Filled Like a Vessel
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Socrates — ναμάτων διὰ τῆς ἀκοῆς πεπληρῶσθαί με δίκην ἀγγείου. ὑπὸ δὲ νωθείας αὖ καὶ αὐτὸ τοῦτο ἐπιλέλησμαι, ὅπως τε καὶ ὧντινων ἤκουσα.
Socrates accounts for his own fluency with a joke that is also an image. He can't be original, he says; he must have been filled up like a jar — poured full through the ears by the streams of the old poets and thinkers he's been quoting. And then, playing the dullard, he claims to have forgotten the one thing that would matter: how, and from whom, he heard it. It is Socratic irony at its lightest — disowning his wisdom by crediting it to others, then 'forgetting' the others too.
Socrates, still mock-modest, explains his sudden eloquence: he must have been filled up like a jar, through the ears, by the streams of the old poets and sages — Sappho and Anacreon among them. And, dull creature that he is, he has clean forgotten how, or from whom, he drank.
The picture is deliberately physical: Socrates a clay angeion, a jar, filled through the ears from namata, the flowing 'streams' of earlier wisdom — the same watery language the poets used for inspiration, kin to the Naiads of the running springs. It is a modest self-portrait, the philosopher as an empty vessel that only holds what was poured in. But it sits pointedly against the palinode to come, where the soul is filled not through the ears by other people's words but by what it once saw of the Forms and now, through beauty, remembers. And notice the verb for his lapse: epilelēsmai, 'I have forgotten,' built on lēthē, oblivion — the very forgetting the myth of recollection is out to reverse. Socrates plays at being a leaky jar with a poor memory. The dialogue is quietly assembling the opposite ideal: a soul that remembers what it drank from, because it drank at the source and not downstream.
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