Beauty for Beauty
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Socrates — περὶ ἐμοῦ, καί τις ἔστʼ ἐν ἐμοὶ δύναμις διʼ ἧς ἂν σὺ γένοιο ἀμείνων· ἀμήχανόν τοι κάλλος ὁρῴης ἂν ἐν ἐμοὶ καὶ τῆς παρὰ σοὶ εὐμορφίας πάμπολυ διαφέρον. εἰ δὴ καθορῶν αὐτὸ κοινώσασθαί τέ μοι ἐπιχειρεῖς καὶ ἀλλάξασθαι κάλλος ἀντὶ κάλλους, οὐκ ὀλίγῳ μου πλεονεκτεῖν διανοῇ, ἀλλʼ ἀντὶ δόξης ἀλήθειαν καλῶν κτᾶσθαι ἐπιχειρεῖς καὶ τῷ
About me, and there is some power in me through which you might become better, you would surely see in me a beauty beyond all reckoning, very different indeed from the good looks that are yours. If, discerning this, you are trying to make common cause with me and to trade beauty for beauty, you intend to gain no small advantage over me, rather you are trying to get the truth of beautiful things instead of their appearance, and with the…
Continuing Socrates' ironic reply begun in 218d (‘My dear Alcibiades, you are no fool, it seems, if what you say of me is true’), he presses the claim further: if there truly is some power in him that could make Alcibiades better, then Alcibiades must be seeing in him a beauty beyond reckoning — something wholly unlike his own celebrated good looks. If that is the bargain Alcibiades is trying to strike, trading beauty for beauty, Socrates warns he stands to come away with far more than he thinks. The sentence runs on unfinished into 219a, where it lands on Homer's image of gold traded for bronze.
κάλλος and εὐμορφία are not synonyms Socrates reaches for at random. εὐμορφία is the word for good physical proportion — the vocabulary a trainer or sculptor would use for Alcibiades' celebrated looks — while κάλλος, reserved for whatever it is Socrates claims to carry, is the heavier word, the one Diotima's speech has just spent its whole length training the reader to hear as something more than a body can hold. By setting the two against each other and calling the gap πάμπολυ, 'by a very great deal,' Socrates is not being modest about his own appearance; he is restating, in the register of a seduction, the distinction the dialogue has been building toward since the ladder speech — that there is a κάλλος beyond any εὐμορφία, and Alcibiades, without meaning to, has just admitted he can see it.
The second move is sharper. πλεονεκτεῖν is marketplace and courtroom language, the verb for getting more than one's fair share — its noun πλεονεξία is what the Republic names as injustice's engine, the term Thrasymachus builds his whole argument on in Book I. Alcibiades thinks he is offering a bargain: his youth and reputation for Socrates' company. Socrates answers in the same commercial terms, κάλλος ἀντὶ κάλλους, 'beauty for beauty' — then swaps the currency underneath the trade. What changes hands is ἀλήθεια for δόξα, truth for opinion, in place of looks for looks. That is the very pair Diotima used a few pages earlier to place Eros itself between ignorance and wisdom, holding right opinion without knowledge. Socrates is telling Alcibiades that the exchange he thinks he is proposing — himself for Socrates — is the other transaction the dialogue has been staging throughout: appearance handed over for the real thing, and Alcibiades has not yet worked out what that costs him.
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