Standing Since Dawn
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Alcibiades — αὐτὸν ὡς καταφρονοῦντα σφῶν. καὶ ταῦτα μὲν δὴ ταῦτα· οἷον δʼ αὖ τόδʼ ἔρεξε καὶ ἔτλη καρτερὸς ἀνὴρ ἐκεῖ ποτε ἐπὶ στρατιᾶς, ἄξιον ἀκοῦσαι. συννοήσας γὰρ αὐτόθι ἕωθέν τι εἱστήκει σκοπῶν, καὶ ἐπειδὴ οὐ προυχώρει αὐτῷ, οὐκ ἀνίει ἀλλὰ εἱστήκει ζητῶν. καὶ ἤδη ἦν μεσημβρία, καὶ ἅνθρωποι ᾐσθάνοντο, καὶ θαυμάζοντες ἄλλος ἄλλῳ ἔλεγεν ὅτι Σωκράτης ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ φροντίζων τι ἕστηκε. τελευτῶντες δὲ τινες τῶν Ἰώνων, ἐπειδὴ ἑσπέρα ἦν, δειπνήσαντες— καὶ
— that he meant to scorn them. So, that, then, is that. But here's another thing he did and dared — this tough man, out there once, on campaign — worth hearing. Sunk in thought, he stood there from dawn, working something out, and when it wasn't going forward for him, he wouldn't quit, but stood there still searching. And by now it was noon, and people had noticed, and in wonder they were telling each other that Socrates had been standing there thinking about something since dawn. Finally some of the Ionians, once evening fell, after dinner — and…
Continuing directly from 220b, where the soldiers had taken Socrates' bare feet and cold-weather endurance as a slight against them (a clause completed here in its first four words): Alcibiades closes that anecdote and turns to a second, on a different campaign — Socrates freezing mid-thought at dawn and refusing to move until midday, then evening, prompted a crowd of onlookers. The unit breaks off mid-sentence as some of the Ionian soldiers, having dined, settle in to keep watch; the scene concludes in 220d.
Alcibiades reaches for an old, heroic pairing to describe an act of pure stillness: ἔρδω and τλάω, ‘did’ and ‘dared/endured,’ are both epic verbs, the diction of a battlefield rather than ordinary Attic prose. He spends that weight on a man standing in one spot working out a problem in his own head. The mismatch is half the joke and half the tribute at once, and it is not an isolated report: this is the second time in the dialogue Socrates freezes mid-thought and will not be moved — the first is on Agathon’s own doorstep a few hours earlier (174d–175b), where a servant is sent out to fetch him and no one can talk him back inside until he is ready. Alcibiades arrived too late to see that one, so this second, independent occasion — years apart, on campaign rather than a doorstep — turns what looked like a single evening’s oddity into a settled trait, witnessed twice by two different people. The same indifference to what the body is doing while the mind is working is what the Phaedo will later stage on a far larger scale, when Socrates spends the morning of his own execution untroubled, arguing calmly for the soul’s immortality.
The crowd around him does what everyone in this dialogue eventually does with Socrates: they notice, they marvel, and they pass the noticing along without getting any closer to explaining it. αἰσθάνομαι and θαυμάζοντες describe watching, not understanding, and ἄλλος ἄλλῳ ἔλεγεν, ‘one told another,’ is the grammar of a rumor spreading man to man faster than anyone can account for what they are seeing. It takes the Ionians — soldiers, but the ones with patience enough to actually stop and watch instead of just talking about it — to sit down and find out how the story ends. That gap between watching and understanding is the shape of Alcibiades’ whole speech: it will end, a few pages later, with him comparing Socrates to a hollow statue of a satyr, admitting that resemblance is as far as his own account can get.
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