Alcibiades Refuses to Make Peace
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Socrates — ἠράσθην, οὐκέτι ἔξεστίν μοι οὔτε προσβλέψαι οὔτε διαλεχθῆναι καλῷ οὐδʼ ἑνί, ἢ οὑτοσὶ ζηλοτυπῶν με καὶ φθονῶν θαυμαστὰ ἐργάζεται καὶ λοιδορεῖταί τε καὶ τὼ χεῖρε μόγις ἀπέχεται. ὅρα οὖν μή τι καὶ νῦν ἐργάσηται, ἀλλὰ διάλλαξον ἡμᾶς, ἢ ἐὰν ἐπιχειρῇ βιάζεσθαι, ἐπάμυνε, ὡς ἐγὼ τὴν τούτου μανίαν τε καὶ φιλεραστίαν πάνυ ὀρρωδῶ.
Alcibiades — ἀλλʼ οὐκ ἔστι,
Aristodemus — φάναι τὸν Ἀλκιβιάδην,
Alcibiades — ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ διαλλαγή. ἀλλὰ τούτων μὲν εἰς αὖθίς σε τιμωρήσομαι· νῦν
I fell in love, it's no longer possible for me to look at or talk with any other beautiful person, or this man, jealous of me and resentful, does amazing things, he reviles me, and scarcely keeps his hands off. So watch that he doesn't do something even now — but reconcile us, or if he tries to use force, defend me, since I am quite afraid of this man's madness and his lover's devotion. “But there is no said Alcibiades — reconciliation between you and me. But I'll punish you for this, another time. Now…”
Socrates finishes the sentence he began in 213c: ever since he fell in love with Alcibiades, he can no longer look at or speak with any other beautiful person without Alcibiades turning jealous and half-violent, so he begs Agathon to keep the peace between them or defend him if Alcibiades resorts to force. The narrator briefly steps in to mark the reply, and Alcibiades flatly refuses any reconciliation, promising Socrates a reckoning later — his sentence trails off mid-thought into 213e.
Socrates casts himself as the pursued and Alcibiades as the jealous, half-violent lover, and the joke works only because everyone at the table knows the roles are supposed to run the other way: Alcibiades is the beautiful young man Athens expects to be chased, not to chase. Philerastia (φιλεραστία) names exactly the wrong-way devotion Socrates diagnoses — the fondness proper to an erōmenos for his erastēs, here misapplied to the boy chasing the old man. Pausanias's speech back at 181–182 had drawn a careful map of who is supposed to love whom and why; Alcibiades has walked straight off that map, and Socrates names the disorder with a coinage rather than the ordinary word for love.
The menace under the comedy is real. Mania is the same word that will carry the whole argument of the Phaedrus, where Socrates argues at length that a god-sent madness can be the soul's greatest gift. Nothing here retracts that; it only insists that madness, sent or not, is also dangerous to stand near, and Socrates is not performing fear so much as reporting it. Alcibiades' one-line reply refuses the terms outright — no reconciliation, a debt deferred — and Plato lets the sentence break off unfinished, so that the audience, like Agathon, is left holding a threat with its second half still owed.
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