What May Not Be Said
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Eryximachus — λόγου ἀναγκάζεις γίγνεσθαι τοῦ σεαυτοῦ, ἐάν τι γελοῖον εἴπῃς, ἐξόν σοι ἐν εἰρήνῃ λέγειν.
Aristodemus — καὶ τὸν Ἀριστοφάνη γελάσαντα εἰπεῖν
Aristophanes — εὖ λέγεις, ὦ Ἐρυξίμαχε, καί μοι ἔστω ἄρρητα τὰ εἰρημένα. ἀλλὰ μή με φύλαττε, ὡς ἐγὼ φοβοῦμαι περὶ τῶν μελλόντων ῥηθήσεσθαι, οὔ τι μὴ γελοῖα εἴπω— τοῦτο μὲν γὰρ ἂν κέρδος εἴη καὶ τῆς ἡμετέρας μούσης ἐπιχώριον— ἀλλὰ μὴ καταγέλαστα.
Eryximachus — βαλών γε, φάναι, ὦ Ἀριστόφανες, οἴει ἐκφεύξεσθαι· ἀλλὰ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν καὶ οὕτως λέγε ὡς δώσων λόγον.
your own speech, you force me to become in case you say something laughable, when you might have spoken in peace. And Aristophanes, laughing, said: You put it well, Eryximachus — let what I said be unsaid. But don't watch over me: I'm not afraid of what's to come, not that I'll say something laughable — that would be a gain, and native to my own Muse — but of saying something merely ridiculous. You've already thrown your shot, he said, Aristophanes, and you think you'll escape; but pay attention, and speak knowing you'll have to give an account.
Continuing directly from 189a's unfinished ‘φύλακά με τοῦ…’, Eryximachus finishes making Aristophanes account for his own speech. Aristophanes, laughing, retracts his hiccup joke as ἄρρητα ('unsaid') and asks not to be watched, insisting he fears not what is properly laughable but what is merely ridiculous. Eryximachus answers that Aristophanes has already thrown his shot and will not get away so easily: let him speak knowing he must give an account of himself.
Aristophanes’ request to be let off the hook reaches for a startling word. Árrhēta is the technical term for what may not be repeated outside the rite it belongs to — above all the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose disclosure was a capital offense at Athens. He asks Eryximachus to treat his own joke about sneezing as though it were that kind of forbidden speech: sealed, unrepeatable, struck from the record. The comedy sits in the gap between the weight of the word and the size of what it covers — a crack about the cure for hiccups elevated, for one line, to the level of sacred silence. He then draws a real distinction for a working comic poet: geloîa, things properly laughable, would be sheer gain and native to his own Muse; katagélasta, things merely ridiculous, are the actual professional risk, the failure his whole craft exists to avoid.
Eryximachus answers by keeping the mock-formality going but shifting the image. Balṓn — ‘having let fly your shot’ — treats Aristophanes’ earlier jab as a move already made, not one he can cancel simply by asking not to be watched; ekpheúgō, ‘get away, escape,’ is the vocabulary for a defendant slipping a charge, not a friend excused from a favor. Dṓsōn lógon, ‘as one about to give an account,’ echoes the eúthynai Athenian magistrates underwent at the end of their term of office, a formal public reckoning of what was done. Alcibiades is at this same table tonight, and within a few years he will be prosecuted for the very thing Aristophanes jokes about here: profaning árrhēta, restaging the Eleusinian rite at a private party, the charge that drove him from Athens in 415 BCE.
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