The Head of Gorgias
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Socrates — ἀποδρὰς ᾠχόμην, εἴ πῃ εἶχον. καὶ γάρ με Γοργίου ὁ λόγος ἀνεμίμνῃσκεν, ὥστε ἀτεχνῶς τὸ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ἐπεπόνθη· ἐφοβούμην μή μοι τελευτῶν ὁ Ἀγάθων Γοργίου κεφαλὴν δεινοῦ λέγειν ἐν τῷ λόγῳ ἐπὶ τὸν ἐμὸν λόγον πέμψας αὐτόν με λίθον τῇ ἀφωνίᾳ ποιήσειεν. καὶ ἐνενόησα τότε ἄρα καταγέλαστος ὤν, ἡνίκα ὑμῖν ὡμολόγουν ἐν τῷ μέρει μεθʼ
having run away I'd have been gone, if I had anywhere to go. For indeed the speech of Gorgias kept reminding me, so that literally I had suffered the very thing in Homer: I was afraid that at the end Agathon, hurling at my speech the head of Gorgias, terrible at speaking, in his own speech, might turn me to very stone by speechlessness. And I realized then, after all, that I was being ridiculous when I agreed with you to take my turn among
Socrates keeps up the comic panic: Agathon's speech reminded him of Gorgias, the great rhetorician, and he says he was afraid that at the end Agathon would launch "the head of Gorgias" against his own speech and turn him to stone with speechlessness. It is a pun on the Gorgon, whose severed head petrified whoever looked at it. He now sees how ridiculous he was to agree to speak in turn. The sentence continues into 198d.
Under the clowning is a serious charge. Gorgias was the master of the dazzling, sound-drunk style, and Agathon has just spoken in exactly that manner; to be "petrified" by such rhetoric is to be silenced by mere verbal beauty rather than answered with truth. Plato makes the same complaint in the Gorgias outright. Here Socrates disarms it as a joke, but the target is plain: a speech that stuns is not the same as a speech that is true, and he is about to insist on the difference.
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