The Tongue Promised
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Socrates — ὑμῶν ἐγκωμιάσεσθαι τὸν ἔρωτα καὶ ἔφην εἶναι δεινὸς τὰ ἐρωτικά, οὐδὲν εἰδὼς ἄρα τοῦ πράγματος, ὡς ἔδει ἐγκωμιάζειν ὁτιοῦν. ἐγὼ μὲν γὰρ ὑπʼ ἀβελτερίας ᾤμην δεῖν τἀληθῆ λέγειν περὶ ἑκάστου τοῦ ἐγκωμιαζομένου, καὶ τοῦτο μὲν ὑπάρχειν, ἐξ αὐτῶν δὲ τούτων τὰ κάλλιστα ἐκλεγομένους ὡς εὐπρεπέστατα τιθέναι· καὶ πάνυ δὴ μέγα ἐφρόνουν ὡς εὖ ἐρῶν ὡς εἰδὼς τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ ἐπαινεῖν ὁτιοῦν. τὸ δὲ ἄρα, ὡς ἔοικεν, οὐ τοῦτο ἦν τὸ καλῶς ἐπαινεῖν ὁτιοῦν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ὡς
to praise Eros along with you, and I said I was an expert in love, knowing nothing, in fact, of the matter — how one ought to praise anything at all. For I, out of silliness, supposed one must speak the truth about each thing praised, and that this be the ground, and out of these very things selecting the finest, to set them out as becomingly as possible; and I prided myself greatly, that I would speak well, as one knowing the truth of how to praise. But this, it seems, was not what it is to praise anything finely, but rather the matter of how —
Still to Eryximachus, Socrates lays bare the game. He had naively thought a proper encomium meant telling the truth about its subject and then selecting the finest true things to present as handsomely as possible. He was proud of himself, sure he'd speak well because he knew the truth. But that, it turns out, was not what praising well means. The thought runs on into 198e.
The complaint is exactly the one Plato presses in the Gorgias against rhetoric: it aims at what pleases, not at what is. Agathon's speech, all balanced beauty, is the immediate target; but the charge reaches every encomium of the evening. Socrates is clearing the ground for a different kind of speech — one that will ask what Eros actually is and actually lacks, even if the truth is less flattering than the god's admirers would like. The famous confession is coming: his tongue agreed to this game, but not his mind.
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