Socrates Plays the Injured Lover
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Alcibiades — ὥσπερ εἰώθεις ἐξαίφνης ἀναφαίνεσθαι ὅπου ἐγὼ ᾤμην ἥκιστά σε ἔσεσθαι. καὶ νῦν τί ἥκεις; καὶ τί αὖ ἐνταῦθα κατεκλίνης; ὡς οὐ παρὰ Ἀριστοφάνει οὐδὲ εἴ τις ἄλλος γελοῖος ἔστι τε καὶ βούλεται, ἀλλὰ διεμηχανήσω ὅπως παρὰ τῷ καλλίστῳ τῶν ἔνδον κατακείσῃ. καὶ
Aristodemus — τὸν Σωκράτη,
Socrates — Ἀγάθων, φάναι, ὅρα εἴ μοι ἐπαμύνεις· ὡς ἐμοὶ ὁ τούτου ἔρως τοῦ ἀνθρώπου οὐ φαῦλον πρᾶγμα γέγονεν. ἀπʼ ἐκείνου γὰρ τοῦ χρόνου, ἀφʼ οὗ τούτου
Just as you always used to suddenly appear wherever I thought you'd least be. And now why have you come? And why again did you recline here — not beside Aristophanes, nor anyone else who is funny and wants to be, but you contrived to recline beside the most beautiful of those here. And Socrates — “Agathon,” he said, “see whether you'll defend me— this man's love for me has become no small matter. For from that time, ever since this one…”
Continuing straight from 213b, where Alcibiades accused Socrates of 'lying in ambush' by turning up wherever he'd be found, Alcibiades finishes the charge: Socrates has contrived to recline beside Agathon, the most beautiful man present, rather than the comic Aristophanes. Socrates turns to Agathon and, casting himself as the injured party, asks for protection from Alcibiades' love, which he says has become no small trouble; his sentence explaining why breaks off mid-clause and finishes in 213d.
Alcibiades' complaint turns on a plain contrast: Aristophanes is γελοῖος, simply 'funny,' the ordinary word for a man who makes you laugh; Agathon is κάλλιστος, 'most beautiful,' the tragedian everyone at the party has already noticed. Socrates, he says, engineered the seating — διεμηχανήσω, a strong verb for calculated plotting, kin to the machinery hiding behind our word 'mechanism' — to land beside beauty rather than comedy. When Socrates turns to Agathon, he does not deny it; he asks him to ἐπαμύνειν, literally to come to his aid the way one soldier backs another in the battle-line. It is the vocabulary of a man under attack, not a guest making small talk at dinner.
The joke works because everyone at the table already knows better. A few Stephanus pages from now Alcibiades will describe a Socrates immune to wine, to cold, and to the sight of the most beautiful men in Athens — a man beauty cannot touch. Here that same man asks to be defended from beauty's owner as though under siege, calling Alcibiades' feeling for him οὐ φαῦλον πρᾶγμα, 'no trifling matter,' the phrase a general uses for a real threat, not one anyone uses to describe being loved. Socrates has spent this evening's earlier speeches, through Diotima, arguing that erōs is the lover's own lack reaching for what it needs — the same lack that gets a chariot and two bolting horses in the Phaedrus. Put that theory in his own mouth here and, for one line, he plays the besieged beloved instead of the needy lover, asking Agathon to hold the horses he is usually blamed for driving.
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