Alone with Alone
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Alcibiades — τὸν ἀκόλουθον μόνος συνεγιγνόμην— δεῖ γὰρ πρὸς ὑμᾶς πάντα τἀληθῆ εἰπεῖν· ἀλλὰ προσέχετε τὸν νοῦν, καὶ εἰ ψεύδομαι, Σώκρατες, ἐξέλεγχε— συνεγιγνόμην γάρ, ὦ ἄνδρες, μόνος μόνῳ, καὶ ᾤμην αὐτίκα διαλέξεσθαι αὐτόν μοι ἅπερ ἂν ἐραστὴς παιδικοῖς ἐν ἐρημίᾳ, διαλεχθείη καὶ ἔχαιρον. τούτων δʼ οὐ μάλα ἐγίγνετο οὐδέν, ἀλλʼ ὥσπερ εἰώθει διαλεχθεὶς ἄν μοι καὶ συνημερεύσας ᾤχετο ἀπιών. μετὰ ταῦτα συγγυμνάζεσθαι
...the attendant, I was alone with him — for I must tell you the whole truth; so pay attention, and if I'm lying, Socrates, refute me — for I was alone, gentlemen, alone with him alone, and I imagined he'd talk with me at once, the way a lover would talk to his boy in private, and I was glad. But none of that happened at all: but, as he was used to, he'd talk with me and spend the day, and go off. After that, I proposed we train together…
Continuing a sentence begun in 217a — Alcibiades had just sent his attendant away — he finds himself alone with Socrates and pledges to tell the whole truth, inviting Socrates to refute him if he lies. He then describes the private evening he had staged and expected, its total anticlimax, and his next move: proposing they train together in the gymnasium. The sentence breaks off mid-thought (συγγυμνάζεσθαι), completing in 217c.
Alcibiades opens with a courtroom formula: πάντα τἀληθῆ εἰπεῖν, ‘to tell the whole truth,’ sworn to an audience, and then hands Socrates the standing right to break the oath for him — εἰ ψεύδομαι, ἐξέλεγχε, ‘if I’m lying, refute me.’ The verb ἐξελέγχω had its ordinary bite two lines earlier at 216a, where Alcibiades described Socrates using it on him against his will, forcing an admission he did not want to make. Here he offers the same weapon voluntarily, as a guarantee of honesty. It works as theater because everyone in the room, Socrates included, knows the story that follows will not actually be checked against the facts — the oath is for the room, not for the truth.
μόνος μόνῳ, ‘alone with alone,’ doubles the isolation for emphasis and sets the ordinary scene of erotic pursuit in this culture: a lover expects that privacy with his beloved buys him the kind of talk an ἐραστής has with his παιδικά. Alcibiades gets the privacy and none of the talk — Socrates converses with him ὥσπερ εἰώθει, ‘just as he was accustomed,’ the flattest possible phrase, spends the day, and leaves. So Alcibiades escalates from a shut door to the gymnasium, συγγυμνάζεσθαι, where their bodies at least would be near each other, unclothed, in a space built for exactly this kind of looking. The move has a real counterpart in the Phaedrus, where a lover and beloved train their eyes on one another over time (255c–d); the difference is that there the charge runs both ways, and here Alcibiades is running it alone.
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