Rinse the Brine With Fresh Water
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Socrates — τοῦτόν γε τοίνυν ἔγωγε αἰσχυνόμενος καὶ αὐτὸν τὸν ἔρωτα δεδιώς ἐπιθυμῶ ποτίμῳ λόγῳ οἷον ἁλμυρὰν ἀκοὴν ἀποκλύσασθαι·
Socrates gathers his motive into a single, beautiful image. He is ashamed — before the gentle, well-born listener he has just imagined — and, more, he is afraid of Love himself, the god he slandered. So he longs to do one thing: rinse out the aftertaste of the two speeches, which have left the ears full of brine, with a potimos logos, a 'fresh, drinkable speech.' The false accounts were seawater — clever, bitter, undrinkable, leaving you parched. The true one will be spring-water, the kind that actually quenches. He even advises Lysias to hurry and write the opposite of what he wrote, so the beloved should favor the lover rather than the non-lover. The recantation is not just an argument; it is a drink of clean water after a mouthful of the sea.
Socrates gives his motive and his cure in one image. Ashamed before that imagined man of taste, and afraid of Love himself, he longs to rinse out the taste of seawater the two cynical speeches have left — a 'briny hearing' — with a fresh, drinkable speech. The palinode is to be clean spring-water poured over ears that just drank brine.
The whole recantation is announced through a single, gorgeous opposition of waters: the two cynical speeches are halmyra akoē, a 'briny hearing,' seawater in the ears, and Socrates wants to wash it out — apoklysasthai, the verb behind 'cataclysm' — with a potimos logos, a fresh, drinkable speech. Fresh water against salt. It is the same divide that ran through the 'sailors' insult a moment earlier, the coarse world of the sea against the gracious life on land, but now it turns tender and specific. And it reaches back to where the two men are actually sitting: the fresh spring at the shrine of the nymphs, the running water Socrates admired when they first arrived. The palinode is being cast as that spring — the clean, living water that restores. Plato is making a claim about what a false account of love does to a person: it does not merely mislead, it leaves you parched, tasting brine, subtly poisoned by cleverness. And the truth about love, correspondingly, is refreshment — something you drink and are made well by. Notice, too, what is driving Socrates: aischynē, shame, and fear of the god. Reverence has come back. He is no longer the clever anatomist of appetite but a man afraid he has offended something holy, thirsty for clean water. The great myth that follows is the drink.
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