Complete Works (113 page)

He’d seen the cooling jar, and he realized it could hold more than two quarts of wine. He had the slaves fill it to the brim, drained it, and ordered them to fill it up again for Socrates.

“Not that the trick will have any effect on
him
,” he told the group. “Socrates will drink whatever you put in front of him, but no one yet has seen him drunk.”

The slave filled the jar and, while Socrates was drinking, Eryximachus said to Alcibiades:

[b] “This is certainly most improper. We cannot simply pour the wine down our throats in silence: we must have some conversation, or at least a song. What we are doing now is hardly civilized.”

What Alcibiades said to him was this:

“O Eryximachus, best possible son to the best possible, the most temperate father: Hi!”

“Greetings to you, too,” Eryximachus replied. “Now what do you suggest we do?”

“Whatever you say. Ours to obey you, ‘For a medical mind is worth a million others’.
⁴⁹
Please prescribe what you think fit.”

[c] “Listen to me,” Eryximachus said. “Earlier this evening we decided to use this occasion to offer a series of encomia of Love. We all took our turn—in good order, from left to right—and gave our speeches, each according to his ability. You are the only one not to have spoken yet, though, if I may say so, you have certainly drunk your share. It’s only proper, therefore, that you take your turn now. After you have spoken, you can decide on a topic for Socrates on your right; he can then do the same for the man to his right, and we can go around the table once again.”

“Well said, O Eryximachus,” Alcibiades replied. “But do you really think it’s fair to put my drunken ramblings next to your sober orations? And [d] anyway, my dear fellow, I hope you didn’t believe a single word Socrates said: the truth is just the opposite! He’s the one who will most surely beat me up if I dare praise anyone else in his presence—even a god!”

“Hold your tongue!” Socrates said.

“By god, don’t you dare deny it!” Alcibiades shouted. “I would never—
never
—praise anyone else with you around.”

[e] “Well, why not just do that, if you want?” Eryximachus suggested. “Why don’t you offer an encomium to Socrates?”

“What do you mean?” asked Alcibiades. “Do you really think so, Eryximachus? Should I unleash myself upon him? Should I give him his punishment in front of all of you?”

“Now, wait a minute,” Socrates said. “What do you have in mind? Are you going to praise me only in order to mock me? Is that it?”

“I’ll only tell the truth—please, let me!”

“I would certainly like to hear the truth from you. By all means, go ahead,” Socrates replied.

“Nothing can stop me now,” said Alcibiades. “But here’s what you can do: if I say anything that’s not true, you can just interrupt, if you want, and correct me; at worst, there’ll be mistakes in my speech, not lies. But
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you can’t hold it against me if I don’t get everything in the right order—I’ll say things as they come to mind. It is no easy task for one in my condition to give a smooth and orderly account of your bizarreness!”

I’ll try to praise Socrates, my friends, but I’ll have to use an image. And though he may think I’m trying to make fun of him, I assure you my image is no joke: it aims at the truth. Look at him! Isn’t he just like a statue [b] of Silenus? You know the kind of statue I mean; you’ll find them in any shop in town. It’s a Silenus sitting, his flute
⁵⁰
or his pipes in his hands, and it’s hollow. It’s split right down the middle, and inside it’s full of tiny statues of the gods. Now look at him again! Isn’t he also just like the satyr Marsyas?
⁵¹

Nobody, not even you, Socrates, can deny that you
look
like them. But the resemblance goes beyond appearance, as you’re about to hear.

You are impudent, contemptuous, and vile! No? If you won’t admit it, I’ll bring witnesses. And you’re quite a fluteplayer, aren’t you? In fact, you’re much more marvelous than Marsyas, who needed instruments to [c] cast his spells on people. And so does anyone who plays his tunes today—for even the tunes Olympus
⁵²
played are Marsyas’ work, since Olympus learned everything from him. Whether they are played by the greatest flautist or the meanest flute-girl, his melodies have in themselves the power to possess and so reveal those people who are ready for the god and his mysteries. That’s because his melodies are themselves divine. The only difference between you and Marsyas is that you need no instruments; you do exactly what he does, but with words alone. You know, people hardly [d] ever take a speaker seriously, even if he’s the greatest orator; but let anyone—man, woman, or child—listen to you or even to a poor account of what you say—and we are all transported, completely possessed.

If I were to describe for you what an extraordinary effect his words have always had on me (I can feel it this moment even as I’m speaking), [e] you might actually suspect that I’m drunk! Still, I swear to you, the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face, even the frenzied Corybantes
⁵³
seem sane compared to me—and, let me tell you, I am not alone. I have heard Pericles and many other great orators, and I have admired their speeches. But nothing like this ever happened to me: they never upset me so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life—
my
life!—was no better than the most miserable slave’s. And yet that is exactly how
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this Marsyas here at my side makes me feel all the time: he makes it seem that my life isn’t worth living! You can’t say that isn’t true, Socrates. I know very well that you could make me feel that way this very moment if I gave you half a chance. He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention. So I refuse to listen to him; I stop my ears and tear [b] myself away from him, for, like the Sirens, he could make me stay by his side till I die.

Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame—ah, you didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Yes, he makes me feel ashamed: I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I [c] feel deeply ashamed, because I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should. Sometimes, believe me, I think I would be happier if he were dead. And yet I know that if he dies I’ll be even more miserable. I can’t live with him, and I can’t live without him! What
can
I do about him?

