Socrates Falls Behind
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Aristodemus — ἥκειν, ἀλλʼ ὑπὸ σοῦ κεκλημένος.
Socrates — σύν τε δύʼ, ἔφη, ἐρχομένω πρὸ ὁδοῦ βουλευσόμεθα ὅτι ἐροῦμεν. ἀλλʼ ἴωμεν.
Aristodemus — τοιαῦτʼ ἄττα σφᾶς ἔφη διαλεχθέντας ἰέναι. τὸν οὖν Σωκράτη ἑαυτῷ πως προσέχοντα τὸν νοῦν κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν πορεύεσθαι ὑπολειπόμενον, καὶ περιμένοντος οὗ κελεύειν προϊέναι εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν. ἐπειδὴ δὲ γενέσθαι ἐπὶ τῇ οἰκίᾳ
to have come— but invited by you. “Two of us going together,” he said, “we'll decide along the way what we'll say.” “Come, let's go.” Talking about such things, he said, they went on— So Socrates, applying his mind to himself, somehow, walked along the road, falling behind, and when he waited, he told him to go on ahead. And when they arrived at the house—
Aristodemus finishes the joking reply to Socrates begun in 174c — he won't admit he's gate-crashing, only that Socrates invited him — and Socrates answers with his own play on Homer as they set off for Agathon's. On the road, though, Socrates drops back, caught up in some thought of his own; Aristodemus waits for him, is told to go on ahead, and reaches the house alone.
This is the first appearance, tossed off almost in passing, of a habit Alcibiades will later describe at length (220c–d): Socrates stopping mid-errand, sometimes for a full day, caught by a thought that has nothing to do with where his body is walking. Here it barely registers as strange — Aristodemus simply waits, then is waved ahead — but the text has already planted what it will later turn into a set piece. In the companion Phaedrus, this same capacity for being overtaken mid-motion shows up as a daimonic sign and as the erotic mania that seizes a person walking, mid-conversation, clean out of himself. Here, on the road to a dinner party, it looks like nothing more than a man distracted — which may be exactly Plato's point: the philosopher's strangest trait is, from the outside, almost invisible.
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