Held Fast by the Words, Not the Speaker
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Alcibiades — τοῦτο ποιεῖς. ἡμεῖς γοῦν ὅταν μέν του ἄλλου ἀκούωμεν λέγοντος καὶ πάνυ ἀγαθοῦ ῥήτορος ἄλλους λόγους, οὐδὲν μέλει ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οὐδενί; ἐπειδὰν δὲ σοῦ τις ἀκούῃ ἢ τῶν σῶν λόγων ἄλλου λέγοντος, κἂν πάνυ φαῦλος ᾖ ὁ λέγων, ἐάντε γυνὴ ἀκούῃ ἐάντε ἀνὴρ ἐάντε μειράκιον, ἐκπεπληγμένοι ἐσμὲν καὶ κατεχόμεθα. ἐγὼ γοῦν, ὦ ἄνδρες, εἰ μὴ ἔμελλον κομιδῇ δόξειν μεθύειν, εἶπον ὀμόσας ἂν ὑμῖν οἷα δὴ πέπονθα αὐτὸς ὑπὸ τῶν τούτου λόγων καὶ πάσχω ἔτι καὶ
This is what you do. We, at least, whenever we hear someone else speaking, even a very good orator, say other things, it matters to none of us, so to speak. But whenever someone hears you, or your words, reported by another, even if the speaker is quite poor, whether a woman hears, a man, or a boy, we are thunderstruck and held fast. I, for one, gentlemen, if I weren't about to seem utterly drunk, I would swear and tell you what I myself have experienced — indeed, at the hands of this man's words — and still feel…
Continuing his encomium, Alcibiades turns from the Marsyas/Silenus image (215a–c) to its point: an ordinary orator, however skilled, leaves an audience unmoved, but Socrates’ words — even reported secondhand by a poor speaker, even heard by a woman, a man, or a boy — leave everyone thunderstruck and gripped. He starts to say he would swear to what this has done to him, then catches himself for fear of sounding drunk.
Alcibiades reaches for the vocabulary of religious possession. Katechō, ‘hold fast, grip,’ is the same verb Plato gives elsewhere to the trance of the Corybantic dancers and to the rhapsode in the Ion, seized by a force that runs through him whether or not he understands a word he is reciting. Alcibiades has spent the preceding lines comparing Socrates to Marsyas and his talk to the satyr’s pipes; here he specifies exactly what that comparison claims. A skilled ῥήτωρ working a crowd with ordinary material — the standard machinery of Athenian persuasion — leaves everyone unmoved: οὐδὲν μέλει, ‘it doesn’t matter at all.’ Socrates’ words do something else: they hold the listener the way a god holds a possessed body, regardless of who repeats them or how well.
The claim is built to survive its own conditions. Alcibiades specifies that the effect holds even when a poor speaker (φαῦλος) repeats the words secondhand, and even when the listener is a woman, a man, or a boy — the range of an Athenian household rather than the range of an Athenian audience the courts and assembly were built to move. If the logos itself carries the charge, the performer is incidental; a bad reporter transmits it as well as a good one, much as the Ion’s chain of magnetized rings passes a force along rhapsodes who bring no skill of their own to it. Alcibiades then breaks off his own sentence rather than swear to what he has felt — the same evasive move he made at 214e, promising truth and hedging it in the same breath. He will go on to describe the effect in vivid detail; he still will not put it under oath.
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