Plato, Symposium 197c · 197c

Agathon summarizes his whole catalogue in one claim — Eros is first and finest, and so becomes, for everyone else, the source of that same excellence — then announces a shift in register: ἐπέρχεται δέ μοί τι καὶ ἔμμετρον εἰπεῖν, 'it occurs to me to say something in verse too.' What follows is Agathon composing on the spot, or claiming to, and the line he produces is built the way his prose already has been: εἰρήνην answered by γαλήνην, a rhyme so close it is almost a pun, peace on land mirrored by calm at sea. Gorgias taught that sound could argue by itself, and Agathon takes the lesson literally — γαλήνην and νηνεμίαν, ἀνέμων κοίτην and ὕπνον, pile up as near-synonyms rather than a developing argument, each new word restating the last in a different key.

The list is also a compressed inventory of everything a Greek sailor or farmer feared: the sea unpredictable, the winds ungovernable, sleep unavailable to a mind in grief (κήδος, the word Homer uses for a mourner's care). Eros gets credit for solving all three, not by explaining how, but by being named their opposite. Socrates will spend his own speech, once it's his turn, doing exactly what Agathon skips here — asking what Eros actually is before praising what he does. The verse is lovely and answers nothing; that gap is the joint at which Socrates' method cuts.

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