If Wisdom Flowed Like Water
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Aristodemus — ἀπολαύσω, ὅ σοι προσέστη ἐν τοῖς προθύροις. δῆλον γὰρ ὅτι ηὗρες αὐτὸ καὶ ἔχεις· οὐ γὰρ ἂν προαπέστης. καὶ τὸν Σωκράτη καθίζεσθαι καὶ εἰπεῖν ὅτι εὖ ἂν ἔχοι, φάναι, ὦ Ἀγάθων, εἰ τοιοῦτον εἴη ἡ σοφία ὥστʼ ἐκ τοῦ πληρεστέρου εἰς τὸ κενώτερον ῥεῖν ἡμῶν, ἐὰν ἁπτώμεθα ἀλλήλων, ὥσπερ τὸ ἐν ταῖς κύλιξιν ὕδωρ τὸ διὰ τοῦ ἐρίου ῥέον ἐκ τῆς πληρεστέρας εἰς τὴν κενωτέραν. εἰ γὰρ οὕτως ἔχει καὶ ἡ
I'll profit from whatever came to you there in the porch. For it's clear that you found it and have it; otherwise you wouldn't have dropped behind. And Socrates sat down and said that it would be a fine thing, he said, O Agathon, if wisdom were such that, from the fuller of us it might flow into the emptier, whenever we touch one another — just as the water in the cups that flows through the wool from the fuller cup into the emptier one. For if it really works this way, and the…
Continuing directly from 175c, mid-sentence: Agathon has invited Socrates to recline beside him, hoping proximity will let some of his porch-side insight rub off. Here he finishes that thought, and Socrates, now seated, answers with a wish of his own — that wisdom really did pass between touching bodies, the way water runs through a strand of wool from a fuller cup into an emptier one.
The wool-and-cups image describes a real piece of household technology: a length of wool stretched between a full vessel and an empty one will slowly draw water from one into the other, and Socrates reaches for the nearest object at a dinner party to make his point, the way he elsewhere reaches for cobblers and helmsmen. But the comparison is a setup, not an endorsement. He phrases the whole thing as an unfulfilled wish — if only wisdom worked this way — and the mood of the verbs, optative rather than plain statement, already gives away that he thinks otherwise. Agathon's gesture, touching Socrates to catch some of his sophia, treats wisdom as a liquid that passes by contact, exactly the picture Diotima's speech later in the evening will dismantle, when she makes wisdom something each soul has to climb toward under its own effort. The Phaedrus runs the same argument about writing: an idea taken in ready-made from someone else, without the labor of working it out, is never quite one's own.
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