I Thought I Had Wounded Him
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Socrates — βουλευόμενοι πράξομεν ὃ ἂν φαίνηται νῷν περί τε τούτων καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἄριστον.
Alcibiades — ἐγὼ μὲν δὴ ταῦτα ἀκούσας τε καὶ εἰπών, καὶ ἀφεὶς ὥσπερ βέλη, τετρῶσθαι αὐτὸν ᾤμην· καὶ ἀναστάς γε, οὐδʼ ἐπιτρέψας τούτῳ εἰπεῖν οὐδὲν ἔτι, ἀμφιέσας τὸ ἱμάτιον τὸ ἐμαυτοῦ τοῦτον— καὶ γὰρ ἦν χειμών— ὑπὸ τὸν τρίβωνα κατακλινεὶς τὸν τουτουί, περιβαλὼν τὼ χεῖρε τούτῳ τῷ
Taking counsel, we shall do whatever seems best to us both about these things and the rest. So then, I, having heard and said these things, and let my words fly like arrows, I thought he had been wounded. And rising, at least, not letting him say anything more, I wrapped this man in my own cloak for it was winter, lay down under his own worn cloak, threw my arms around this—
Socrates gives his brief, deflecting answer to Alcibiades' proposal at the end of 219a: they will decide together, later, what is best. Alcibiades, narrating, is certain his declaration has landed home. He rises, refuses to let Socrates say another word, wraps him in his own cloak against the winter cold, and climbs in under Socrates' own worn mantle to lie beside him. The embrace, begun here, is completed in 219c.
τιτρώσκω, ‘to wound,’ completes a small archery scene Alcibiades has built without announcing it: his own confession becomes βέλη, ‘arrows,’ shot at Socrates, and he walks off the field certain of a hit — τετρῶσθαι αὐτὸν ᾤμην, ‘I thought he had been wounded.’ It is a striking reversal. Earlier in this same speech (217e–218a) Alcibiades described what philosophy's bite had already done to him — the snakebite, the Corybantic frenzy he could not shake off — casting himself as the wounded one throughout. Here, for one sentence, he swaps places and becomes the archer instead, and the tense he chooses gives the game away: ᾤμην is imperfect, ‘I was thinking, I supposed,’ not a flat aorist — a belief being held rather than a fact settled, and the reader already suspects it will not last the night.
The garment he climbs under is doing similar work. He puts his own ἱμάτιον on Socrates for the cold, ordinary hospitality, but then gets in under Socrates' τρίβων — the single worn cloak that, by the time later writers describe Socrates at all, has become his trademark: no shoes, one cloak, every season, the visible form his indifference to the body took. Alcibiades doesn't remark on the trade he's just made — his own fine ἱμάτιον given, Socrates' rough τρίβων borrowed — but the two garments changing hands in one night, wealth wrapped around poverty while desire crawls in underneath, says most of what the rest of the speech will spend itself trying to say outright.
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