Aristophanes

Athenian comic playwright who wrote The Clouds (satirizing Socrates as a dangerous sophist), The Birds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs — and whose famous speech in Plato's Symposium explains the origin of love through the myth of humans as originally doubled beings cut in half by Zeus.

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes provides the most memorable account of eros — human beings were originally round creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces, whom Zeus cut in half, and love is the search for one's other half — making the myth the most intuitive and humane account of why love feels like recognition.