The Soft One
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Apollodorus — οὐδὲν ποιοῦντες. καὶ ἴσως αὖ ὑμεῖς ἐμὲ ἡγεῖσθε κακοδαίμονα εἶναι, καὶ οἴομαι ὑμᾶς ἀληθῆ οἴεσθαι· ἐγὼ μέντοι ὑμᾶς οὐκ οἴομαι ἀλλʼ εὖ οἶδα.
Companion — ἀεὶ ὅμοιος εἶ, ὦ Ἀπολλόδωρε· ἀεὶ γὰρ σαυτόν τε κακηγορεῖς καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους, καὶ δοκεῖς μοι ἀτεχνῶς πάντας ἀθλίους ἡγεῖσθαι πλὴν Σωκράτους, ἀπὸ σαυτοῦ ἀρξάμενος. καὶ ὁπόθεν ποτὲ ταύτην τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν ἔλαβες τὸ μαλακὸς καλεῖσθαι, οὐκ οἶδα ἔγωγε· ἐν μὲν γὰρ τοῖς λόγοις ἀεὶ τοιοῦτος εἶ, σαυτῷ τε καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἀγριαίνεις πλὴν Σωκράτους.
doing nothing. And perhaps in turn you think that I am cursed with bad luck, and I think you're right to think so. But I, as for you — I don't think it, I know it well. You're always the same, Apollodorus. You always run down both yourself and the rest, and you seem to me simply to think everyone wretched except Socrates — beginning with yourself. And where in the world you got this nickname — being called 'the soft one,' I for one don't know; For, in your talk, you're always like this — savage toward yourself and everyone else, except Socrates.
Continuing his sentence from 173c, Apollodorus finishes describing an idle morning of talk with ‘doing nothing.’ He turns it on his companions — you probably think I’m cursed, and you’re right, but I don’t just think that of you, I know it. His unnamed companion answers with the dialogue’s running joke: Apollodorus is always like this, savaging himself and everyone else but Socrates, and no one can explain how a man with that tongue ever earned the nickname ‘the soft one.’
The nickname is the joke’s real hinge. Malakos — ‘soft’ — is a loaded word in Greek: it names a soft couch or a mild climate, but it just as easily brands a man weak, self-indulgent, unable to endure hardship, even, in later usage, sexually passive. None of that fits the man standing in front of us, who has just promised to know his friends are wretched rather than merely suspect it. Plato lets the irony sit unexplained — the companion says he doesn’t know where the name came from, and neither, really, do we. It is a small early sign of how this frame works throughout: Apollodorus is drawn as an extreme, almost comic character, the same instability of temperament that later makes his devotion to Socrates, and his grief at the death recounted in the Phaedo, so unnervingly total.
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