Eryximachus Takes Heart
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Aristophanes — ἐρεῖ, μᾶλλον δὲ τί ἑκάτερος· Ἀγάθων γὰρ καὶ Σωκράτης λοιποί.
Eryximachus — ἀλλὰ πείσομαί σοι, ἔφη φάναι τὸν Ἐρυξίμαχον· καὶ γάρ μοι ὁ λόγος ἡδέως ἐρρήθη. καὶ εἰ μὴ συνῄδη Σωκράτει τε καὶ Ἀγάθωνι δεινοῖς οὖσι περὶ τὰ ἐρωτικά, πάνυ ἂν ἐφοβούμην μὴ ἀπορήσωσι λόγων διὰ τὸ πολλὰ καὶ παντοδαπὰ εἰρῆσθαι· νῦν δὲ ὅμως θαρρῶ.
—will say, or rather, what each of the two; for Agathon and Socrates are what remain." "But I will obey you," he said— Eryximachus replied, "for indeed your speech was told to me pleasantly. And if I did not know that Socrates and Agathon are formidable in matters of love, I would be quite afraid they might run out of words, because so much and so varied has already been said. But as it is, I have courage all the same."
Aristophanes' speech runs to its close, finishing the sentence begun in 193d: he corrects himself mid-thought, since with his own speech done only Agathon and Socrates remain to speak. The frame narration then turns to Eryximachus, who agrees not to mock the speech and admits what steadies his nerve about the two speakers still to come.
Eryximachus calls Socrates and Agathon deinoi peri ta erōtika, formidable in matters of love, and the word deinos keeps both of its ordinary senses live at once: it names what is skillful and what is frightening in the same breath, the adjective Athenians used equally for a clever speaker and for a monster. His own admission in the next clause, ephoboumēn, that he would fear the remaining speeches running dry, draws on the same root sense — what is deinos is worth being afraid of, even when the fear is really a form of respect. Socrates has already staked a public claim to expertise in love earlier in the dialogue, so Eryximachus's worry reads as more than flattery; he genuinely expects to be outclassed by both men still to speak.
There is a quieter joke folded into his confidence. Eryximachus, the doctor who has just spent his own speech treating erōs as a force to be diagnosed and balanced like the body's humors, admits here that theory only goes so far: he can classify love in the abstract, but set beside two men who are actually deinoi at it, all he can do is hope the well of words has not run dry, mē aporēsōsi logōn. The verb aporeō is the same one Plato uses elsewhere for the state Socrates induces in the people he questions — the numbness of the torpedo fish in the Meno, the sting of finding out you did not know what you thought you knew. Here the fear points the other way: not that Socrates will leave someone aporos, but that Socrates himself might come up short of things to say. No reader who has gotten this far into the Symposium believes that for a moment.
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