After So Beautiful a Speech
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Socrates — καὶ πῶς, ὦ μακάριε, εἰπεῖν τὸν Σωκράτη, οὐ μέλλω ἀπορεῖν καὶ ἐγὼ καὶ ἄλλος ὁστισοῦν, μέλλων λέξειν μετὰ καλὸν οὕτω καὶ παντοδαπὸν λόγον ῥηθέντα; καὶ τὰ μὲν ἄλλα οὐχ ὁμοίως μὲν θαυμαστά· τὸ δὲ ἐπὶ τελευτῆς τοῦ κάλλους τῶν ὀνομάτων καὶ ῥημάτων τίς οὐκ ἂν ἐξεπλάγη ἀκούων; ἐπεὶ ἔγωγε ἐνθυμούμενος ὅτι αὐτὸς οὐχ οἷός τʼ ἔσομαι οὐδʼ ἐγγὺς τούτων οὐδὲν καλὸν εἰπεῖν, ὑπʼ αἰσχύνης ὀλίγου
And how, my blessed friend, said Socrates, am I not going to be at a loss, I and anyone else, about to speak after so beautiful and varied a speech has been delivered? The other parts were not equally wonderful; but the beauty of the words and phrases at the very end — who would not be struck dumb hearing it? Since I for one, reflecting that I myself shall not be able to say anything beautiful even near these, out of shame almost
Socrates goes on, deadpan, to Eryximachus: how could anyone not be tongue-tied after a speech like Agathon's? He mock-praises its finish — the sheer beauty of its words and phrases — and confesses that, realizing he could say nothing so lovely, he nearly fled the room for shame. The sentence runs on into 198c.
The self-deprecation is the old Socratic move — profess helplessness, then quietly overturn everything. He fixes on kallos, beauty, as the speech's great virtue, and beauty is exactly what his own speech will re-examine: not the beauty of phrases but the beauty that Eros desires. The Gorgias and the Phaedrus both stage this same quarrel between rhetoric that pleases and speech that tells the truth; here Plato lets Socrates smile his way into it before drawing the knife.
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