Delight and Irritation
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Apollodorus — ὥστε, ὅπερ ἀρχόμενος εἶπον, οὐκ ἀμελετήτως ἔχω. εἰ οὖν δεῖ καὶ ὑμῖν διηγήσασθαι, ταῦτα χρὴ ποιεῖν. καὶ γὰρ ἔγωγε καὶ ἄλλως, ὅταν μέν τινας περὶ φιλοσοφίας λόγους ἢ αὐτὸς ποιῶμαι ἢ ἄλλων ἀκούω, χωρὶς τοῦ οἴεσθαι ὠφελεῖσθαι ὑπερφυῶς ὡς χαίρω· ὅταν δὲ ἄλλους τινάς, ἄλλως τε καὶ τοὺς ὑμετέρους τοὺς τῶν πλουσίων καὶ χρηματιστικῶν, αὐτός τε ἄχθομαι ὑμᾶς τε τοὺς ἑταίρους ἐλεῶ, ὅτι οἴεσθε τὶ ποιεῖν
So — as I said when I began, I'm not out of practice. So if I must tell you the story too, that's what I should do. In fact, I myself, in general, whenever I make some talk about philosophy myself, or listen to others', quite apart from thinking I'm helped, how much I enjoy it, enormously. But whenever it's some other kind — especially your crowd, the rich and money-making sort — I myself am irritated, and I pity you, my companions, because you think you're doing something —
Continuing the sentence broken off at the end of 173b — Apollodorus has just explained that his source is Aristodemus, checked against Socrates' own account. He now explains why he is glad to retell it: philosophical talk is the one thing that gives him pure pleasure; talk of money and business does the opposite. The sentence runs on, unfinished, into 173d.
The undercurrent here is temperament, not argument. Apollodorus draws his line not between true and false but between two feelings — chairō, unguarded delight, and achthomai, a weight settling on him — and he doesn't pretend to be neutral about which side philosophy sits on. Pity (eleō) for his own rich friends is a strange thing to declare this early in a dialogue about love and beauty; it previews the disposition that earns him, a few lines later, the nickname "the maniac." The Phaedrus makes a related wager — that the philosophical life looks like madness from outside it — but there Socrates has to argue the case at length. Here Apollodorus just states the feeling, unembarrassed, before any argument has been made at all.
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