Few Sensible Men
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — εἰ ἰδὼν τὴν σὴν ἀνδρείαν καὶ μεγαλοφροσύνην ἀναβαίνοντος ἐπὶ τὸν ὀκρίβαντα μετὰ τῶν ὑποκριτῶν, καὶ βλέψαντος ἐναντία τοσούτῳ θεάτρῳ, μέλλοντος ἐπιδείξεσθαι σαυτοῦ λόγους, καὶ οὐδʼ ὁπωστιοῦν ἐκπλαγέντος, νῦν οἰηθείην σε θορυβήσεσθαι ἕνεκα ἡμῶν ὀλίγων ἀνθρώπων.
Agathon — τί δέ, ὦ Σώκρατες; τὸν Ἀγάθωνα φάναι, οὐ δήπου με οὕτω θεάτρου μεστὸν ἡγῇ ὥστε καὶ ἀγνοεῖν ὅτι νοῦν ἔχοντι ὀλίγοι ἔμφρονες πολλῶν ἀφρόνων φοβερώτεροι;
If, having seen your courage and magnanimity as you mounted onto the platform with the actors, and looked straight at so great a theater, about to display your own speeches, and were not panicked in the slightest, I should now think that you would be thrown into confusion on account of us, a few men. "What do you mean, Socrates?" said Agathon. "Surely you don't think me so full of the theater that I'm unaware that to a sensible man a few men of sense are more formidable than many fools?"
Socrates continues his teasing reply to Agathon, begun at 194a: having just watched Agathon mount the actors' platform and face a full theater without flinching, he could hardly now suppose their small dinner party would fluster him. Agathon answers in kind, turning the compliment into an aphorism about audiences.
Socrates picks his image with care. Ὄκρίβας is the actual name for the plank-built platform Athenian actors used before the city built a proper stone theater, and ὑποκριτής — the ordinary word for a stage actor — is built on ὑποκρίνομαι, to answer or interpret. Long before it gave English hypocrite, the word simply named the man who answers back, in character, in front of a crowd. Socrates has just watched Agathon do this for real, mounting that platform among the professional actors and facing a theater full of strangers without so much as a flinch (οὐδʼ ὁπωστιοῦν ἐκπλαγέντος, “not the least bit panicked”). To suppose that same man would now come apart over a handful of friends at dinner would be, as Socrates has just said of himself in 194a, plain forgetfulness.
Agathon's answer turns the tease into an argument. His οὐ δήπου question expects the answer no, and it is built on a pair of opposites, ἔμφρων against ἄφρων — ‘in one's φρήν’ against its own negation, the same root twice. A few discerning men, he says, are φοβερώτεροι, more formidable, than a crowd of fools. It is a version of the argument Socrates himself will make to Crito about listening to the one person who actually understands rather than counting the votes of the many (Crito 44c–47d) — Plato has the playwright, freshly crowned by a jury of thousands, reach the philosopher's own conclusion before the philosopher has had to argue for it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 194b 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 194b — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/194b/