ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the reception of Plato's Symposium, more specifically on Aristophanes's account of the Androgyne as it was offered to readers in mid-sixteenth-century France in the translation and commentary by Louis Le Roy. The culture from within which Le Roy thought and wrote, about a century into the age of print, was still nearly as memory-intensive as Plato's own. If Le Roy's dedication is an exercise in willful forgetting, Plato's dialogue is, on the contrary, staged as a tour de force of memory. Le Roy added extensive notes and commentary placed at each break or change of speaker in the Symposium. The comic poet tells of the Androgyne, who, he claims, was the original form of human beings. Aristophanes's hiccups, caused by too much cold humor, are relieved by sneezing, which corrects an excess of humidity. In standard humeral medicine, it is understood that men are by nature warm and dry, women cold and wet.
