The Missing Socrates
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Aristodemus — τῇ Ἀγάθωνος, ἀνεῳγμένην καταλαμβάνειν τὴν θύραν, καί τι ἔφη αὐτόθι γελοῖον παθεῖν. οἷ μὲν γὰρ εὐθὺς παῖδά τινα τῶν ἔνδοθεν ἀπαντήσαντα ἄγειν οὗ κατέκειντο οἱ ἄλλοι, καὶ καταλαμβάνειν ἤδη μέλλοντας δειπνεῖν· εὐθὺς δʼ οὖν ὡς ἰδεῖν τὸν Ἀγάθωνα, ὦ, φάναι, Ἀριστόδημε, εἰς καλὸν ἥκεις ὅπως συνδειπνήσῃς· εἰ δʼ ἄλλου τινὸς ἕνεκα ἦλθες, εἰς αὖθις ἀναβαλοῦ, ὡς καὶ χθὲς ζητῶν σε ἵνα καλέσαιμι, οὐχ οἷός τʼ ἦ ἰδεῖν. ἀλλὰ Σωκράτη ἡμῖν πῶς οὐκ ἄγεις; καὶ ἐγώ, ἔφη, μεταστρεφόμενος οὐδαμοῦ ὁρῶ Σωκράτη ἑπόμενον· εἶπον οὖν ὅτι καὶ αὐτὸς μετὰ Σωκράτους ἥκοιμι, κληθεὶς ὑπʼ ἐκείνου δεῦρʼ ἐπὶ δεῖπνον. καλῶς γʼ, ἔφη, ποιῶν σύ· ἀλλὰ ποῦ ἔστιν οὗτος;
At Agathon's, he found the door open, and he said something funny happened to him there. A servant from inside met him at once and led him to where the others were reclining, and found them already about to dine. The moment he saw Agathon, 'Ah, Aristodemus,' he said, you've come at a good time to join us for dinner. But if you came for some other reason, put it off to another time — since I was looking for you yesterday too, to invite you, but couldn't find you. But how is it you haven't brought us Socrates?' And I, he said, turning around, saw Socrates nowhere behind me. So I said that I myself had come with Socrates, invited by him here to dinner. 'You did well to come,' he said. 'But where is he?'
Continuing Aristodemus's account, picked up mid-sentence from 174d (“...when they arrived at the house—”): the door at Agathon's stands open, and something funny happens on the way in. A servant leads Aristodemus straight to the other guests, already reclining for dinner; Agathon greets him warmly, then asks at once why he hasn't brought Socrates — who, Aristodemus realizes on turning around, isn't behind him after all.
Plato's word for the funny thing — geloion, the ordinary Greek word for whatever makes people laugh — is a quiet flag: this dinner already holds the city's leading comic poet reclining a few couches from its tragic one, and by the small hours the two of them will still be awake, with Socrates, arguing that comedy and tragedy are the work of the same craftsman. The joke itself is modest: Socrates has simply stopped walking, caught by a thought absorbing enough to cost him his companion. It is the same kind of disappearance the Phaedrus stages at its opening, where an unusual conversation announces itself by pulling Socrates out of his ordinary habits. Later in this dialogue (220c–d), Alcibiades will describe the pattern at full scale — Socrates once stood fixed in one spot at Potidaea, thinking, from one morning to the next.
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