To No Man, But to the Sileni
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Alcibiades — καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους κατὰ ταὔτʼ ἄν τις ἀπεικάζοι· οἷος δὲ οὑτοσὶ γέγονε τὴν ἀτοπίαν ἅνθρωπος, καὶ αὐτὸς καὶ οἱ λόγοι αὐτοῦ, οὐδʼ ἐγγὺς ἂν εὕροι τις ζητῶν, οὔτε τῶν νῦν οὔτε τῶν παλαιῶν, εἰ μὴ ἄρα εἰ οἷς ἐγὼ λέγω ἀπεικάζοι τις αὐτόν, ἀνθρώπων μὲν μηδενί, τοῖς δὲ σιληνοῖς καὶ σατύροις, αὐτὸν καὶ τοὺς λόγους. καὶ γὰρ οὖν καὶ τοῦτο ἐν τοῖς πρώτοις παρέλιπον, ὅτι καὶ οἱ λόγοι αὐτοῦ ὁμοιότατοί εἰσι τοῖς σιληνοῖς τοῖς διοιγομένοις.
And the others one might liken in the same way. But what a strange man this one has become he himself and his speeches one, searching, would find nothing close, not among today's men nor the men of old, unless, indeed, if one likened him to what I mean to no man, but to the Sileni and Satyrs — him, and his speeches. And in fact I left out this too, among my first remarks, that his speeches too, are most like those Sileni that open up.
Alcibiades continues straight from 221c, where he had granted that other men could be likened to famous types — Achilles to Brasidas, Pericles to Nestor. Socrates admits no such comparison: in his sheer atopia (strangeness) he matches no man, living or dead, and can only be likened to the Sileni and Satyrs — the same figures Alcibiades used to open the whole encomium at 215a–b. He now doubles back to add a claim he says he skipped over at the start: that Socrates' talk, too, resembles those Silenus statues that open up.
The comparison here is a refusal dressed up as praise. Alcibiades does not say Socrates is like some admirable man of the past, because the whole point of the catalogue he has just finished — Achilles matched to Brasidas, Pericles to Nestor and Antenor — was that ordinary praise works by finding your man's double somewhere in the record. Socrates has none, in either direction of time. So Alcibiades drops the register of heroes entirely and reaches for the carved figures sold in the statuary shops: Sileni and satyrs, squat and snub-nosed on the outside, and, when pried open, holding little images of the gods. He had already made the physical half of that comparison at 215a–b, in the speech's opening minutes. What 221d adds, and marks as an afterthought, is that Socrates' talk is built the same way as his face.
The admission arrives framed as something he ‘left out’ (parélipon) rather than something planned, and that framing is doing real work: the drunk speaker recovering, mid-sentence, a point he swears he meant to make from the start. It sets up what comes next, at 221e–222a, where Alcibiades will spell out the cost of opening one of these figures — absurd talk of pack-asses and bronzesmiths on the surface, and inside, speeches he calls the only ones with any sense in them, holding images of virtue and reaching toward whatever a man needs to examine if he means to become genuinely good. None of that vocabulary appears yet in 221d. What 221d does is close the loop Alcibiades opened at 215b and left dangling: the outside was never incidental to what's inside it, and now the reader knows both halves point to the same man.
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