Father of Luxury and Longing
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Agathon — δὲ οὗτος ἡμᾶς ἀλλοτριότητος μὲν κενοῖ, οἰκειότητος δὲ πληροῖ, τὰς τοιάσδε συνόδους μετʼ ἀλλήλων πάσας τιθεὶς συνιέναι, ἐν ἑορταῖς, ἐν χοροῖς, ἐν θυσίαισι γιγνόμενος ἡγεμών; πρᾳότητα μὲν πορίζων, ἀγριότητα δʼ ἐξορίζων; φιλόδωρος εὐμενείας, ἄδωρος δυσμενείας; ἵλεως ἀγαθός; θεατὸς σοφοῖς, ἀγαστὸς θεοῖς; ζηλωτὸς ἀμοίροις, κτητὸς εὐμοίροις; τρυφῆς, ἁβρότητος, χλιδῆς, χαρίτων, ἱμέρου, πόθου πατήρ; ἐπιμελὴς ἀγαθῶν, ἀμελὴς κακῶν; ἐν πόνῳ, ἐν φόβῳ, ἐν πόθῳ, ἐν
And this one empties us of estrangement, fills us with kinship, bringing together all such gatherings with one another, at festivals, in dances, in sacrifices, showing himself our leader; supplying gentleness, and banishing savagery; generous with good will, stingy with ill will; gracious, good; a sight to the wise, a wonder to the gods; enviable to those who lack him, a prize for those who share him; father of luxury, of delicacy, of elegance, of the graces, of desire, of longing; attentive to good things, indifferent to bad ones; in toil, in fear, in longing, in—
Agathon's rolling catalogue of Eros's titles continues straight out of the verse quotation that closed 197c (“peace among men, calm on the sea…”). A new run-on sentence opens here: Eros empties the company of estrangement and fills it with kinship, presides over every festival, dance, and sacrifice, and is praised through a string of paired epithets — gentle, well-disposed, gracious, admired, enviable, a father of soft and yearning things — building toward a final list of settings (toil, fear, longing…) that Burnet's page division cuts off mid-phrase; the list's last item, 'in discourse,' arrives only at the start of 197e.
Agathon has stopped arguing and started chanting. The sentence has no main verb doing normal work anymore — just predicate after predicate stacked onto hoûtos, “this one,” each pair built from a rhyme (philódōros / ádōros, zēlōtós / ktētós, ámoiros / eúmoiros) or an antithesis (praiótēs against agriótēs, gentleness against savagery). This is the Gorgianic style by name — Gorgias of Leontini's trick of making prose sound like verse through matched clauses and jingling homoioteleuton — and Plato lets Agathon run it to the edge of self-parody: six abstract nouns in a row (tryphês, habrótētos, chlidês, charítōn, himérou, póthou) naming luxury, softness, and desire, with no argument connecting any of them to the last. The wordplay on ámoiros/eúmoiros — “without a share” against “with a good share,” both built on moîra</u>, portion or fate — makes Eros himself into the thing fortune allots, envied by those who go without.
The list runs straight into the Stephanus page break: Burnet's 197d ends on a bare en, “in,” with its noun — lógōi, “in speech” — stranded at the start of 197e. That is an accident of how the dialogue was later carved into citation units, not a pause Agathon intended, but it lands well: a speech this saturated with sound was always going to keep going past any point where sense demands it stop. Socrates will name the disease directly in 198c, comparing Agathon to Gorgias and confessing his own fright at the man's mouth.
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