Last on the Couches, Last to Speak
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Socrates — Παυσανίας, οὐδὲ μὴν Ἀριστοφάνης, ᾧ περὶ Διόνυσον καὶ Ἀφροδίτην πᾶσα ἡ διατριβή, οὐδὲ ἄλλος οὐδεὶς τουτωνὶ ὧν ἐγὼ ὁρῶ. καίτοι οὐκ ἐξ ἴσου γίγνεται ἡμῖν τοῖς ὑστάτοις κατακειμένοις· ἀλλʼ ἐὰν οἱ πρόσθεν ἱκανῶς καὶ καλῶς εἴπωσιν, ἐξαρκέσει ἡμῖν. ἀλλὰ τύχῃ ἀγαθῇ καταρχέτω Φαῖδρος καὶ ἐγκωμιαζέτω τὸν ἔρωτα.
Aristodemus — ταῦτα δὴ καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι πάντες ἄρα συνέφασάν τε καὶ
Pausanias, nor indeed Aristophanes, whose entire business is Dionysus and Aphrodite, nor anyone else here that I see. And yet it isn't fair for us who recline last. But if those before us speak well and adequately, that will suffice for us. But with good luck, let Phaedrus begin and praise Eros. With that, all the others likewise agreed as well, and…
Continuing Socrates's reply to Eryximachus, begun in 177d: having said he himself would never refuse to speak on Eros, Socrates names Agathon and Pausanias, then Aristophanes — whose whole occupation, he says, is given over to Dionysus and Aphrodite — and everyone else present as equally willing. He points out that those of them reclining last at table are at a disadvantage, but proposes that, with good luck, Phaedrus should open the round of speeches. Aristodemus notes that everyone agreed.
The joke about Aristophanes runs on one word twice. His diatribē — literally a “wearing away” of time, from diatríbō, to rub or spend hours down to nothing — is entirely given over to Dionysus and Aphrodite: wine and sex, the two things Athenian Old Comedy was staged to celebrate at the god's own festival and the two things its jokes never tire of. Socrates isn't insulting him; he's describing the comic poet's whole professional life in two divine names, and setting up exactly the kind of speech Aristophanes will in fact deliver a few pages later. The second point is smaller but just as physical: κατακειμένοις, 'reclining,' is not a metaphor. Where you happen to be lying on the couches decides when you speak, and Socrates' crowd, stuck at the far end of the room, will hear seven variations on a theme before their own turn comes. A dinner party's seating chart becomes the order of philosophical argument. Whatever thread the evening's account of love finally follows, it starts here as an accident of furniture — Phaedrus goes first because he happens to be reclining first, not because he has thought about Eros longest.
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