Filled from Other Streams
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Socrates — δῆλον δὲ ὅτι τινῶν ἀκήκοα, ἤ που Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς ἢ Ἀνακρέοντος τοῦ σοφοῦ.… πλῆρές πως, ὦ δαιμόνιε, τὸ στῆθος ἔχων αἰσθάνομαι, παρὰ ταῦτα ἂν ἔχειν εἰπεῖν ἕτερα μὴ χείρω.… συνειδὼς ἐμαυτῷ ἀμαθίαν
I must have heard it from someone — from Sappho the beautiful, maybe, or Anacreon the wise, or some prose writer. Why do I think so? My breast feels strangely full, my uncanny friend: I could say other things beside these, and not worse. That none of it is my own I know for certain — I am conscious of my own ignorance. So it must have been poured into me from someone else's streams, through the ears, like a jar being filled.
Pressed to admit he could improve on Lysias, Socrates pleads a strange condition: his chest feels full — of material he knows is not his own, poured in through the ears from poets he can only half name.
Where does a better speech about love come from? Not from me, says Socrates — and names his lenders: <em>Sappho the beautiful, Anacreon the wise</em>. The epithets are placed with a jeweler's care: the woman poet gets the dialogue's sacred adjective (<em>kalḗ</em>), the drinking-song master gets wisdom. Behind the tease is a real debt — the palinode's physiology of love, the fire under the skin and the soul unstrung, is Sappho's symptomatology (fragment 31) transposed into myth. Plato lets Socrates owe his erotics to a woman, by name, before the palinode borrows her tremors.<br><br>The self-description is the deeper joke. His breast (<em>stêthos</em> — Homer's seat of thought) is 'somehow full' of <em>other people's</em> material, poured in through the ears 'like a jar' — knowledge as liquid, the self as container: the picture of inspiration the <em>Ion</em> builds into a chain of magnets. And the one thing he claims as his own is the famous nothing: <em>syneidṑs emautôi amathían</em>, 'conscious-in-myself of ignorance' — <em>sýnoida</em>, the knowing-with verb whose noun became, via Latin <em>conscientia</em>, our 'conscience.' The Socratic paradox in one clause: the inner witness whose sole testimony is emptiness sits in a chest that keeps filling from elsewhere.
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