The Silenus, Opened
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Alcibiades — τοῦτον γιγνώσκει· ἀλλὰ ἐγὼ δηλώσω, ἐπείπερ ἠρξάμην. ὁρᾶτε γὰρ ὅτι Σωκράτης ἐρωτικῶς διάκειται τῶν καλῶν καὶ ἀεὶ περὶ τούτους ἐστὶ καὶ ἐκπέπληκται, καὶ αὖ ἀγνοεῖ πάντα καὶ οὐδὲν οἶδεν. ὡς τὸ σχῆμα αὐτοῦ τοῦτο οὐ σιληνῶδες; σφόδρα γε. τοῦτο γὰρ οὗτος ἔξωθεν περιβέβληται, ὥσπερ ὁ γεγλυμμένος σιληνός· ἔνδοθεν δὲ ἀνοιχθεὶς πόσης οἴεσθε γέμει, ὦ ἄνδρες συμπόται, σωφροσύνης; ἴστε ὅτι οὔτε εἴ τις καλός ἐστι μέλει αὐτῷ οὐδέν, ἀλλὰ καταφρονεῖ τοσοῦτον
…knows this man; but I'll explain, since I've begun. You see that Socrates is erotically disposed toward the beautiful, always around them, and he's smitten— and again he's ignorant of everything and knows nothing. Isn't this get-up of his just like a Silenus? Very much so. For this he's wrapped around himself on the outside, like the carved Silenus; but opened up within, how full of temperance do you think he is, fellow drinkers? Know that it matters nothing to him not whether someone is beautiful, but he despises it to such a degree—
Continuing directly from 216c, where Alcibiades told the party that none of them really knows Socrates ('...knows this man' completes the thought here). He now makes good on that claim: Socrates is visibly, almost comically fixated on beautiful young men, forever around them, dazzled by them, and just as visibly professes to know nothing at all. Isn't that whole pose, Alcibiades asks, exactly like a carved figure of Silenus — an ugly, hollow statuette wrapped around something else? Opened up, he says, Socrates is full of self-mastery, and he cares nothing for beauty in others; he despises it — the sentence breaks off mid-clause (καταφρονεῖ τοσοῦτον...), completing with 216e's ὅσον...
Alcibiades finally names the figure he has been circling since the Marsyas comparison: a σιληνός, one of the little carved statuettes sold in Athenian shops, ugly and comic on the outside, that open on a hinge to show something else packed inside. He builds the sentence to do the same work the statuette does. ὡς τὸ σχῆμα αὐτοῦ τοῦτο οὐ σιληνῶδες; is a question he answers himself, σφόδρα γε, before anyone else in the room can — the outward σχῆμα, the get-up, is agreed on all sides. Then the verb that matters: ἀνοιχθείς, 'having been opened,' passive, as though Socrates were a box someone else pries at rather than a man who chooses when to show what is in him. Only once that opening happens, Alcibiades says, do you find γέμει σωφροσύνης — he is full of sōphrosynē, the same virtue the whole party has been praising all evening in the abstract, now lodged inside the ugliest man at the table.
The claim about beauty is not incidental description; it is the proof of the σωφροσύνη just asserted. οὔτε εἴ τις καλός ἐστι μέλει αὐτῷ οὐδέν — Socrates does not care at all whether someone is beautiful, and the sentence breaks off promising something stronger still (καταφρονεῖ τοσοῦτον, completed in 216e). This is the same indifference the Phaedrus spends its whole second half arguing a philosopher should have toward bodily beauty, but there it is a doctrine defended through a myth of chariots and wings; here it is simply reported as a fact about one man's daily behavior, by someone who was, on his own earlier testimony, spectacularly beautiful and used to getting whatever he wanted from people on that basis. Alcibiades is not praising a philosophical position. He is describing what it felt like to offer his beauty to Socrates and watch it register as nothing at all.
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