The Golden Images Inside
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Alcibiades — ὅσον οὐδʼ ἂν εἷς οἰηθείη, οὔτʼ εἴ τις πλούσιος, οὔτʼ εἰ ἄλλην τινὰ τιμὴν ἔχων τῶν ὑπὸ πλήθους μακαριζομένων. ἡγεῖται δὲ πάντα ταῦτα τὰ κτήματα οὐδενὸς ἄξια καὶ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν εἶναι— λέγω ὑμῖν— εἰρωνευόμενος δὲ καὶ παίζων πάντα τὸν βίον πρὸς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους διατελεῖ. σπουδάσαντος δὲ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνοιχθέντος οὐκ οἶδα εἴ τις ἑώρακεν τὰ ἐντὸς ἀγάλματα, ἀλλʼ ἐγὼ ἤδη ποτʼ εἶδον, καί μοι ἔδοξεν οὕτω θεῖα καὶ
More than anyone would think, not if he's rich, nor if he holds some other honor the crowd blesses. He believes all these possessions are worth nothing, and that we are nothing — I'm telling you — and he goes through his whole life pretending and playing with people. But when he's serious and opened up, I don't know if anyone has seen the images inside. But I have already seen them once, and they seemed to me so divine and—
Alcibiades has just compared Socrates to a hollow figurine of Silenus that opens to reveal gods within (216d). Now he explains that Socrates treats wealth and public honor as worthless and spends his whole life joking with people — until, rarely, he turns serious and opens up. Alcibiades says he has seen what is inside only once. The sentence breaks off mid-word, continuing in 217a.
The image working underneath this sentence is the one Alcibiades has just given at 216d: Socrates as a carved Silenus, the squat, snub-nosed satyr-figure sold in the shops of Athens, hollow and hinged, that opens down the middle to show gods inside. σπουδάσαντος δὲ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνοιχθέντος, 'when he is in earnest and has been opened' — the participles are passive and genitive absolute, grammar that keeps Socrates the object being acted on rather than the one doing the opening. Alcibiades never claims he pried anything loose himself. The figures were simply there to be seen, once, by whoever happened to be looking when the box came open on its own.
εἰρωνευόμενος, 'dissembling,' is the verb that gives Socratic eirōneia its name, and Alcibiades uses it here without any of the warmth later ages read into 'irony.' In his mouth it names a decades-long performance: a man who spends πάντα τὸν βίον, his whole life, playing games with everyone he meets, holding cheap what the city calls τιμή — wealth, office, whatever τὸ πλῆθος, the crowd, is currently blessing. That the sentence breaks off mid-word, on καὶ, 'and,' just as Alcibiades reaches for the adjectives — golden, they turn out to be, in the next section — is the frozen source's doing, not a rhetorical choice, but it leaves the one unambiguous claim in the room suspended exactly where Alcibiades wants it: he alone has seen what is inside, and he is still deciding how much of it to tell the party.
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