A Spell Before Speaking
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Aristodemus — τὸν οὖν Σωκράτη εἰπεῖν
Socrates — καλῶς γὰρ αὐτὸς ἠγώνισαι, ὦ Ἐρυξίμαχε· εἰ δὲ γένοιο οὗ νῦν ἐγώ εἰμι, μᾶλλον δὲ ἴσως οὗ ἔσομαι ἐπειδὰν καὶ Ἀγάθων εἴπῃ εὖ, καὶ μάλʼ ἂν φοβοῖο καὶ ἐν παντὶ εἴης ὥσπερ ἐγὼ νῦν.
Agathon — φαρμάττειν βούλει με, ὦ Σώκρατες, εἰπεῖν τὸν Ἀγάθωνα, ἵνα θορυβηθῶ διὰ τὸ οἴεσθαι τὸ θέατρον προσδοκίαν μεγάλην ἔχειν ὡς εὖ ἐροῦντος ἐμοῦ.
Socrates — ἐπιλήσμων μεντἂν εἴην, ὦ Ἀγάθων, εἰπεῖν τὸν Σωκράτη,
So Socrates said: You yourself have competed well, Eryximachus; but if you should come to where I am now, or rather, perhaps, where I will be once Agathon too has spoken well — you would be very afraid indeed, and be at a total loss, just as I am now. You want to bewitch me, Socrates, said Agathon, so that I may be flustered, supposing the theater holds great expectation that I will speak well. I would indeed be forgetful, Agathon, said Socrates,
Aristophanes has just finished his myth-speech, and the frame narration returns: Socrates now turns to Eryximachus, admitting that if he is afraid now, he will be far more afraid once Agathon — fresh from his tragedy's contest victory — has also spoken. Agathon suspects Socrates is trying to unsettle him before he begins.
Agathon's accusation turns on a single verb, pharmáttein — to treat someone with a φάρμακον, the maddeningly untranslatable Greek word that covers drug, poison, and remedy without settling on one. He hears Socrates' compliment-and-confession as a spell cast on purpose: tell me how frightened speaking after a tragedian makes you, and you plant the same fear in me before I begin. Plato reaches for the same word-family again at Phaedrus 274e–275b, where writing itself is called a pharmakon that can serve or ruin memory depending on how it is used — the ambiguity is never resolved there any more than it is here. Agathon is not wrong to be wary. Socrates has in fact just applied a little pressure dressed as flattery about the dramatic contest that ἠγώνισαι names, the very ἀγών Agathon has already won once tonight and is about to enter again in a different arena.
Socrates' answer plays on epilḗsmōn, forgetful — built on the same root as λήθη (forgetting), which with the alpha-privative gives ἀλήθεια, truth, literally what does not slip away. Calling himself forgetful, even as a joke, is an odd move from the character who elsewhere makes remembering what the soul has lost the whole business of philosophy. The joke works precisely because Socrates is not forgetful: he is tallying, with some precision, how much worse his fear will get once Agathon has spoken, and naming his own coming discomfort before it happens. The stakes recall the Ion, where Plato pictures a rhapsode's hold over an audience as a chain of magnetized rings passing feeling from Muse to poet to listener without any link in the chain possessing real knowledge — a picture just as suspicious of what a well-timed compliment, or a tragedy that has already won its contest, can do to a room before anyone has judged the words themselves.
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