No One Has Ever Seen Him Drunk
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Alcibiades — ἀσιτεῖν, οὐδὲν ἦσαν οἱ ἄλλοι πρὸς τὸ καρτερεῖν— ἔν τʼ αὖ ταῖς εὐωχίαις μόνος ἀπολαύειν οἷός τʼ ἦν τά τʼ ἄλλα καὶ πίνειν οὐκ ἐθέλων, ὁπότε ἀναγκασθείη, πάντας ἐκράτει, καὶ ὃ πάντων θαυμαστότατον, Σωκράτη μεθύοντα οὐδεὶς πώποτε ἑώρακεν ἀνθρώπων. τούτου μὲν οὖν μοι δοκεῖ καὶ αὐτίκα ὁ ἔλεγχος ἔσεσθαι. πρὸς δὲ αὖ τὰς τοῦ χειμῶνος καρτερήσεις— δεινοὶ γὰρ αὐτόθι χειμῶνες— θαυμάσια ἠργάζετο τά τε
To fast the others were nothing beside his endurance. Again, at their feasts, he alone was able to enjoy everything else and drinking, especially, though unwilling, whenever he was forced, he outdid everyone. And — most amazing of all — no man has ever seen Socrates drunk. Of that, then, I think, the proof will come soon enough. But now, as for his endurance of winter — for the winters there are terrible — he worked wonders, both…
Alcibiades continues his Potidaea testimony without a break from 219d (not yet drafted), where the missing governing clause supplies the sense 'he was able' for the infinitive ἀσιτεῖν that opens this unit. He finishes the point about fasting, turns to Socrates' capacity to drink without ever being seen drunk, and then pivots to the campaign's brutal winters — a sentence the unit leaves suspended mid-clause, completed in 220b.
Alcibiades calls it elenchos — “the proof,” or “the test” — and reaches for a loaded word. In philosophical Greek, and above all in Socrates’ own mouth, elenchos names the method: the cross-examination that strips a confident answer down to contradiction, the machinery running through nearly every early dialogue. Alcibiades means it more plainly here — a claim tonight’s party will verify by direct observation — but the word still carries its owner’s fingerprints. He has spent this whole speech trying to put Socrates on trial: a few lines earlier, at 219c, he formally convened the other guests as jurors to judge Socrates’ arrogance. Here the same impulse surfaces in miniature. The man famous for subjecting everyone else’s claims to relentless questioning is about to have his own claim — that no one has ever seen him drunk — tested by people with every reason, tonight, to make it fail.
The catalogue leading up to that claim is not random: hunger, then drink, then — the unit breaks off mid-sentence — cold. Each is an appetite or discomfort that the moral psychology the Republic later spells out assigns to the soul’s lowest part, the one that governs itself by nothing but pain and pleasure. What keeps frustrating Alcibiades is a man in whom that part does not rule. Forced to drink, Socrates gets everyone else drunk and stays sober himself; short of food, he is unmoved where the professional soldiers around him are not. It is the same imperviousness Alcibiades already read as an insult in the bedroom at 219c, and will read as scarcely human once the winter stories reach their extreme in 220b. Nothing here says Socrates has risen above eating and drinking altogether — the text is careful to keep one class of drinking, when he is compelled to it, in which he still plainly excels. It says only that whatever rules him is not what rules everyone else at this table.
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