A Third at the Couch
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Aristodemus — ἐν μέσῳ Σωκράτους τε καὶ ἐκείνου, παραχωρῆσαι γὰρ τὸν Σωκράτη ὡς ἐκεῖνον κατιδεῖν. παρακαθεζόμενον δὲ αὐτὸν ἀσπάζεσθαί τε τὸν Ἀγάθωνα καὶ ἀναδεῖν. εἰπεῖν οὖν τὸν Ἀγάθωνα
Agathon — Ὑπολύετε, παῖδες, Ἀλκιβιάδην, ἵνα ἐκ τρίτων κατακέηται.
Alcibiades — πάνυ γε, εἰπεῖν τὸν Ἀλκιβιάδην, ἀλλὰ τίς ἡμῖν ὅδε τρίτος συμπότης;
Aristodemus — καὶ ἅμα μεταστρεφόμενον αὐτὸν ὁρᾶν τὸν Σωκράτη, ἰδόντα δὲ ἀναπηδῆσαι καὶ εἰπεῖν
Alcibiades — ὦ Ἡράκλεις, τουτὶ τί ἦν; Σωκράτης οὗτος; ἐλλοχῶν αὖ με ἐνταῦθα κατέκεισο,
Between Socrates and him, for Socrates had made room, so as to see him. Sitting down beside them, he embraced Agathon and wreathed him. Then Agathon said, Unshoe him, boys, Alcibiades, so he can recline as a third. By all means, said Alcibiades— but who is this third companion of ours? And as he spoke, turning around, he saw Socrates; catching sight of him, he leapt up and cried, Heracles! What is this? Socrates, here? Lying in ambush for me again, you were reclining right here,
Continuing straight from 213a: Aristodemus reports that Socrates yields his place so that he can get a look at Agathon, and Alcibiades ends up reclining between the two of them. Once down, Alcibiades embraces Agathon and winds his own ribbons around him, before Agathon tells the slaves to unshoe him properly. Turning to ask who their third couch-companion is, Alcibiades spots Socrates and leaps up in mock alarm — a sentence that runs on past this unit's end into 213c.
Aristodemus stages the seating with the same care Plato gives to everything physical in this dialogue: Socrates gives up his spot so he can see Agathon, and the newcomer ends up wedged literally between the two men whose speeches have framed the evening — the poet of beauty and the philosopher who is about to unmake him. Alcibiades, still garlanded from the door, embraces Agathon and winds his own ribbons around him before he has even registered who else is on the couch. Then he turns, and the scene tips straight into comedy: Heracles! is a stock oath, the kind of thing a startled slave shouts in Aristophanes, not language a serious symposiast reaches for — and Plato hands it to his most self-possessed guest anyway, mid-swallow of wine.
The verb Alcibiades picks for what Socrates has supposedly done, ellocháo, is hunting and ambush vocabulary — the word for a soldier or a predator lying concealed until prey wanders into range. It is a strange charge to level at a man who was simply reclining on a couch, and it lands harder than Alcibiades seems to intend: this dialogue has just spent its longest speech, Diotima's, describing Eros himself as a fierce hunter who stalks the beautiful and the good by nature (Symposium 203d). Alcibiades means the accusation as a joke about Socrates' habit of turning up in doorways. By the end of his own speech a few pages on, the joke will have reversed completely — it is Alcibiades who has spent years hunting Socrates, and failing to catch him.
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