Anything But Philosophy
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Apollodorus — πρὸ τοῦ δὲ περιτρέχων ὅπῃ τύχοιμι καὶ οἰόμενος τὶ ποιεῖν ἀθλιώτερος ἦ ὁτουοῦν, οὐχ ἧττον ἢ σὺ νυνί, οἰόμενος δεῖν πάντα μᾶλλον πράττειν ἢ φιλοσοφεῖν. καὶ ὅς, μὴ σκῶπτʼ, ἔφη, ἀλλʼ εἰπέ μοι πότε ἐγένετο ἡ συνουσία αὕτη. κἀγὼ εἶπον ὅτι παίδων ὄντων ἡμῶν ἔτι, ὅτε τῇ πρώτῃ τραγῳδίᾳ ἐνίκησεν Ἀγάθων, τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ ἢ ᾗ τὰ ἐπινίκια ἔθυεν αὐτός τε καὶ οἱ χορευταί. πάνυ, ἔφη, ἄρα πάλαι, ὡς ἔοικεν. ἀλλὰ τίς σοι διηγεῖτο; ἢ αὐτὸς Σωκράτης;
Before that, though, I ran about wherever I chanced to, and thought I was doing something, while I was more wretched than anyone at all — no less than you are right now, thinking one must do anything rather than philosophize. And he: Don't make fun of me, he said, but tell me when this gathering took place. And I said that when we were still boys, back when Agathon won with his first tragedy — on the day after the one when he himself and his chorus-men were sacrificing the victory offerings. Then that is a very long time ago, he said, so it seems. But who told it to you? Or was it Socrates himself?
Apollodorus is still answering Glaucon on the road into town. He has just said that he has been following Socrates for not quite three years; this is the sentence that describes the life before that, and it turns into a jab at Glaucon. The section ends on a complete sentence — Glaucon's question about who told Apollodorus the story — and the answer comes at 173b.
The charge against Glaucon is not laziness. It is panta mallon prattein ē philosophein — doing anything at all rather than philosophizing — and it makes busyness the disease and philosophy the cure, an inversion that runs through Plato. In the Apology (31b) Socrates says he neglected everything of his own to go about attending to other men's souls; in the Phaedrus the whole conversation is possible only because the two men find they have scholē, leisure (258e), and spend it on the cicadas' myth rather than on business. What follows here is dating, and it is quietly doing the same work. Agathon's first tragic victory was 416 BC, a date an Athenian could place to the day, and the party came the evening after he and his chorus had sacrificed for the win. Apollodorus adds that he and Glaucon were still children then. The night the dialogue is about is already old, already secondhand, and already the property of people who were not there.
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