Socrates Arrives Late
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Aristodemus — ἄλλους, θεραπεύετε, ἵνʼ ὑμᾶς ἐπαινῶμεν. μετὰ ταῦτα ἔφη σφᾶς μὲν δειπνεῖν, τὸν δὲ Σωκράτη οὐκ εἰσιέναι. τὸν οὖν Ἀγάθωνα πολλάκις κελεύειν μεταπέμψασθαι τὸν Σωκράτη, ἓ δὲ οὐκ ἐᾶν. ἥκειν οὖν αὐτὸν οὐ πολὺν χρόνον ὡς εἰώθει διατρίψαντα, ἀλλὰ μάλιστα σφᾶς μεσοῦν δειπνοῦντας. τὸν οὖν Ἀγάθωνα— τυγχάνειν γὰρ ἔσχατον κατακείμενον μόνον— δεῦρʼ, ἔφη φάναι, Σώκρατες, παρʼ ἐμὲ κατάκεισο, ἵνα καὶ τοῦ σοφοῦ ἁπτόμενός σου
‘Wait on the others,’ so that we may praise you all.’ After this, he said, they dined, but Socrates did not come in. So Agathon kept urging, often, that someone send for Socrates, but he would not allow it. Then he came, not delaying as long as usual, but just when they were halfway through dinner. Agathon then — since he happened to be reclining alone, at the far end — ‘Here, Socrates,’ he said, he said, ‘recline beside me, so that, by touching you, I may also get hold of some of your wisdom…
Continuing Aristodemus's account: Socrates has stopped on a neighbor's porch, caught in one of his fits of abstraction, and calls to the others as they go in without him — ‘wait on the rest, so that we may praise you’ are the words this section opens on. Aristodemus and the company begin dinner; Agathon keeps wanting to send a servant after Socrates.
Agathon's welcome plays on an old folk picture of wisdom as a substance that can pass by contact, the way water finds its own level — he wants to sit close enough to Socrates that some of the sophia that struck him on the porch might flow across into him. It is a charming, half-serious wish, and Plato is about to let Socrates puncture it: a few lines on, Socrates will compare the idea to wool soaking up water through a thread from a fuller vessel to an emptier one, and deny that wisdom works that way at all. But the instinct under Agathon's joke is not simply wrong for this dialogue — proximity and desire really will turn out to transmit something over the course of the evening, just not by touch. The porch itself is also a quiet echo of the Phaedrus, where Socrates is likewise drawn out of ordinary company into private absorption; there it is love and landscape that pull him aside, here only his own thought, and the others simply learn, as Aristodemus already has, to let him be.
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