The Satyr's Hide
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Alcibiades — εἰ γὰρ ἐθέλοι τις τῶν Σωκράτους ἀκούειν λόγων, φανεῖεν ἂν πάνυ γελοῖοι τὸ πρῶτον— τοιαῦτα καὶ ὀνόματα καὶ ῥήματα ἔξωθεν περιαμπέχονται, σατύρου δή τινα ὑβριστοῦ δοράν. ὄνους γὰρ κανθηλίους λέγει καὶ χαλκέας τινὰς καὶ σκυτοτόμους καὶ βυρσοδέψας, καὶ ἀεὶ διὰ τῶν αὐτῶν τὰ αὐτὰ φαίνεται λέγειν, ὥστε ἄπειρος καὶ ἀνόητος ἄνθρωπος
For if someone were willing to hear Socrates' speeches, they would seem, utterly ridiculous, at first — such names and words cover it, on the outside — the hide, so to speak, of some outrageous satyr. For he talks of pack-asses, and certain smiths, and cobblers, and tanners, and he always seems to say the same things through the same words, so that an inexperienced and foolish person…
Continuing straight from 221d, where Alcibiades declared Socrates unlike anyone, past or present, comparable only to the Silenus-figures and satyrs. He now extends that image from Socrates' looks to his actual manner of speaking: heard for the first time, it sounds absurd, wrapped in a crude vocabulary of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and is completed in 222a.
Alcibiades has just ranked Socrates above Achilles, Brasidas, Pericles, Nestor — the whole gallery of comparisons Greek culture had on hand — and now drops him below all of it, into a vocabulary you would not use of a free man discussing anything serious. Pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, tanners: these are not random insults. They are the standard cast of Socratic argument, the trades he interrogates shop by shop in the Apology when he goes testing claims to knowledge, and needles Callicles with in the Gorgias. Athenians who heard Socrates reason this way for the first time found it beneath philosophy. Alcibiades reports that reaction honestly, before he spends the rest of the speech insisting it was wrong.
The word for the outer covering, dorá, is specific: a hide, the kind stripped from an animal's body, not skin still worn by something living. Alcibiades chose the same image at 215b, comparing Socrates to Marsyas, the satyr Apollo flayed alive for daring to compete with him in music — his pelt hung up afterward as a trophy. Calling Socrates' crude talk a satyr's dorá is not a stray joke; it is that comparison working a second time, and it says something a plain compliment could not: whatever gets peeled off first is not the man, only the ugly skin he happens to be wearing.
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