Ashamed Before This One Man
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Alcibiades — πρὸς τοῦτον μόνον ἀνθρώπων, ὃ οὐκ ἄν τις οἴοιτο ἐν ἐμοὶ ἐνεῖναι, τὸ αἰσχύνεσθαι ὁντινοῦν. ἐγὼ δὲ τοῦτον μόνον αἰσχύνομαι. σύνοιδα γὰρ ἐμαυτῷ ἀντιλέγειν μὲν οὐ δυναμένῳ ὡς οὐ δεῖ ποιεῖν ἃ οὗτος κελεύει, ἐπειδὰν δὲ ἀπέλθω, ἡττημένῳ τῆς τιμῆς τῆς ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν. δραπετεύω οὖν αὐτὸν καὶ φεύγω, καὶ ὅταν ἴδω, αἰσχύνομαι τὰ ὡμολογημένα.
toward this man alone of all men, something no one would suppose to be in me, shame before anyone at all. But I am ashamed of this one man alone. For I know within myself that I cannot argue that I need not do what he commands, yet whenever I leave, I'm overcome by the honor of the crowd. So I run off from him and flee, and whenever I see him, I'm ashamed of what I've agreed to.
Continuing the sentence broken off at the end of 216a (πέπονθα δὲ…), Alcibiades names what he has felt: toward Socrates alone of all men, a shame he would never have believed himself capable of. He knows he cannot argue his way out of doing what Socrates asks, yet the moment he is out of earshot the honor the crowd pays him wins out — so he runs, and every fresh sight of Socrates reopens the shame of what he has already agreed to.
αἰσχύνομαι here does double duty as the passage's hinge: the same verb names both the shame Alcibiades feels in front of Socrates and, at the very end, the shame he feels over τὰ ὡμολογημένα, the things he has already agreed to. Socrates does not shame him with an accusation; he only makes Alcibiades unable to argue (ἀντιλέγειν... οὐ δυναμένῳ) that he is free not to live rightly. That is the whole mechanism, and it recurs almost verbatim from the Gorgias, where Socrates tells Callicles that he cannot let a refuted argument stand no matter how much he'd rather move on — the shame of a man who has run out of counter-arguments and knows it. Alcibiades adds one thing the Gorgias never shows from the inside: what happens after the conversation ends. Away from Socrates he is ἡττημένος, beaten, by τῆς τιμῆς τῆς ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν, honor paid by the crowd — the same public standing he has spent the whole speech admitting he chases instead of his own good.
δραπετεύω is a slave's word, not a free man's: it means to bolt like a runaway property, not simply to leave. Alcibiades, richest and best-born man at the party, casts himself as Socrates' fugitive slave rather than his rival or his student. The self-mockery is not incidental — it is the whole confession, and it explains why he needs wine and a room full of witnesses to say it. He does not claim Socrates is wrong about him. He claims only that being right about him is unbearable to sit near for long, and that each fresh sight of Socrates reopens an agreement he made and has already broken by living as he does.
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