The Cure Finishes, and the Doctor Begins
Read the full text in our reader
Eryximachus — ἀνακογχυλίασον. εἰ δʼ ἄρα πάνυ ἰσχυρά ἐστιν, ἀναλαβών τι τοιοῦτον οἵῳ κινήσαις ἂν τὴν ῥῖνα, πτάρε· καὶ ἐὰν τοῦτο ποιήσῃς ἅπαξ ἢ δίς, καὶ εἰ πάνυ ἰσχυρά ἐστι, παύσεται.
Aristophanes — οὐκ ἂν φθάνοις λέγων,
Aristodemus — φάναι τὸν Ἀριστοφάνη·
Aristophanes — ἐγὼ δὲ ταῦτα ποιήσω.
Aristodemus — εἰπεῖν δὴ τὸν Ἐρυξίμαχον,
Eryximachus — δοκεῖ τοίνυν μοι ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι, ἐπειδὴ Παυσανίας ὁρμήσας ἐπὶ τὸν λόγον καλῶς οὐχ
Gargle; but if it is still very violent, take something like that you could use to tickle your nose, and sneeze. Do that once or twice, and even if it's very violent, it will stop. You couldn't be quicker in starting to speak, said Aristophanes. And I will do that. Then Eryximachus said, Well then, I think it's necessary for me, since Pausanias, having made a fine start to his speech, did not…
Continuing straight on from the sentence broken off at 185d (…with water…), Eryximachus finishes prescribing for Aristophanes's hiccups — gargle, and if that fails, force a sneeze — and Aristophanes agrees, telling him to go ahead and start speaking. The frame narration then hands the floor to Eryximachus, who opens by noting that Pausanias made a fine start to his speech but, cut off mid-sentence here, did not bring it to a proper close.
Eryximachus closes his prescription with a word that survives nowhere else in Greek: anakonchyliason, 'gargle.' Readers of the passage have long connected it to konchē, a mussel-shell, as though the compound verb were coined to catch the wet rattle of water churned around the mouth — a doctor's private shorthand surfacing in literature exactly once, at a dinner party, for a hiccup. The second remedy, forcing a sneeze, had a life outside medicine that Eryximachus ignores completely: a sneeze at the right moment counted as a sign from the gods, the way Penelope in the Odyssey takes her son's sudden sneeze as proof that her prayer will be answered. Eryximachus treats the same reflex as plumbing, a mechanical trigger for a mechanical problem, with no interest in what a sneeze might be saying.
The instant his patient stops interrupting him, Eryximachus turns the identical diagnostic habit on Pausanias's speech. He does not compliment it and move along; he says it is anankaion, necessary, to finish what Pausanias began well but left incomplete — the same vocabulary of clinical obligation he has just used on the hiccup. The sentence breaks off before we learn exactly what went wrong, but the shape of the complaint already shows how Eryximachus thinks: a speech, like a body, can start correctly and still fail to reach its proper end, and someone with the right technique has to see it there. That is the doctor's whole method in miniature, several sentences before he has said a word about eros.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 185e in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 185e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/185e/