola Radici Colace

The exciting meetings with the “knowledge of ancient taste” organized at the MArRC in collaboration with the International Writers Center of Calabria continue. The appointment is on Thursday, January 16th, 2020, at 5.30 pm, in the Conference Room, with Paola Radici Colace, professor of classical Philology at the University of Messina, honorary president of the CIS and head of the Theater Section, who will pleasantly entertain the audience on “The myth of Aristophanes or of the androgyne”.

This is the fourth meeting for the Cycle “Myth and philosophical hermeneutics in Plato: from the myth of the cave to the myth of Atlantis”.

They will introduce: the director of the Museum, Carmelo Malacrino, and the president of the CIS, Loreley Rosita Borruto.

“In Plato’s dialogue ‘The Symposium’ – Radici Colace explains – the playwright Aristophanes speaks among the guests, to express his opinion on love, on Eros and its nature, the theme of the meeting. In the initial moments of creation, the human being was androgynous, male and female together. Envious of its exceptional vigor and its exuberant completeness, to weaken it, Zeus split it in two: Two were formed from One. Since then – continues the scholar – these parts divided in half, ‘split’, ‘cut’ by the wound inflicted by the gods, of which the navel is perpetual memory, are desperately seeking to recompose the One, pushed by the regret of the original perfection, from the nostalgia for that time of fullness in which nothing was missing, from the yearning desire for that original completeness”.

The androgynous archetype, therefore, is “destined to travel the western imagination”. By video projections, Radici Colace will trace this presence in the history of art and literature, in an unsatisfied search to find “the other half of the apple” (or, as the philologist makes clear, to use the Aristophanes expression, “the other half of the sole”).