Dishonored, and Yet in Awe
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Alcibiades — ἀνέστην μετὰ Σωκράτους, ἢ εἰ μετὰ πατρὸς καθηῦδον ἢ ἀδελφοῦ πρεσβυτέρου. τὸ δὴ μετὰ τοῦτο τίνα οἴεσθέ με διάνοιαν ἔχειν, ἡγούμενον μὲν ἠτιμάσθαι, ἀγάμενον δὲ τὴν τούτου φύσιν τε καὶ σωφροσύνην καὶ ἀνδρείαν, ἐντετυχηκότα ἀνθρώπῳ τοιούτῳ οἵῳ ἐγὼ οὐκ ἂν ᾤμην ποτʼ ἐντυχεῖν εἰς φρόνησιν καὶ εἰς καρτερίαν; ὥστε οὔθʼ ὅπως οὖν ὀργιζοίμην εἶχον καὶ ἀποστερηθείην τῆς τούτου συνουσίας, οὔτε ὅπῃ προσαγαγοίμην
I got up with Socrates — just as if I'd slept with my father, or an elder brother. So after this, what state of mind do you think I was in, believing myself dishonored, yet marveling at his nature, and his temperance, and courage — having met a man of a kind I would never have thought ever to meet, for wisdom and endurance. So I had no way to be angry and be deprived of his company, nor any way to win him over…
Continuing directly from 219c, where Alcibiades broke off mid-clause after describing a night of chaste sleep beside Socrates: he completes the comparison — he got up no differently than if he had slept beside his own father or an older brother — then asks the banquet what state of mind that left him in, torn between feeling wronged and admiring the man who caused it. The sentence runs on, unresolved, into 219e.
Two words here carry more legal weight than a night of frustrated seduction should require. ἠτιμάσθαι, ‘to have been dishonored,’ is the passive of ἀτιμόω, the verb for a specific Athenian penalty: the formal loss of a citizen's rights, not a bruised ego but a civic sentence. ἀποστερηθείην, ‘I might be deprived,’ is standard courtroom language for being cheated of a debt or a deposit — the charge brought against a man who keeps what belongs to someone else. Alcibiades reaches for both to describe a rejection that cost him nothing at all. He is still narrating the trial he convened at the end of 219c, and he keeps supplying it with exhibits: Socrates' restraint gets filed not as a compliment but as an unpaid debt, a right withheld.
The bind he describes is structural as much as emotional. He cannot be angry, because anger would cost him access to Socrates, and he cannot find a strategy either — ὀργίζομαι and προσάγομαι bracket the same impasse from two sides, the withheld reaction and the failed maneuver. The Phaedrus stages a version of the same seizure in its own vocabulary: the charioteer's dark horse strains toward the beloved while the whole team stays locked in place, wanting and unable to move. Alcibiades has no myth to explain his own paralysis, only an inventory of qualities — nature, temperance, courage — that make the object of his desire immovable by any means he owns. He does not yet have a word for what has happened to him; that comes only in 219e, when he calls himself enslaved.
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