The Corrupted Proverb
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Socrates — ἔχεις πρὸς τὸ ἐθέλειν ἂν ἰέναι ἄκλητος ἐπὶ δεῖπνον;
Aristodemus — κἀγώ, ἔφη, εἶπον ὅτι οὕτως ὅπως ἂν σὺ κελεύῃς. ἕπου τοίνυν,
Socrates — ἔφη, ἵνα καὶ τὴν παροιμίαν διαφθείρωμεν μεταβαλόντες, ὡς ἄρα καὶ Ἀγάθωνʼ ἐπὶ δαῖτας ἴασιν αὐτόματοι ἀγαθοί. Ὅμηρος μὲν γὰρ κινδυνεύει οὐ μόνον διαφθεῖραι ἀλλὰ καὶ ὑβρίσαι εἰς ταύτην τὴν παροιμίαν· ποιήσας γὰρ τὸν Ἀγαμέμνονα διαφερόντως ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα
Are you willing to go, uninvited, to dinner? And I, he said, replied that, just as you command. “Follow then,” he said, so that we may corrupt the proverb by changing it — that, it seems, the good go of their own accord, even to Agathon's feasts. For Homer risks not only corrupting but even doing violence to this proverb — for, portraying Agamemnon as outstandingly good a man…
Continuing Socrates' question to Aristodemus on the road: he proposes they go together, uninvited, to Agathon's dinner, and jokes about ‘corrupting’ an old proverb by punning on their host's name.
The joke works entirely on sound. The proverb's real word is agathōn, ‘of the good’ — the genitive plural of ἀγαθός. Socrates swaps in the host's own name, Agathōn, and the two words, always near-identical to the ear, collapse into one: to dine among good men simply is to dine at Agathon's. It is a showy piece of wit for a man who has just, unusually, bathed and put on sandals to look his best (174a). The theme he raises so lightly here — whether the aklētos, the uninvited, belongs at a feast among the good — is not idle. It returns in dead earnest at the dialogue's close, when a very different uninvited guest, a drunk and garlanded Alcibiades, comes pounding on Agathon's door.
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