That’s the effect of this satyr’s music—on me and many others. But that’s the least of it. He’s like these creatures in all sorts of other ways; his powers are really extraordinary. Let me tell you about them, because, [d] you can be sure of it, none of you really understands him. But, now I’ve started, I’m going to show you what he really is.

To begin with, he’s crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze. Also, he likes to say he’s ignorant and knows nothing. Isn’t this just like Silenus? Of course it is! And all this is just on the surface, like the outsides of those statues of Silenus. I wonder, my fellow drinkers, if you have any idea what a sober and temperate man he proves to be once you have looked inside. Believe me, it couldn’t matter less to him whether a boy is beautiful. You can’t imagine how little he [e] cares whether a person is beautiful, or rich, or famous in any other way that most people admire. He considers all these possessions beneath contempt, and that’s exactly how he considers all of us as well. In public, I tell you, his whole life is one big game—a game of irony. I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful,
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so utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me.

What I thought at the time was that what he really wanted was
me
, and that seemed to me the luckiest coincidence: all I had to do was to let him have his way with me, and he would teach me everything he knew—believe me, I had a lot of confidence in my looks. Naturally, up to that time we’d never been alone together; one of my attendants had always been present. But with this in mind, I sent the attendant away, and met [b] Socrates alone. (You see, in this company I must tell the whole truth: so pay attention. And, Socrates, if I say anything untrue, I want you to correct me.)

So there I was, my friends, alone with him at last. My idea, naturally, was that he’d take advantage of the opportunity to tell me whatever it is that lovers say when they find themselves alone; I relished the moment. But no such luck! Nothing of the sort occurred. Socrates had his usual sort of conversation with me, and at the end of the day he went off. [c]

My next idea was to invite him to the gymnasium with me. We took exercise together, and I was sure that this would lead to something. He took exercise and wrestled with me many times when no one else was present. What can I tell you? I got nowhere. When I realized that my ploy had failed, I decided on a frontal attack. I refused to retreat from a battle I myself had begun, and I needed to know just where matters stood. So what I did was to invite him to dinner, as if
I
were his lover and he my young prey! To tell the truth, it took him quite a while to accept my [d] invitation, but one day he finally arrived. That first time he left right after dinner: I was too shy to try to stop him. But on my next attempt, I started some discussion just as we were finishing our meal and kept him talking late into the night. When he said he should be going, I used the lateness of the hour as an excuse and managed to persuade him to spend the night at my house. He had had his meal on the couch next to mine, so he just made himself comfortable and lay down on it. No one else was there. [e]

Now you must admit that my story so far has been perfectly decent; I could have told it in any company. But you’d never have heard me tell the rest of it, as you’re about to do, if it weren’t that, as the saying goes, ‘there’s truth in wine when the slaves have left’—and when they’re present, too. Also, would it be fair to Socrates for me to praise him and yet to fail to reveal one of his proudest accomplishments? And, furthermore, you know what people say about snakebite—that you’ll only talk about it with your fellow victims: only they will understand the pain and forgive you
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for all the things it made you do. Well, something much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on young and eager souls is much more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things. Now, [b] all you people here, Phaedrus, Agathon, Eryximachus, Pausanias, Aristodemus, Aristophanes—I need not mention Socrates himself—and all the rest, have all shared in the madness, the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy. And that’s why you will hear the rest of my story; you will understand and forgive both what I did then and what I say now. As for the house slaves and for anyone else who is not an initiate, my story’s not for you: block your ears!

[c] To get back to the story. The lights were out; the slaves had left; the time was right, I thought, to come to the point and tell him freely what I had in mind. So I shook him and whispered:

“Socrates, are you asleep?”

“No, no, not at all,” he replied.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“I think,” I said, “you’re the only worthy lover I have ever had—and yet, look how shy you are with me! Well, here’s how I look at it. It would [d] be really stupid not to give you anything you want: you can have me, my belongings, anything my friends might have. Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be, and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim. With a man like you, in fact, I’d be much more ashamed of what wise people would say if I did
not
take you as my lover, than I would of what all the others, in their foolishness, would say if I did.”

He heard me out, and then he said in that absolutely inimitable ironic manner of his:

[e] “Dear Alcibiades, if you are right in what you say about me, you are already more accomplished than you think. If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. But, then, is this a fair exchange that you propose? You seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, ‘gold
[219]
in exchange for bronze.’
⁵⁴

“Still, my dear boy, you should think twice, because you could be wrong, and I may be of no use to you. The mind’s sight becomes sharp only when the body’s eyes go past their prime—and you are still a good long time away from that.”

When I heard this I replied:

“I really have nothing more to say. I’ve told you exactly what I think. Now it’s your turn to consider what you think best for you and me.”

[b] “You’re right about that,” he answered. “In the future, let’s consider things together. We’ll always do what seems the best to the two of us.”

His words made me think that my own had finally hit their mark, that he was smitten by my arrows. I didn’t give him a chance to say another word. I stood up immediately and placed my mantle over the light cloak which, though it was the middle of winter, was his only clothing. I slipped underneath the cloak and put my arms around this man—this utterly [c] unnatural, this truly extraordinary man—and spent the whole night next to him. Socrates, you can’t deny a word of it. But in spite of all my efforts, this hopelessly arrogant, this unbelievably insolent man—he turned me down! He spurned my beauty, of which I was so proud, members of the jury—for this is really what you are: you’re here to sit in judgment of Socrates’ amazing arrogance and pride. Be sure of it, I swear to you by all the gods and goddesses together, my night with Socrates went no [d] further than if I had spent it with my own father or older brother!