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Alcibiades — προυκαλούμην αὐτὸν καὶ συνεγυμναζόμην, ὥς τι ἐνταῦθα περανῶν. συνεγυμνάζετο οὖν μοι καὶ προσεπάλαιεν πολλάκις οὐδενὸς παρόντος· καὶ τί δεῖ λέγειν; οὐδὲν γάρ μοι πλέον ἦν. ἐπειδὴ δὲ οὐδαμῇ ταύτῃ ἥνυτον, ἔδοξέ μοι ἐπιθετέον εἶναι τῷ ἀνδρὶ κατὰ τὸ καρτερὸν, καὶ οὐκ ἀνετέον, ἐπειδήπερ ἐνεκεχειρήκη, ἀλλὰ ἰστέον ἤδη τί ἐστι τὸ πρᾶγμα. προκαλοῦμαι δὴ αὐτὸν πρὸς τὸ συνδειπνεῖν, ἀτεχνῶς ὥσπερ ἐραστὴς παιδικοῖς ἐπιβουλεύων. καί μοι οὐδὲ τοῦτο ταχὺ
I challenged him, and we trained together, hoping I'd get somewhere there. So he trained with me and wrestled with me often, with no one else present. And why say more? I got nothing more out of it. But since I was getting nowhere this way, I decided I had to attack the man by main force, and not let up, now that I'd taken it on, I had to find out, finally, what the trouble really was. So I invited him to dinner, acting exactly like a lover laying a trap for his beloved. And to me, not even this, readily…
Continuing Alcibiades' narration without a break: the private evening he had staged (217b) produced nothing but Socrates' ordinary company. He now describes escalating to shared training and wrestling, then, when even that fails, to a deliberate campaign — force, persistence, and finally a dinner invitation, framed explicitly as a lover's stratagem against his beloved. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and completes in 217d.
The dinner invitation that follows gets a simile Alcibiades states outright rather than leaves for the room to notice: atéchnōs hósper erastḗs paidikoís epibouleuōn, “exactly as a lover schemes against his beloved.” epibouleuō is not a lover's verb in ordinary Attic — it is what a general does to a city he means to take by surprise, or what a rival does to a man he means to ruin. Alcibiades is admitting that the only model of courtship he owns is a campaign, and that he is now running it on Socrates. The scene has a near-exact mirror in Plato's Alcibiades I, where it is Socrates who is described watching and waiting years for the right moment to approach the young Alcibiades; here the parts have traded places, and the only vocabulary Alcibiades has for wanting someone is a soldier's.
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