The First Image: Socrates and the Sileni
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Alcibiades — ψεύσομαι. ἐὰν μέντοι ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος ἄλλο ἄλλοθεν λέγω, μηδὲν θαυμάσῃς. οὐ γάρ τι ῥᾴδιον τὴν σὴν ἀτοπίαν ὧδʼ ἔχοντι εὐπόρως καὶ ἐφεξῆς καταριθμῆσαι. Σωκράτη δʼ ἐγὼ ἐπαινεῖν, ὦ ἄνδρες, οὕτως ἐπιχειρήσω, διʼ εἰκόνων. οὗτος μὲν οὖν ἴσως οἰήσεται ἐπὶ τὰ γελοιότερα, ἔσται δʼ ἡ εἰκὼν τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἕνεκα, οὐ τοῦ γελοίου. φημὶ γὰρ δὴ ὁμοιότατον αὐτὸν εἶναι τοῖς σιληνοῖς τούτοις τοῖς
I will not lie. If, however, recollecting, I mention things now from one point, now from another, don't be at all surprised — it's not at all easy, for someone in this state, to list your strangeness readily and in order. But I will attempt to praise Socrates, gentlemen, this way — through images. Now then, he'll perhaps think it's toward the more ridiculous, but the image will be for the sake of the truth, not of ridicule. For, indeed, I say he is most like these Sileni here, the ones…
Socrates has just permitted the truth and told Alcibiades to speak (214e). Alcibiades completes the hedge he began there — he will not willingly lie, though drunk enough that his memory may wander — and announces his method: he will praise Socrates διὰ εἰκόνων, through images, since Socrates may take it for mockery when it is aimed at truth. He opens with the boldest comparison first: Socrates is most like the little Silenus-statues kept in sculptors' shops. The sentence describing them runs on into 215b.
Alcibiades answers Socrates’ fear from 214e almost word for word. Socrates had asked whether the plan was ἐπὶ τὰ γελοιότερα, ‘toward the more ridiculous’; Alcibiades repeats the same comparative here, γελοιότερα, and promises that his εἰκών will be τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἕνεκα, ‘for the sake of the truth,’ not of the ridiculous. The word choice matters more than it looks. εἰκών is Plato’s technical term, elsewhere in the corpus, for a likeness one rank below the thing it copies — the shadows and reflections he calls εἰκόνες in the divided line at Republic 509e–510a, the lowest grade of what can be known at all. By naming his portrait of Socrates an εἰκών rather than a plain λόγος, Alcibiades tells the room, before he has described a single feature of the comparison, that what follows is a copy standing in for something more real than itself — and that a copy can look absurd without the thing it copies being so.
The image he reaches for first is an object everyone at the table would recognize: the small carved Silenus-figures sold in sculptors’ workshops, made holding pipes or flutes, that split down the middle to reveal a god’s statuette hidden inside (the description finishes only in 215b, but the shape of the joke is already set here, at τοῖς σιληνοῖς τούτοις τοῖς). Sileni were the stock comic old satyrs of Dionysus’s retinue — snub-nosed, pot-bellied, perpetually drunk — and this dinner is itself held, unstated but obvious, under Dionysus’s patronage. Aristophanes is at the table, the poet who had already made Socrates a figure of fun for an Athenian audience seven years earlier, in the Clouds. Alcibiades is not retracting that portrait; he is proposing it was accurate and incomplete at once — funny on the outside for the same reason a Silenus box is funny on the outside, which is exactly where the god is kept.
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