Pay the God His Due
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Phaedrus — καὶ τὸν Φαῖδρον ἔφη ὑπολαβόντα εἰπεῖν ὦ φίλε Ἀγάθων, ἐὰν ἀποκρίνῃ Σωκράτει, οὐδὲν ἔτι διοίσει αὐτῷ ὁπῃοῦν τῶν ἐνθάδε ὁτιοῦν γίγνεσθαι, ἐὰν μόνον ἔχῃ ὅτῳ διαλέγηται, ἄλλως τε καὶ καλῷ. ἐγὼ δὲ ἡδέως μὲν ἀκούω Σωκράτους διαλεγομένου, ἀναγκαῖον δέ μοι ἐπιμεληθῆναι τοῦ ἐγκωμίου τῷ Ἔρωτι καὶ ἀποδέξασθαι παρʼ ἑνὸς ἑκάστου ὑμῶν τὸν λόγον; ἀποδοὺς οὖν ἑκάτερος τῷ θεῷ οὕτως ἤδη διαλεγέσθω.
And Phaedrus, breaking in, said — so Apollodorus told us — "My dear Agathon, if you start answering Socrates, nothing will matter to him any longer, whatever happens here in whatever way, so long as he has someone to talk with — especially someone handsome. Now I myself enjoy listening to Socrates converse, but I still have to see to Eros's encomium, and collect a speech from each one of you. So once each of you has paid the god his due, let the two of you go on talking."
Phaedrus breaks into the sparring between Socrates and Agathon (194a-c) to call the evening back to its actual business: each guest still owes Eros a speech, and Agathon and Socrates may resume talking only once that debt is paid.
ὑπολαβόντα is Plato’s standard word for cutting into someone else’s speech — the same participle introduces Thrasymachus’s outburst in the Republic (336b) and marks interruption throughout the dialogues generally. Here it names a structural fact about this evening as much as a narrative one: Phaedrus, who back at 177a–c complained that no poet had ever written Eros a proper hymn and proposed this very round of speeches to fix that, is now the one enforcing his own rule. Socrates and Agathon have wandered off the schedule into a private duel of compliments, and it falls to Phaedrus — not the philosopher, not the tragedian, but the evening’s impresario — to call the room back to order.
His language for doing it is financial as much as festive. ἀποδούς … τῷ θεῷ (“having paid the god”) uses ἀποδίδωμι, the ordinary verb for discharging a debt or making good on a vow. An ἐγκώμιον, on Phaedrus’s own terms, is not a spontaneous gift but something each guest owes and must render in turn — exactly the transaction he set up at the start of the party. Only once that debt is settled, he says, can Agathon and Socrates go back to their own exchange; ἑκάτερος, “each of the two,” already marks out which pair will be left standing once every other speaker has paid up.
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