Jurors of His Disdain
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Alcibiades — δαιμονίῳ ὡς ἀληθῶς καὶ θαυμαστῷ, κατεκείμην τὴν νύκτα ὅλην. καὶ οὐδὲ ταῦτα αὖ, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἐρεῖς ὅτι ψεύδομαι. ποιήσαντος δὲ δὴ ταῦτα ἐμοῦ οὗτος τοσοῦτον περιεγένετό τε καὶ κατεφρόνησεν καὶ κατεγέλασεν τῆς ἐμῆς ὥρας καὶ ὕβρισεν— καὶ περὶ ἐκεῖνό γε ᾤμην τὶ εἶναι, ὦ ἄνδρες δικασταί· δικασταὶ γάρ ἐστε τῆς Σωκράτους ὑπερηφανίας— εὖ γὰρ ἴστε μὰ θεούς, μὰ θεάς, οὐδὲν περιττότερον καταδεδαρθηκὼς
With him — so truly superhuman, so wondrous — I lay the whole night. And you won’t say, Socrates, about this either, again, that I’m lying. But after I had done all this, he so completely prevailed, and despised, and laughed at my youthful bloom, and treated it with insolence — and in that, in fact, I thought I was somebody — gentlemen of the jury, for you are the judges of Socrates’ arrogance — for know well, by the gods, by the goddesses, that, having slept not one bit more…
Continuing straight from 219b, where Alcibiades threw his arms around Socrates and lay down beside him: Alcibiades finishes the account of that night (nothing happened) and, for the very rebuff to his famous beauty, calls the banquet guests to sit as jurors on a charge of Socrates' ‘arrogance.’ The sentence breaks off mid-clause and is completed in 219d.
Hybris, the word Alcibiades reaches for, named a specific crime at Athens — not seduction but assault, the overreach of a stronger party against a weaker one, serious enough to carry its own public lawsuit. He uses it here without a trace of irony: Socrates, he says, treated his celebrated beauty with hybris. But the charge runs backward. What actually happened is nothing — the two men lay together all night and no one touched anyone. The injury, as Alcibiades tells it, is the refusal itself: to be wanted and not taken reads to him as a worse violation than being taken would have been.
He even convenes a jury for it — ὦ ἄνδρες δικασταί, the exact address a defendant uses in an Athenian courtroom, the same phrase Socrates himself will use, in earnest, at his own trial in the Apology. Alcibiades stages the whole banquet as a jury weighing a charge of hyperēphania, disdain toward one's inferiors, and treats his own humiliation as proof he was worth disdaining. The comparison he reaches for once the story resumes in 219d — that he got up no differently than if he had slept beside his father or an older brother — belongs to the very vocabulary the Phaedrus spends its own palinode defending: a chaste, appetite-free love as the mark of the genuine lover of wisdom. Alcibiades cannot process being on the receiving end of it. He has spent this whole speech assuming that any restraint shown him is calculation, a delaying tactic before the real transaction — so when Socrates' restraint turns out to be the entire content of the reply, the only file he has for it is injury.
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