Great Doors on the Ears
Read the full text in our reader
Alcibiades — Ἐρυξιμάχους, Παυσανίας, Ἀριστοδήμους τε καὶ Ἀριστοφάνας· Σωκράτη δὲ αὐτὸν τί δεῖ λέγειν, καὶ ὅσοι ἄλλοι; πάντες γὰρ κεκοινωνήκατε τῆς φιλοσόφου μανίας τε καὶ βακχείας— διὸ πάντες ἀκούσεσθε· συγγνώσεσθε γὰρ τοῖς τε τότε πραχθεῖσι καὶ τοῖς νῦν λεγομένοις. οἱ δὲ οἰκέται, καὶ εἴ τις ἄλλος ἐστὶν βέβηλός τε καὶ ἄγροικος, πύλας πάνυ μεγάλας τοῖς ὠσὶν ἐπίθεσθε. ἐπειδὴ γὰρ οὖν, ὦ ἄνδρες, ὅ τε λύχνος ἀπεσβήκει καὶ
Eryximachus, Pausanias, Aristodemus and Aristophanes — why must one even mention Socrates himself, or anyone else? For you have all shared in the philosopher's madness and bacchic frenzy — that's why you'll all hear this; you will forgive both what was done then and what's being said now. But you house-servants, and anyone else who is profane and boorish, set very great doors on your ears. For when, gentlemen, the lamp had gone out, and…
Continuing the roll call of guests begun in 218a — where he named Phaedrus and Agathon — Alcibiades finishes the list (Eryximachus, Pausanias, Aristodemus, Aristophanes) and asks why he should even bother naming Socrates, since everyone present has already shared in philosophy's own madness and bacchic frenzy; that shared state, he says, is why they will forgive both what happened then and what he is about to say now. He then warns off the household servants and any other profane, boorish outsider to shut great doors on their ears — the sentence breaks off mid-clause (the lamp had gone out and...), completing in 218c.
The list keeps running in the grammar Alcibiades used for Phaedrus and Agathon back in 218a: not Ἐρυξίμαχον but Ἐρυξιμάχους, a proper name put in the plural. Grammarians call this the generalizing or ‘type’ plural — naming one man as a plural to mean everyone like him, much as an English speaker might say ‘your Eryximachuses’ to gesture at a whole class of person. Socrates gets the opposite treatment: he isn't named at all, just waved off with τί δεῖ λέγειν, ‘why must one even mention him,’ as though singling him out by name would understate how completely he belongs to the condition Alcibiades is describing. That condition is μανία τε καὶ βακχεία, madness and bacchic frenzy, and the verb attached to it, κεκοινωνήκατε, ‘you have shared in,’ is the ordinary word for holding a stake in a cult or a civic body, not a private symptom. It is close kin to the mania the Phaedrus will later defend as a gift of the gods, the kind that makes a philosopher, a poet, or a lover look deranged to anyone standing outside it (244a–245c) — Alcibiades is naming that same affliction from inside it, as something everyone in the room already has.
οἱ δὲ οἰκέται ... πύλας πάνυ μεγάλας τοῖς ὠσὶν ἐπίθεσθε, ‘set very great doors on your ears,’ borrows the standing formula that opened a Greek mystery rite: the herald's warning turning away anyone not admitted to the secret, ἑκὰς ἑκὰς ἔστε, βέβηλοι, ‘stand back, you profane.’ Alcibiades applies the same word, βέβηλος, to house-servants and to ‘anyone else’ who is ἄγροικος, boorish — the profane here is not the irreligious but simply the tasteless, someone who wouldn't know what to do with what he is about to hear. It is a joke with real teeth: Socrates has just relayed Diotima's account of being led up through grades of initiation into τὰ ἐρωτικά, the mysteries of love (210a), and Alcibiades now stages his own confession as if it required the same threshold. What waits on the other side of the door is not a vision of the beautiful itself but an evening that went nowhere and a man who still can't get over it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 218b in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 218b — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/218b/