Alcibiades Calls Socrates Marsyas the Satyr
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Alcibiades — ἐν τοῖς ἑρμογλυφείοις καθημένοις, οὕστινας ἐργάζονται οἱ δημιουργοὶ σύριγγας ἢ αὐλοὺς ἔχοντας, οἳ διχάδε διοιχθέντες φαίνονται ἔνδοθεν ἀγάλματα ἔχοντες θεῶν. καὶ φημὶ αὖ ἐοικέναι αὐτὸν τῷ σατύρῳ τῷ Μαρσύᾳ. ὅτι μὲν οὖν τό γε εἶδος ὅμοιος εἶ τούτοις, ὦ Σώκρατες, οὐδʼ αὐτὸς ἄν που ἀμφισβητήσαις; ὡς δὲ καὶ τἆλλα ἔοικας, μετὰ τοῦτο ἄκουε. ὑβριστὴς εἶ; ἢ οὔ? ἐὰν γὰρ μὴ ὁμολογῇς, μάρτυρας παρέξομαι. ἀλλʼ οὐκ αὐλητής? πολύ γε θαυμασιώτερος ἐκείνου.
sitting in the herm-carvers' shops, the ones the craftsmen make holding pipes or flutes, which split in two, are seen to have inside images of gods. And I say again that he resembles the satyr Marsyas. Now then, that in form at least you're similar to these, Socrates, not even you yourself, I suppose, would dispute. But that you're like them in other ways too, listen next. You're an insolent one or not? For if you won't admit it, I'll produce witnesses. But aren't you a flute-player? Far more astonishing than that one.
Continuing the Silenus-statue image from 215a, Alcibiades finishes describing the hollow, myth-carved figures and then names the specific satyr Socrates resembles: Marsyas, flayed by Apollo after losing a music contest. He presses two charges — that Socrates is ὑβριστής (insolent, overbearing) and αὐλητής (a flute-player) — promising witnesses if Socrates denies either.
Alcibiades finishes the Silenus image with more Marsyas in it than generic satyr: the statues are sold at the ἑρμογλυφεῖα, the herm-carvers’ shops that lined the Athenian street, and split open to reveal a god hidden inside a grotesque shell. Naming Marsyas specifically matters: he was the particular satyr who lost a music contest with Apollo and was flayed alive for the presumption of competing. Alcibiades puts that fate in the room before he has made a single specific charge. The word he does choose, hybristēs, is not a mild jab; it names the man who commits hybris, the crime of violating another person’s honor by force, and Attic law let the victim of it bring a public suit. Alcibiades, who has spent his whole speech as the pursued party in this dialogue’s erotic economy, recasts himself here as the one under assault and Socrates as the aggressor — an inversion he plays for laughs but does not fully take back.
Herm-carvers’ shops are also a strange thing for Alcibiades to reach for here. In 415 BC, about a year after this dinner’s dramatic date, the herms standing outside houses and shrines across Athens were mutilated overnight, and Alcibiades himself stood accused of the vandalism and of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries — the affair that pulled him back from the Sicilian expedition and sent him into exile rather than face trial. Plato’s readers knew all of this; Alcibiades, inside the fiction, does not yet. The image he reaches for to praise Socrates is one his own later notoriety would make impossible to hear innocently. The flute-player charge that follows — ἀλλʼ οὐκ αὐλητής; — opens the comparison Alcibiades develops next: that Socrates gets the same effect on people Marsyas got from his pipes, without needing an instrument at all.
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