A Godsend, He Thought
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Alcibiades — χρυσᾶ εἶναι καὶ πάγκαλα καὶ θαυμαστά, ὥστε ποιητέον εἶναι ἔμβραχυ ὅτι κελεύοι Σωκράτης. ἡγούμενος δὲ αὐτὸν ἐσπουδακέναι ἐπὶ τῇ ἐμῇ ὥρᾳ ἕρμαιον ἡγησάμην εἶναι καὶ εὐτύχημα ἐμὸν θαυμαστόν, ὡς ὑπάρχον μοι χαρισαμένῳ Σωκράτει πάντʼ ἀκοῦσαι ὅσαπερ οὗτος ᾔδει· ἐφρόνουν γὰρ δὴ ἐπὶ τῇ ὥρᾳ θαυμάσιον ὅσον. ταῦτα οὖν διανοηθείς, πρὸ τοῦ οὐκ εἰωθὼς ἄνευ ἀκολούθου μόνος μετʼ αὐτοῦ γίγνεσθαι, τότε ἀποπέμπων
golden, all-beautiful, and wondrous — so that, in short, I had to do whatever Socrates commanded. And thinking he was in earnest about my bloom, I considered it a godsend and a wondrous piece of luck of mine — that it was open to me, by gratifying Socrates, to hear everything this man knew. For indeed I was tremendously proud of my bloom. Having thought this over then, though before I wasn't in the habit of being alone with him without an attendant — then, sending away—
Alcibiades has just finished comparing Socrates to a Silenus statuette: crack open the joking surface and what is inside is golden, all-beautiful, and wondrous. He now describes what that discovery did to him years earlier. Believing Socrates was seriously courting his famous good looks (ὡρα), he counted it pure luck — gratify Socrates and hear everything the man knew. So, breaking his usual rule of never being alone with him without an attendant, he sent the attendant away. (The sentence, and the seduction attempt it sets up, continues in 217b.)
Alcibiades reads the whole scene backward. In Athens the ordinary traffic of desire runs one direction: an older man pursues a young man's hōra, his bloom, and the young man, if he consents, grants (charizomai) that bloom in exchange for something useful — an education, a connection, a start in public life. Alcibiades, the most sought-after young man in the city, assumes Socrates wants the familiar trade, and prices his own side of it in the vocabulary of luck rather than merit: hermaion, a windfall named for Hermes, god of things picked up by chance, and eutychēma, a stroke of good fortune. He has decided he stumbled onto a bargain — his looks for Socrates' knowledge — and moves to close it by sending away the attendant who, by custom, kept a young man from ever being caught alone with a lover.
He is wrong, and the speech spends its next several pages making him say so himself. Socrates wants nothing that hermaion or eutychēma can name, because he was never playing the game Alcibiades thinks he has walked into. The joke lands hardest for a reader who has just heard Socrates, earlier that same evening, recount Diotima's teaching that erōs is not a trade of one good for another but a climb, each rung given up for the next. Alcibiades is enacting, in his own history, the very mistake Diotima's speech had already dismantled before he burst drunk into the party — and Plato lets him tell it in his own words, still certain, years later, that he was the one who saw the opportunity first.
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