Plato, Symposium 188e · 188e

Eryximachus closes with an itemized disclaimer, the standard move of any speaker working through a large subject: πολλὰ παραλείπω, 'I leave out much.' But he refuses to let it pass as mere carelessness — οὐ μέντοι ἑκών γε, 'not willingly, at least' — before handing the remainder to Aristophanes with a small verbal echo. He has just used the infinitive ἐγκωμιάζειν, 'to praise,' twice in describing what Aristophanes might do, and closes on the bare imperative of the same verb, ἐγκωμίαζε: infinitive turns into command in the space of one sentence, and the speech ends on the very word it was about, now redirected at someone else.

The last word before Aristophanes rises to speak is λύγξ, the hiccup that stopped his own turn back at 185c–185e, which Eryximachus, the doctor at the table, treated first with a gargle and then with a forced sneeze. Its resolution here is stated as a plain clinical fact, πέπαυσαι, 'you have stopped' — but the timing is exact: the last thing said before Aristophanes speaks is that his body has stopped misbehaving. He is about to tell a myth in which the human body itself is the whole problem, sliced in two by Zeus and driven ever after to find its missing half. Eryximachus cannot know what is coming; Plato places the hiccup at the door anyway.

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