Steel Could Not Touch Him
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Alcibiades — αὐτὸν ηὐπόρουν. εὖ γὰρ ᾔδη ὅτι χρήμασί γε πολὺ μᾶλλον ἄτρωτος ἦν πανταχῇ ἢ σιδήρῳ ὁ Αἴας, ᾧ τε ᾤμην αὐτὸν μόνῳ ἁλώσεσθαι, διεπεφεύγει με. ἠπόρουν δή, καταδεδουλωμένος τε ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ὡς οὐδεὶς ὑπʼ οὐδενὸς ἄλλου περιῇα. ταῦτά τε γάρ μοι ἅπαντα προυγεγόνει, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα στρατεία ἡμῖν εἰς Ποτείδαιαν ἐγένετο κοινὴ καὶ συνεσιτοῦμεν ἐκεῖ. πρῶτον μὲν οὖν τοῖς πόνοις οὐ μόνον ἐμοῦ περιῆν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων— ὁπότʼ ἀναγκασθεῖμεν ἀποληφθέντες που, οἷα δὴ ἐπὶ στρατείας…
To win him I had no way. For I knew well that, with money, at least, far more he was invulnerable, everywhere, than Ajax was to steel — and by which I thought alone he'd be caught, had escaped me. I was at a loss then, enslaved by the man as no one else has ever been by anyone. For all this, had already happened to me, and after that, a campaign to Potidaea came to us together, and we messed there. First, then, in hardship he surpassed not only me, but all the others too — whenever we were forced, cut off somewhere, as indeed happens on campaign…
Continuing directly from 219d's broken-off clause: Alcibiades admits he never found a way to win Socrates over, comparing him to the legendarily invulnerable Ajax whom no blade could wound, and confesses this left him more enslaved than anyone has ever been to anyone. He then pivots from that erotic failure to the two men's shared military service, opening the Potidaea campaign where Socrates' endurance became the next proof.
Ajax was supposed to be invulnerable — not in Homer, where he is simply enormous and hard to kill, but in the version of the story already current by Plato's day: wrapped as an infant in the skin of the Nemean lion at Heracles' request, proof against any blade except the one spot the wrapping missed. Alcibiades reaches for that image to describe his failed campaign of bribery. Money, he says, could not touch Socrates anywhere — a stronger claim than ‘incorruptible,’ since it borrows the vocabulary of an unwoundable body rather than an honest mind. In the next clause the metaphor turns on him: he calls himself enslaved, ‘as no one else has ever been by anybody,’ the flattest superlative in the whole speech. Katadouloō names actual slavery, not a lover's exaggeration, and an Athenian audience would have heard the word with the full legal weight of the institution behind it.
Having exhausted bribery as a test of Socrates, Alcibiades switches genres for the rest of the speech: from here on, the evidence is military. Potidaea was a real siege, a rebel Corinthian colony that Athens besieged for most of three years in the run-up to the war Thucydides would go on to narrate, and messing together there put Socrates on permanent public display in a way no private encounter could. That matters structurally as much as biographically. A young man's word about a lover's restraint invites doubt about his motives; a soldier's word about a comrade's endurance under real hardship is a different kind of testimony, harder to explain away as flattery or grudge. The claim that Socrates outlasted the whole camp at going hungry is not a change of subject from what came before — it is the same claim about him, carried into a setting with other witnesses.
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