Where Atē Walks
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Agathon — ἐνδεὴς οἷος ἦν Ὅμηρος πρὸς τὸ ἐπιδεῖξαι θεοῦ ἁπαλότητα. Ὅμηρος γὰρ Ἄτην θεόν τέ φησιν εἶναι καὶ ἁπαλήν— τοὺς γοῦν πόδας αὐτῆς ἁπαλοὺς εἶναι— λέγων… τῆς μένθʼ ἁπαλοὶ πόδες; οὐ γὰρ ἐπʼ οὔδεος πίλναται, ἀλλʼ ἄρα ἥ γε κατʼ ἀνδρῶν κράατα βαίνει. καλῷ οὖν δοκεῖ μοι τεκμηρίῳ τὴν ἁπαλότητα ἀποφαίνειν, ὅτι οὐκ ἐπὶ σκληροῦ βαίνει, ἀλλʼ ἐπὶ μαλθακοῦ. τῷ αὐτῷ
needing one such as Homer was, to show a god's tenderness. For Homer is a goddess, and tender — her feet, at least, are soft — saying: …her feet are soft; for she does not draw near upon the ground, but indeed she walks upon the heads of men. By this fine proof, it seems to me, he shows her tenderness: that she walks not on what is hard, but on what is soft. By the same—
Agathon turns from claim to proof: to display a god's tenderness he reaches for Homer's own picture of Atē, goddess of ruin, whose feet are so soft she never touches bare ground but walks on the heads of men.
Agathon's citation comes from Iliad 19.91-94, where Agamemnon blames Atē, eldest daughter of Zeus, for the quarrel with Achilles that opens the poem's plot. In Homer she is no minor figure: she once deceived Zeus himself and was hurled down from Olympus for it, and ever since she works her way among mortals without touching the ground, walking instead over the heads of men. The image ties together how delusion works — it moves fast, stays ungrounded, and enters through men's heads rather than their feet. Agathon keeps only the physical detail and drops the rest: a passage about catastrophic self-deception becomes, in his mouth, a nature note about soft feet.
Burnet marks a gap before the quoted line — something has dropped out of the transmission at exactly this point. The wording given here for Atē's feet is looser than Homer's actual Iliad phrasing, the kind of drift that comes from quoting poetry after wine rather than from a scroll. It is a small crack in Agathon's performance; Socrates will open a much larger one in his own turn, since none of this actually proves Eros is tender — only that Homer once called someone else's feet soft.
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