You Seem Sober to Me
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Aristodemus — εἰπόντος δὴ ταῦτα τοῦ Ἀλκιβιάδου γέλωτα γενέσθαι ἐπὶ τῇ παρρησίᾳ αὐτοῦ, ὅτι ἐδόκει ἔτι ἐρωτικῶς ἔχειν τοῦ Σωκράτους. τὸν οὖν Σωκράτη,
Socrates — Νήφειν μοι δοκεῖς,
Aristodemus — φάναι,
Socrates — ὦ Ἀλκιβιάδη. οὐ γὰρ ἄν ποτε οὕτω κομψῶς κύκλῳ περιβαλλόμενος ἀφανίσαι ἐνεχείρεις οὗ ἕνεκα ταῦτα πάντα εἴρηκας, καὶ ὡς ἐν παρέργῳ δὴ λέγων ἐπὶ τελευτῆς αὐτὸ ἔθηκας, ὡς οὐ πάντα τούτου ἕνεκα εἰρηκώς, τοῦ ἐμὲ καὶ
When Alcibiades had said this, there was laughter at his frankness, since he still seemed smitten with Socrates. So Socrates, “You seem sober to me,” he said, “Alcibiades. For you'd never otherwise wrapped it around so cleverly, tried to hide the reason you've said all this, tucking it in as a passing remark at the very end, as though you hadn't said the whole thing for the sake of this — so that I and…”
Alcibiades has just finished his long, seemingly unscripted eulogy of Socrates (216a–222b), and the table laughs at his candor, since it is obvious he is still in love with the man he has just spent a whole speech praising. Socrates answers by reading the speech itself as a construction, accusing Alcibiades of saving its real purpose for the very end and passing it off as incidental. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and is completed in 222d, where Socrates names that purpose: to turn him against Agathon.
Alcibiades had opened his speech by refusing Agathon's kind of oratory outright — no polished praise, he said back at 214e, only the truth as it comes to him. Socrates does not buy it. He reads the whole performance as built, and built with a professional's sense of timing: the real point held back for the very end and dressed up as an aside (parergon) — which puts parrēsia, the very word the room just used for his supposed candor, in question. The Phaedrus later insists a good speech needs its parts in a necessary order, head to foot, like a living creature (264c); Socrates here accuses Alcibiades of exactly that architecture, minus any honesty about having built something at all.
Kompsōs is Socrates' recurring word for the sophist's kind of cleverness — a finish so smooth it ought to make a listener suspicious rather than admiring. Aiming it at Alcibiades, who has just spent a whole speech insisting he alone tells Socrates the plain truth, turns the encomium into exactly the thing it claimed not to be. What Alcibiades actually wanted comes out in the next section, but the shape of the charge is already in place: a speech can sound spontaneous and still be aimed, and the aim only shows once someone reads past the last line instead of stopping at it.
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