A Lover of Socrates
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Apollodorus — οὐ μὰ τὸν Δία, ἦν δʼ ἐγώ, ἀλλʼ ὅσπερ Φοίνικι. Ἀριστόδημος ἦν τις, Κυδαθηναιεύς, σμικρός, ἀνυπόδητος ἀεί· παρεγεγόνει δʼ ἐν τῇ συνουσίᾳ, Σωκράτους ἐραστὴς ὢν ἐν τοῖς μάλιστα τῶν τότε, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ. οὐ μέντοι ἀλλὰ καὶ Σωκράτη γε ἔνια ἤδη ἀνηρόμην ὧν ἐκείνου ἤκουσα, καί μοι ὡμολόγει καθάπερ ἐκεῖνος διηγεῖτο. τί οὖν, ἔφη, οὐ διηγήσω μοι; πάντως δὲ ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ εἰς ἄστυ ἐπιτηδεία πορευομένοις καὶ λέγειν καὶ ἀκούειν. οὕτω δὴ ἰόντες ἅμα τοὺς λόγους περὶ αὐτῶν ἐποιούμεθα,
No, by Zeus, said I — but the very man who told Phoenix. There was a certain Aristodemus, of Cydathenaeum, a little man, always barefoot; he had been there at the gathering, being a lover of Socrates among the most devoted of that time, as it seems to me. All the same, I have by now put some questions to Socrates too about what I heard from that man, and he agreed with me just as that man told it. Why then, he said, won't you tell it to me? In any case the road up to town is just right for men walking both to talk and to listen. So then, as we walked we made our talk about these things at the same time,
Glaucon has just asked, at the end of 173a, who told Apollodorus the story — Socrates himself? The unit is Apollodorus' answer: no, his source is Aristodemus, whom he now describes, and whose report he has since checked with Socrates. It breaks off mid-sentence at ἐποιούμεθα, 'we made our talk', which runs on into 173c.
The word for that following is erastēs, and this is its first appearance in a dialogue that will spend the whole evening arguing about what it means. In Athens it was the technical term of courtship: the older man who pursues a boy, the active half of the pair whose passive half is the erōmenos. Here it names something else — a disciple's attachment to a teacher, 'a lover of Socrates among the most devoted of that time'. The Phaedrus works the same seam from the other side: at 252c–253c the lover picks out a beloved who resembles the god he himself followed, and then labours to shape him into that god's likeness, so that loving and imitating are one act. Before anyone in the Symposium has offered a definition of erōs, Plato has quietly filed the word under discipleship, and given the whole story to a man who took the imitation as far as his feet.
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