The Revelers Break In
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Aristodemus — τὸν μὲν οὖν Ἀγάθωνα ὡς κατακεισόμενον παρὰ τῷ Σωκράτει ἀνίστασθαι· ἐξαίφνης δὲ κωμαστὰς ἥκειν παμπόλλους ἐπὶ τὰς θύρας, καὶ ἐπιτυχόντας ἀνεῳγμέναις ἐξιόντος τινὸς εἰς τὸ ἄντικρυς πορεύεσθαι παρὰ σφᾶς καὶ κατακλίνεσθαι, καὶ θορύβου μεστὰ πάντα εἶναι, καὶ οὐκέτι ἐν κόσμῳ οὐδενὶ ἀναγκάζεσθαι πίνειν πάμπολυν οἶνον. τὸν μὲν οὖν Ἐρυξίμαχον καὶ τὸν Φαῖδρον καὶ ἄλλους τινὰς ἔφη ὁ Ἀριστόδημος οἴχεσθαι ἀπιόντας, ἓ δὲ ὕπνον λαβεῖν
So then, as Agathon was rising to go lie down beside Socrates, suddenly a great crowd of revelers arrived at the doors, and finding them open since someone was going out, they came straight in among the company and reclined, everything was full of noise, and no longer in any order were they forced to drink a great deal of wine. Eryximachus and Phaedrus and some others, Aristodemus said, went off and left, but he himself fell asleep…
As Agathon rises to go lie down beside Socrates, a great crowd of revelers suddenly arrives at the doors — left open by someone stepping out — and pushes straight in among the company. The party dissolves into uproar and forced drinking; Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and some others slip away, Aristodemus said, while he himself gives in to sleep.
Nobody argues anyone into gratifying anyone here — the door was simply left open by someone stepping out, and a crowd of drunk revelers walks straight into the one room in Athens where the conversation had, for a few hours, actually been about something. κωμαστής, ‘reveler,’ names the exact figure Alcibiades made of himself at 212c-d, garlanded and unsteady, leaning on a flute-girl to get through the same door. Now the real thing arrives in force, and the distinction Alcibiades' own entrance blurred — between the philosopher's party and the drinking party — collapses for good. κόσμος is the word Plato reaches for to name what disappears — the ordering principle itself, the same word Socrates spends half the dialogues arguing a soul or a city needs to be anything at all. οὐκέτι ἐν κόσμῳ οὐδεν — no order, of any kind, remains.
The exits that follow are not a stampede. Eryximachus and Phaedrus are exactly who you would expect to leave first: the doctor whose whole speech at 186a-188e had insisted that health is a due measure and a right mixture, and the young man who begged, at 176e, for the wine bowl to circulate slowly. Both built their contributions to the evening on the value now flooding out of the room. Aristodemus stays and simply loses the fight to stay awake — an oddly literal fate for the one guest whose whole function in Apollodorus's story has been to notice and remember everything that happens. He will wake once, near dawn, for the very end of the conversation; everything in between, the reader loses exactly as he did.
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