Shame Before the Wise
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Socrates — οὐ μεντἂν καλῶς ποιοίην, φάναι, ὦ Ἀγάθων, περὶ σοῦ τι ἐγὼ ἄγροικον δοξάζων· ἀλλʼ εὖ οἶδα ὅτι εἴ τισιν ἐντύχοις οὓς ἡγοῖο σοφούς, μᾶλλον ἂν αὐτῶν φροντίζοις ἢ τῶν πολλῶν. ἀλλὰ μὴ οὐχ οὗτοι ἡμεῖς ὦμεν— ἡμεῖς μὲν γὰρ καὶ ἐκεῖ παρῆμεν καὶ ἦμεν τῶν πολλῶν— εἰ δὲ ἄλλοις ἐντύχοις σοφοῖς, τάχʼ ἂν αἰσχύνοιο αὐτούς, εἴ τι ἴσως οἴοιο αἰσχρὸν ὂν ποιεῖν· ἢ πῶς λέγεις;
Agathon — ἀληθῆ λέγεις, φάναι.
Socrates — τοὺς δὲ πολλοὺς οὐκ ἂν αἰσχύνοιο, εἴ τι οἴοιο αἰσχρὸν ποιεῖν;
I certainly wouldn't be doing right, he said, Agathon, if I formed some boorish judgment about you. But I know well that if you met people you thought wise, you'd care more about them than about the many. I suspect we aren't those people — since we too were there, and we were among the many — though if you met other wise men, perhaps you'd feel ashamed before them, if you thought you were doing something shameful. Or how do you mean?" "You speak the truth," he said. "But the many — wouldn't you feel ashamed if you thought you were doing something shameful?"
Socrates takes Agathon's own aphorism from 194b and turns it into a test: a person is ashamed before those he judges wise, not before a crowd. He presses Agathon to admit that the dinner guests — who sat in that same theater audience — don't really count as the wise, before turning the question back on the crowd itself.
Socrates hedges his own remark with a joke at his own expense. ἄγροικος means country-bred, and by extension boorish — the ordinary slur a city Athenian aimed at anyone who didn’t know how to behave among sophisticated company. Socrates worries out loud that he might commit exactly this kind of gaffe toward Agathon, then builds an argument that has nothing crude about it: a person's shame answers only to those he judges wise, not to a crowd, however large. Since Socrates and the rest of the party sat in that same theater audience the day before, he and Agathon were, by Agathon’s own logic from 194b, simply part of the πολλοί — the many whose opinion carries no real weight.
The verb for that feeling, αἰσχύνομαι, to feel shame, comes back with real weight later in this same dialogue. When Alcibiades finally confesses his feelings for Socrates at 216b, he says he is ashamed in front of one man only, out of everyone alive, and that man is Socrates. Here the same verb is only a debating point, used to test whether Agathon can tell a serious judge from an indifferent crowd; there it names something Alcibiades cannot talk himself out of. Socrates is quietly sorting out, before anyone has had much wine, whose opinion is actually going to matter in this room.
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