Alcibiades' Heart Leaps Like the Corybantes'
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Alcibiades — νυνί. ὅταν γὰρ ἀκούω, πολύ μοι μᾶλλον ἢ τῶν κορυβαντιώντων ἥ τε καρδία πηδᾷ καὶ δάκρυα ἐκχεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν λόγων τῶν τούτου, ὁρῶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλους παμπόλλους τὰ αὐτὰ πάσχοντας; Περικλέους δὲ ἀκούων καὶ ἄλλων ἀγαθῶν ῥητόρων εὖ μὲν ἡγούμην λέγειν, τοιοῦτον δʼ οὐδὲν ἔπασχον, οὐδʼ ἐτεθορύβητό μου ἡ ψυχὴ οὐδʼ ἠγανάκτει ὡς ἀνδραποδωδῶς διακειμένου, ἀλλʼ ὑπὸ τουτουῒ τοῦ Μαρσύου πολλάκις δὴ
For whenever I listen, my heart leaps far more than that of those in Corybantic frenzy, and tears pour out at his words; and I also see many others undergoing the same thing. But when I hear Pericles and other good orators, I think they speak well, but nothing like that did I feel, nor was my soul thrown into turmoil, nor was it indignant at being disposed like a slave — but by this Marsyas here, so often, indeed…
Continuing straight from 215d, Alcibiades explains what still happens to him when he hears Socrates: his heart pounds harder than a Corybantic worshipper's and tears come unbidden, and he has watched other men react the same way. He contrasts this with Pericles and Athens' other fine orators, whose speeches he judges good but which left him personally untouched — no turmoil, no shame. The sentence breaks off as he turns to 'this Marsyas' and what such hearing has repeatedly done to him, completing in 216a.
Plato reaches for this same comparison for the pull of argument itself elsewhere. In the Crito, Socrates says the arguments ringing in his ears sound like the flutes of the Corybantic rites, drowning out every other voice (Crito 54d). In the Ion, the rhapsode's possession is explicitly Corybantic, a chain of force running from the Muse through the poet to the audience (Ion 533e). Alcibiades borrows the same vocabulary of possession and turns it into testimony about one man rather than a theory of inspiration: this happened to him specifically, and did not happen when Pericles spoke, however well Pericles spoke. The list of symptoms he denies feeling with Pericles — turmoil, indignation, the sense of being ἀνδραποδωδῶς disposed, ‘like a slave’ — is the checklist he is about to confirm as present with Socrates. What Alcibiades names here without yet explaining it is shame: the humiliation of finding his own way of life indicted by a man he cannot simply walk away from, which is the confession the sentence completes in 216a.
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