Not to Me Alone
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Alcibiades — οὐκ ἐμὲ μόνον ταῦτα πεποίηκεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ Χαρμίδην τὸν Γλαύκωνος καὶ Εὐθύδημον τὸν Διοκλέους καὶ ἄλλους πάνυ πολλούς, οὓς οὗτος ἐξαπατῶν ὡς ἐραστὴς παιδικὰ μᾶλλον αὐτὸς καθίσταται ἀντʼ ἐραστοῦ. ἃ δὴ καὶ σοὶ λέγω, ὦ Ἀγάθων, μὴ ἐξαπατᾶσθαι ὑπὸ τούτου, ἀλλʼ ἀπὸ τῶν ἡμετέρων παθημάτων γνόντα εὐλαβηθῆναι, καὶ μὴ κατὰ τὴν παροιμίαν ὥσπερ νήπιον παθόντα γνῶναι.
He's done this not to me alone, but also to Charmides, the son of Glaucon, and Euthydemus, the son of Diocles, and a great many others — whom he deceives, while playing the lover — he himself ends up the beloved, rather than the lover. This I tell you, too, Agathon: don't be deceived by him, but, having learned from our sufferings, be on your guard, and not learn it like a fool, by suffering it — as the proverb says.
Still inside Alcibiades’ encomium, right after he compares Socrates’ arguments to the carved Silenus figures and sums up his praise and his grievance together (222a), Alcibiades widens the charge: this same erotic reversal — courted as a lover, ending up the beloved instead — has happened to other favorites of Athens too, and he now turns to warn Agathon by name before the same thing happens to him.
Alcibiades names names. Charmides, Glaucon’s son, and Euthydemus, Diocles’ son — two of the best-looking young men in Athens — get the same treatment he has just spent his whole speech describing for himself: Socrates plays erastēs, the lover, and then reverses the roles, becoming paidika, the beloved, instead. The verb is kathistatai, middle voice, ‘establishes himself as’ — not something done to him, something he arranges. It is the exact mechanism Alcibiades has just confessed about his own case earlier in the speech: approach Socrates hoping to be courted, end up doing the courting. Every young man who tries the ordinary Athenian move on Socrates gets run backward through it instead.
The closing line reaches for a stock proverbial shape, pathonta gnōnai, ‘to learn by having suffered’ — the same pairing Aeschylus makes famous in the Agamemnon, pathei mathos, wisdom bought only through pain. Alcibiades uses it as a plain warning, not a tragic flourish: Agathon can take the lesson secondhand, from watching what happened to Charmides and Euthydemus and Alcibiades himself, or he can learn it the slow way, by living it. Coming from a man who has just finished confessing exactly that slow, painful education, the warning carries some weight — whether Agathon, reclining a few feet away, actually heeds it is a question the dialogue leaves open.
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