Two Kinds of Waking
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Aristodemus — καὶ καταδαρθεῖν πάνυ πολύ, ἅτε μακρῶν τῶν νυκτῶν οὐσῶν, ἐξεγρέσθαι δὲ πρὸς ἡμέραν ἤδη ἀλεκτρυόνων ᾀδόντων, ἐξεγρόμενος δὲ ἰδεῖν τοὺς μὲν ἄλλους καθεύδοντας καὶ οἰχομένους, Ἀγάθωνα δὲ καὶ Ἀριστοφάνη καὶ Σωκράτη ἔτι μόνους ἐγρηγορέναι καὶ πίνειν ἐκ φιάλης μεγάλης ἐπί δεξιά. τὸν οὖν Σωκράτη αὐτοῖς διαλέγεσθαι· καὶ τὰ μὲν ἄλλα ὁ
And I fell fast asleep, for quite a while, since the nights were long, and I woke close to daybreak already, the cocks crowing. Waking up, I saw the others asleep and gone; but Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates were still awake, alone, drinking from a large bowl, passed to the right. Socrates then was talking with them; and as for the rest…
Continuing Aristodemus's account, now relayed in indirect discourse: he admits he fell asleep himself for a long stretch, given how far the night had run, and woke near daybreak to actual cockcrow. Looking around, he finds the rest of the company asleep or already gone — only Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates are still up, drinking from a shared bowl passed round to the right, with Socrates now doing the talking. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and continues in 223d.
Aristodemus admits here that he is not the steady witness the frame has made him out to be: he fell asleep himself, for as long as the season's long nights allowed, and only surfaces at the sound of actual roosters. Two different verbs mark two different kinds of waking in this sentence. His own is exegrésthai / exegrómenos, the ordinary aorist for a single completed act — he woke up, once, at a fixed moment, and can only guess at how long he was out from the length of the night. What Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates are doing is named instead with the perfect egrēgorénai: a form that describes not an event but a standing condition, to have gotten yourself roused and to still be in that state. Grammatically, the three of them were never asleep to begin with.
The detail that they drink epì dexiá, passing the bowl to the right, is not decoration. Greek symposia moved the wine sunwise around the couches as a matter of form, the same direction this evening's speeches themselves were supposed to take earlier in the night; the custom outlives the occasion it was built for. By this point the formal round of speeches is long over, the slaves and most of the guests are gone, and what is left of the evening's shape is one bowl still going the right way between three men. Socrates is one of the three, without any of the staged endurance the dialogue makes explicit once Aristodemus wakes again to find him the last one standing. Here he is simply still there, still talking, because he never much needed the sleep the rest of the room did.
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