Alcibiades Arrives, Crowned and Very Drunk
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Aristodemus — ἐστεφανωμένον αὐτὸν κιττοῦ τέ τινι στεφάνῳ δασεῖ καὶ ἴων, καὶ ταινίας ἔχοντα ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς πάνυ πολλάς, καὶ εἰπεῖν·
Alcibiades — ἄνδρες, χαίρετε· μεθύοντα ἄνδρα πάνυ σφόδρα δέξεσθε συμπότην, ἢ ἀπίωμεν ἀναδήσαντες μόνον Ἀγάθωνα, ἐφʼ ᾧπερ ἤλθομεν; ἐγὼ γάρ τοι, φάναι, χθὲς μὲν οὐχ οἷός τʼ ἐγενόμην ἀφικέσθαι, νῦν δὲ ἥκω ἐπὶ τῇ κεφαλῇ ἔχων τὰς ταινίας, ἵνα ἀπὸ τῆς ἐμῆς κεφαλῆς τὴν τοῦ σοφωτάτου καὶ καλλίστου κεφαλὴν ἐὰν εἴπω οὑτωσὶ ἀναδήσω. ἆρα καταγελάσεσθέ μου ὡς μεθύοντος; ἐγὼ δέ, κἂν ὑμεῖς
Crowned with a thick wreath of ivy and violets, wearing a great many ribbons on his head, and said: Gentlemen, greetings— will you receive as your drinking companion a man who is very, very drunk, or shall we go away, once we've simply crowned Agathon, which is exactly why we came? For I, he said, could not manage to come yesterday, but now I am here with the ribbons on my head, so that from my own head if I may put it so I may bind the head of the wisest and most beautiful man. Will you laugh at me for being drunk? But I, even if you—
Continuing the description begun in 212d — Alcibiades has just been heard shouting drunkenly in the courtyard and is brought to the doorway — 212e completes the sentence: still crowned with ivy, violets, and ribbons, he speaks, opening with a mock-formal greeting and a joke about his own drunkenness before turning, mid-sentence, to explain why he is wearing a spare set of ribbons meant for Agathon's head. The unit ends mid-clause, continuing into 213a.
Alcibiades arrives wearing the costume of the very god the party has spent all night praising: a thick crown of kittós and violets is exactly how Dionysos and his revelers are shown on vase paintings, and the ivy specifically marks him as coming from a kōmos, the drunken victory-procession that barges into other people's parties uninvited. His opening line performs a mock vote — dékesthe, 'will you admit me' — that echoes, without any sign he knows it, the very question a doorkeeper or a jury might put; Alcibiades treats admission to a drinking party as if it needed the same formal yes as admission to the city's business. Then comes the joke that turns out not to be one: he came to crown Agathon, using the extra ribbons on his own head for the purpose, 'if I may put it that way' — a hedge (houtōsí) that flags, the moment before he says it, that binding one man's head-ornament onto another's carries an erotic charge he can't quite own straight.
The crowning gesture makes Alcibiades a second Agathon-prize-giver in one evening: Agathon has just been praised in every speech and crowned in fact, and the man who now proposes to add ribbons to that crown is the one whose own entrance is about to eclipse every speech that came before him. Socrates has spent the whole dialogue arguing that the philosopher, not the tragedian, is Eros's true prize-winner; Alcibiades' drunken coronation of Agathon, staged in exactly the terms the sober speeches used, sets up the contest over who really deserves the wreath — a contest his own speech, still to come, will settle by crowning Socrates instead.
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