The Pause of Pausanias, and a Fit of Hiccups
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Pausanias — τε ἐρῶντα αὐτὸν αὑτοῦ καὶ τὸν ἐρώμενον· οἱ δʼ ἕτεροι πάντες τῆς ἑτέρας, τῆς πανδήμου. ταῦτά σοι, ἔφη, ὡς ἐκ τοῦ παραχρῆμα, ὦ Φαῖδρε, περὶ Ἔρωτος συμβάλλομαι.
Aristodemus — Παυσανίου δὲ παυσαμένου— διδάσκουσι γάρ με ἴσα λέγειν οὑτωσὶ οἱ σοφοί— ἔφη ὁ Ἀριστόδημος δεῖν μὲν Ἀριστοφάνη λέγειν, τυχεῖν δὲ αὐτῷ τινα ἢ ὑπὸ πλησμονῆς ἢ ὑπό τινος ἄλλου λύγγα ἐπιπεπτωκυῖαν καὶ οὐχ οἷόν τε εἶναι λέγειν,
both the lover, himself, and the beloved; but all the others belong to the other, the common one. This, he said, is what I contribute to you, Phaedrus, off the cuff, concerning Love. Now that Pausanias had paused — for the wise teach me to speak in balanced phrases like this — Aristodemus said that it was Aristophanes's turn to speak, but it happened that some hiccup, from over-fullness or something else, had come upon him, and he was not able to speak,
Pausanias reaches the close of the sentence he began in 185b, naming the final pair who belong to the Heavenly Eros — the lover in his own right and the one he loves — then closes with a small disclaimer to Phaedrus that the speech has been improvised. The frame resumes: Apollodorus, retelling Aristodemus's account, jokes about the pun in Pausanias's own name before reporting that Aristophanes, next in line to speak, was stopped by a sudden fit of hiccups.
Apollodorus interrupts his own narration to make a joke, and the joke works twice over. ‘Pausanias, having paused’ — Παυσανίου παυσαμένου — pairs a proper name with the verb it happens to share most of its letters with, and Apollodorus explains the trick out loud in the same breath: ‘the wise teach me to talk like this,’ he says, meaning the professional teachers of rhetoric who drilled their students in isokola, clauses built to matching length and sound. It is a small parody of a real technique, the kind a room full of Gorgias's admirers — Agathon among them — would recognize at once. The joke lands partly because it is aimed at the narrator himself: he performs the very affectation he is pointing out, in the sentence where he points it out.
The pun runs deeper than a coincidence of sound. Greek names built on παύειν, 'to stop,' regularly pair the verb with a noun for whatever is being stopped, and Pausanias's own name is conventionally read as 'stopper of grief.' So when the narration marks the moment he falls silent as Παυσανίου παυσαμένου, it is not inventing a resemblance between the name and the verb; it is pointing out one that was already sitting there. English can reproduce the surface chime by luck — ‘Pausanias paused’ very nearly does the same trick — but not the deeper fact that in Greek the name and the verb are the same word wearing two different endings. A hiccup interrupts the next speaker a moment later, and the text gives the pun and the spasm exactly the same amount of weight.
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