Unshod on the Ice
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Alcibiades — ἄλλα, καί ποτε ὄντος πάγου οἵου δεινοτάτου, καὶ πάντων ἢ οὐκ ἐξιόντων ἔνδοθεν, ἢ εἴ τις ἐξίοι, ἠμφιεσμένων τε θαυμαστὰ δὴ ὅσα καὶ ὑποδεδεμένων καὶ ἐνειλιγμένων τοὺς πόδας εἰς πίλους καὶ ἀρνακίδας, οὗτος δʼ ἐν τούτοις ἐξῄει ἔχων ἱμάτιον μὲν τοιοῦτον οἷόνπερ καὶ πρότερον εἰώθει φορεῖν, ἀνυπόδητος δὲ διὰ τοῦ κρυστάλλου ῥᾷον ἐπορεύετο ἢ οἱ ἄλλοι ὑποδεδεμένοι, οἱ δὲ στρατιῶται ὑπέβλεπον
Other things too, and once, when there was a frost of the harshest kind, and everyone was either not going out indoors at all, or if anyone went out, wrapped up remarkably, in bound shoes, their feet wound in felt and sheepskins, this man, in the middle of it, went out wearing the very same cloak he had always worn before, and unshod he crossed the ice more easily than the others in their shoes — and the soldiers began to eye him askance…
Continuing the sentence broken off at the end of 220a, which ends “γὰρ αὐτόθι χειμῶνες—θαυμάσια ἠργάζετο τά τε”, Alcibiades moves from Socrates' feats with food and drink to his feats against winter cold on the Potidaea campaign: barefoot on a hard frost, he outwalks the shod soldiers on the ice, who begin to eye him askance. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and is completed in 220c.
The image is famous well outside Plato: Socrates barefoot on a hard frost, crossing the ice faster than soldiers laced into felt boots and sheepskins. Alcibiades offers it as one more item in a running catalog of endurance — hunger, drink, now cold — but the detail he actually lingers on is the cloak. It is the same one Socrates always wears, winter or otherwise; no special gear gets brought out for the occasion. The Greek's rhâion, 'more easily,' is doing the real work in the sentence — not gritting his teeth through what other men can barely stand, but a body that appears simply not to register the difference. Watching him cross the ice unshod while they pick their way across it bundled to the eyes, the soldiers start to hypoblépein him: literally, to look at him from under lowered brows, the stance of suspicion rather than admiration.
That reaction — reading Socrates' indifference to cold as some kind of insult — repeats a pattern from earlier in the speech. At 219c Alcibiades named Socrates' sexual restraint hybris, treating a refusal to touch him as proof of contempt. Here the soldiers do something similar with cold: a man who simply doesn't suffer as they do gets read as a man showing them up on purpose. The sentence will finish the thought in 220c, spelling out exactly what the soldiers think he means by it — but the shape of the misreading is already visible here. What both scenes share is Alcibiades' own blind spot: he can describe, in precise and vivid detail, how baffling Socrates looks to everyone around him, and still not notice that the very same misreading runs straight through his own account of that night in 219c.
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