Praising the God Himself
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Agathon — ἀλλὰ καλῶς λέγεις, ὦ Φαῖδρε, φάναι τὸν Ἀγάθωνα, καὶ οὐδέν με κωλύει λέγειν; Σωκράτει γὰρ καὶ αὖθις ἔσται πολλάκις διαλέγεσθαι. ἐγὼ δὲ δὴ βούλομαι πρῶτον μὲν εἰπεῖν ὡς χρή με εἰπεῖν, ἔπειτα εἰπεῖν. δοκοῦσι γάρ μοι πάντες οἱ πρόσθεν εἰρηκότες οὐ τὸν θεὸν ἐγκωμιάζειν ἀλλὰ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους εὐδαιμονίζειν τῶν ἀγαθῶν ὧν ὁ θεὸς αὐτοῖς αἴτιος; ὁποῖος δέ τις αὐτὸς ὢν
But you're right, Phaedrus, said Agathon, and nothing stops me from speaking; for I will often get to talk with Socrates again. But I indeed wish first to say how I ought to speak, and then to speak. For it seems to me that everyone who spoke before has praised not the god, but the people, congratulating them for the good things of which the god is the cause to them; but as for what sort of being he himself is—
Phaedrus has just cut Socrates off, warning Agathon that answering him will lead nowhere — Socrates only wants an excuse to keep talking, especially to someone beautiful — and insisting each man pay his speech to the god before any more conversation. Agathon yields, and turns at once from banter to method: what is the right way to praise anything at all.
Agathon states his method as a technical correction. The speakers before him, he says, did not ἐγκωμιάζειν the god — deliver a proper enkōmion, a praise-speech describing what its subject is — they only εὐδαιμονίζειν men, congratulated mortals on their good luck. The distinction is real: an enkōmion describes a nature; a eudaimonismos just totals up someone's blessings and calls them fortunate. Phaedrus praised eros's age and its power over lovers, Pausanias sorted it into two kinds, Eryximachus found it running through the whole cosmos, Aristophanes gave it a myth of severed halves — all of them describing what love does for us, none of them asking what love is, prior to any of that. Agathon means to close the gap: the god's nature first, his gifts after.
The demand is not new to this dinner party. In the Phaedrus, Socrates insists on exactly this before he will praise or blame eros at all: we must first agree on what a thing is, in every particular, or we are bound to miss it completely (237b–d). Agathon, with no apparent debt to Socrates, arrives at the philosopher's own opening move by way of rhetorical training rather than dialectic. There is a smaller joke folded into his transition, too: he waves off further questioning from Socrates — there will be plenty of other chances to talk with him — without knowing how soon that chance returns. Socrates starts cross-examining him the moment his speech ends, at 199c.
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