Wishing Him Dead, and Dreading It
Read the full text in our reader
Alcibiades — καὶ πολλάκις μὲν ἡδέως ἂν ἴδοιμι αὐτὸν μὴ ὄντα ἐν ἀνθρώποις; εἰ δʼ αὖ τοῦτο γένοιτο, εὖ οἶδα ὅτι πολὺ μεῖζον ἂν ἀχθοίμην, ὥστε οὐκ ἔχω ὅτι χρήσωμαι τούτῳ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ. καὶ ὑπὸ μὲν δὴ τῶν αὐλημάτων καὶ ἐγὼ καὶ ἄλλοι πολλοὶ τοιαῦτα πεπόνθασιν ὑπὸ τοῦδε τοῦ σατύρου; ἄλλα δὲ ἐμοῦ ἀκούσατε ὡς ὅμοιός τʼ ἐστὶν οἷς ἐγὼ ᾔκασα αὐτὸν καὶ τὴν δύναμιν ὡς θαυμασίαν ἔχει. εὖ γὰρ ἴστε ὅτι οὐδεὶς ὑμῶν
And often I would gladly see him not among the living; but if that happened again, I know well I'd grieve far more — so I don't know what to do with this man. And indeed, both I and many others have suffered such things from this satyr's pipings; but hear other things from me — how he is like those I compared him to, and how astonishing a power he has. For know well that none of you—
Continuing straight on from Alcibiades' confession in 216b — his helpless shame before Socrates and his repeated flight from him — he now admits something starker: he sometimes wishes Socrates were dead, though losing him would grieve him worse than the shame does. He then turns back to the whole party: he and many others already know this suffering from Marsyas' pipe-playing, but he wants them to hear something further — how exactly the comparison holds, and what strange power Socrates has. The sentence breaks off mid-clause, completing in 216d.
Alcibiades says the sentence and then unsays it in the same breath. ἡδέως ἂν ἴδοιμι αὐτὸν μὴ ὄντα ἐν ἀνθρώποις is the idiom Greek uses for wishing someone dead — not being among men — and it comes out of him as a considered admission, not a slip: he would gladly see it. The next clause, built on the identical grammar (another potential optative, ἂν ἀχθοίμην), takes it back without apology — he would grieve worse than he does now. Plato lets the two wishes sit in the same sentence, unresolved, because that is what the feeling is: not ambivalence dissolving into a preference, but two full-strength states occupying Alcibiades at once. άχθομαι is the ordinary verb for grief at a death, and a reader coming to the Symposium already knowing Socrates' actual death — the one dramatized in the Phaedo, where the same students who could never quite stay away from him weep at his side — hears Alcibiades predict, correctly, exactly what will happen when the wish is no longer hypothetical.
The pipings he mentions in passing (ὑπὸ τῶν αὐλημάτων) point back to the comparison he has already made, a few lines earlier, between Socrates and Marsyas the satyr. Marsyas played the aulos so well he challenged Apollo to a contest and lost his skin for it — flayed alive, in the story every listener at this party would know. Alcibiades keeps calling Socrates a satyr and himself one of the many who have "suffered" from that music, and the joke sits directly over a story about a musical challenge that ends in someone's death. He is about to promise the room something more than the joke: he will explain the resemblance properly and describe a δύναμις, a power, that he calls θαυμασίαν, astonishing — the same word Diotima uses of the vision of Beauty itself later in the dialogue. Whatever Alcibiades thinks he is about to reveal, the word he reaches for is already doing more work than a drinking-party compliment needs.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 216c in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 216c — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/216c/