Wine Is True
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Alcibiades — ἡμεῖς. μέχρι μὲν οὖν δὴ δεῦρο τοῦ λόγου καλῶς ἂν ἔχοι καὶ πρὸς ὁντινοῦν λέγειν· τὸ δʼ ἐντεῦθεν οὐκ ἄν μου ἠκούσατε λέγοντος, εἰ μὴ πρῶτον μέν, τὸ λεγόμενον, οἶνος ἄνευ τε παίδων καὶ μετὰ παίδων ἦν ἀληθής, ἔπειτα ἀφανίσαι Σωκράτους ἔργον ὑπερήφανον εἰς ἔπαινον ἐλθόντα ἄδικόν μοι φαίνεται. ἔτι δὲ τὸ τοῦ δηχθέντος ὑπὸ τοῦ ἔχεως πάθος κἄμʼ ἔχει. φασὶ γάρ πού τινα τοῦτο παθόντα οὐκ ἐθέλειν λέγειν οἷον ἦν πλὴν τοῖς δεδηγμένοις, ὡς μόνοις γνωσομένοις
except us. Up to this point in my story, it would be fine to tell to anyone; but from here on you wouldn't have heard it from me talking, were it not, first — as they say — wine, whether without children or with them, is true — and second, having come to praise Socrates, it seems unjust to me to hide a haughty deed of his. And besides, the feeling of someone bitten by a viper has hold of me too: for they say, I suppose, that whoever suffers this is unwilling to say what it was like, except to those who've been bitten, since they alone would understand.
Continuing the sentence begun in 217d — Alcibiades has just said no one else was sleeping in the room ‘except us.’ He now warns the company that from here his account turns candid, and licenses the confession with an old proverb: wine makes people honest. He adds that it would be unjust, having come to praise Socrates, to suppress a haughty deed of his — and introduces the image of a viper's bite, which the sentence carries on completing in 218a.
Alcibiades reaches for a real proverb here: the pairing of wine and truth was already old in Greek song — Alcaeus links the two directly in a surviving fragment — and he specifies that it holds ἄνευ τε παίδων καὶ μετὰ παίδων, with children present or not, a lawyerly precision that mirrors the oath he swore two sections earlier at 217b to tell πάντα τἀληθῆ. The verb he almost chooses instead of telling the truth is ἀφανίσαι, 'to make disappear' — the same operation he accused Socrates of performing on his own looks at the start of the speech, the Silenus figure whose plain outside hides gold within. Alcibiades frames staying silent about Socrates' 'haughty deed' as its own kind of concealment, and casts himself, for once, as the one refusing to hide something.
The image that follows, τὸ τοῦ δηχθέντος ὑπὸ τοῦ ἔχεως πάθος, 'the feeling of one bitten by a viper', sets up a comparison Alcibiades will draw out at length: what Socrates does to a person is a wound, and only the already-wounded can hear about it without flinching. The claim that only τοῖς δεδηγμένοις, 'those who have been bitten', can understand borrows the shape of mystery religion — Diotima spoke of the ascent to beauty as μυστήρια a few pages earlier — and Alcibiades quietly assigns himself and Socrates' other victims a status close to initiates, with everyone else in the room excluded from full understanding even as they sit and listen.
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