No One Else Saved Me
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Alcibiades — γὰρ θέρος τότε γʼ ἦν— χαμεύνια ἐξενεγκάμενοι ἅμα μὲν ἐν τῷ ψύχει καθηῦδον, ἅμα δʼ ἐφύλαττον αὐτὸν εἰ καὶ τὴν νύκτα ἑστήξοι. ὁ δὲ εἱστήκει μέχρι ἕως ἐγένετο καὶ ἥλιος ἀνέσχεν· ἔπειτα ᾤχετʼ ἀπιὼν προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλίῳ. εἰ δὲ βούλεσθε ἐν ταῖς μάχαις— τοῦτο γὰρ δὴ δίκαιόν γε αὐτῷ ἀποδοῦναι— ὅτε γὰρ ἡ μάχη ἦν ἐξ ἧς ἐμοὶ καὶ τἀριστεῖα ἔδοσαν οἱ στρατηγοί, οὐδεὶς ἄλλος ἐμὲ ἔσωσεν
For it was summer then, indeed — they brought out light bedding, and while they slept in the cold, they also kept watch on him, whether even through the night he'd still be standing. And he stood there, until dawn came and the sun rose; then he went off, having prayed to the sun. And if you like, in the battles — for it's right, indeed, to render him his due — for when the battle was fought in which the generals gave me the prize for valor, no one else saved me…
Continuing straight from 220c, where Alcibiades finished describing Socrates' all-night standing trance at Potidaea: the vigil ends with Socrates greeting the sunrise, and Alcibiades pivots to a new marvel — the battle where the generals wanted to award him, Alcibiades, the ἀριστεῖον (prize for valor), though it was Socrates alone who saved him. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and is completed in 220e.
The trance story gets one more beat before Alcibiades drops it: Socrates stands rooted from dusk to dawn while the rest of the camp sleeps in the summer cold, and when the sun finally clears the horizon he does not simply walk away — he prays to it first. Plato lets that gesture pass without comment, but he will return to it. A man who spends a whole night in unbroken thought and then addresses the rising sun is doing, in miniature, what the Republic will later do at length: make the sun the visible stand-in for the Good, the thing the mind can only approach after a long climb out of the dark. Alcibiades has no access to that reading. He treats the prayer as one more camp story, filed next to endurance and strange stares, evidence of a man too odd to embarrass.
Then he changes register entirely. The vocabulary turns legal and financial in the same breath: dikaion, ‘just,’ and apodounai, ‘to render what is owed,’ are the words of a debt being settled, not a drinking-party speech. He is building a case, plainly and in order, for a claim he is about to make against himself: that the aristeion voted to him by the generals belonged, by right, to the man who actually saved his life. The same speaker who convened a jury against Socrates for ‘arrogance’ at 219c is, three sentences later, cross-examining his own war record and finding himself the one who owes.
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