I Joined Your Bacchic Revel
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Socrates — δαιμονίως μὲν οὖν, ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὥστε με ἐκπλαγῆναι. ἐμοὶ ἐδόκεις γάνυσθαι ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου… καὶ ἑπόμενος συνεβάκχευσα μετὰ σοῦ τῆς θείας κεφαλῆς
Uncannily good, my friend — it thunderstruck me. And that was your doing, Phaedrus: I kept watching you, and you seemed to glow with delight in the speech as you read. So, trusting that you understand these matters better than I do, I followed you — and following, joined your Bacchic revel, you divine head.
The recital ends. Phaedrus waits for literary judgment — and Socrates, deadpan, reports only symptoms: thunderstruck, and drunk on Phaedrus's own glow.
Asked for literary criticism, Socrates reports symptoms instead. Every word is possession-vocabulary played for comedy: the speech was <em>daimoníōs</em> good (uncanny — from <em>daímōn</em>, the anonymous divine whose personal 'sign' will interrupt this very dialogue at 242b); it left him <em>thunderstruck</em> (<em>ekplagênai</em> — the same 'stricken out of oneself' the palinode gives the soul that glimpses beauty); and watching Phaedrus <em>beam</em> (<em>gánysthai</em>, joy as visible radiance — the shine hiding in Ganymede's name), he 'followed and <em>joined the Bacchic revel</em>.' Fellow-Corybants at 228b, fellow-bacchants now: the mock-ecstasies keep escalating, one god at a time, toward the real one.<br><br>The closing address seals the tease: <em>tês theías kephalês</em>, 'your divine head' — Homer's tenderest formula (Zeus says it to Hera), half mock-epic, half real affection. And note what Socrates actually confesses: he caught his rapture not from Lysias's text but from Phaedrus's <em>face</em>. The speech argued for loveless calculation; its delivery was already a small proof of the opposite — enthusiasm passing from body to body, the way the palinode says beauty's stream passes into the lover through the eyes (251b).
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