Home to Rest
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Apollodorus — Ἀριστόδημος οὐκ ἔφη μεμνῆσθαι τῶν λόγων— οὔτε γὰρ ἐξ ἀρχῆς παραγενέσθαι ὑπονυστάζειν τε— τὸ μέντοι κεφάλαιον, ἔφη, προσαναγκάζειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸς εἶναι κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν ἐπίστασθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνῃ τραγῳδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κωμῳδοποιὸν εἶναι. ταῦτα δὴ ἀναγκαζομένους αὐτοὺς καὶ οὐ σφόδρα ἑπομένους νυστάζειν, καὶ πρότερον μὲν καταδαρθεῖν τὸν Ἀριστοφάνη, ἤδη δὲ ἡμέρας γιγνομένης τὸν Ἀγάθωνα. τὸν οὖν Σωκράτη, κατακοιμίσαντʼ ἐκείνους, ἀναστάντα ἀπιέναι, καὶ ἓ ὥσπερ εἰώθει ἕπεσθαι, καὶ ἐλθόντα εἰς Λύκειον, ἀπονιψάμενον, ὥσπερ ἄλλοτε τὴν ἄλλην ἡμέραν διατρίβειν, καὶ οὕτω διατρίψαντα εἰς ἑσπέραν οἴκοι ἀναπαύεσθαι.
Aristodemus said he did not remember the discussion — he had not been there from the start and was dozing off — but the main point, he said, was that Socrates was forcing them to agree it was the mark of the same man to know how to write both comedy and tragedy, and whoever, by skill, was a tragic poet was also a comic poet. Forced along by this, and not quite keeping up, they began to doze — Aristophanes fell asleep first, and then, as day broke, Agathon did too. So Socrates, once he settled them to sleep, got up and left, and Aristodemus followed him, as he always did. He went to the Lyceum, washed himself, and spent the rest of the day as he usually did. And having passed the day this way, toward evening he went home to rest.
The dialogue's final page. Aristodemus admits he cannot vouch for the last exchange in full — he had missed the start of the evening and was dozing by the end — but he remembers its gist: Socrates pressing Aristophanes and Agathon to agree that comedy and tragedy are a single craft. As the two finally give in to sleep, Socrates rises, and the sentence broken off in 223c completes here with an ordinary morning: a wash, a day at the Lyceum, and home at evening to rest. This is the final Stephanus unit of the *Symposium*.
Aristodemus admits, on the dialogue's last page, that he cannot vouch for what was actually said. He had missed the start of the evening and had been dozing since; the one thing he retains is the shape of Socrates' claim, not its steps — that the same man's skill produces both comedy and tragedy, and that a genuine tragic poet would, by that same skill, also write comedy. Plato never gives the argument itself, here or anywhere else, and no ancient or modern reader has reconstructed it with any confidence. What the passage does give us is the frame collapsing at the last possible moment: the whole Symposium has reached us through Aristodemus's memory, retold by Apollodorus to a companion, and only now, on the final page, are we told outright that the source was half asleep for the part that mattered most.
Then the frame narrows to one man moving through an ordinary morning. Socrates settles his two remaining companions into sleep, gets up, and — with Aristodemus trailing him, as he says was always the case — walks to the Lyceum, washes, and spends the day exactly as he spends any other day, going home at evening to rest. No closing speech, no summary of what erōs is; the dialogue's last Greek word is ἀναπαύεσθαι, 'to rest,' carrying no more weight than it would after any Athenian's long night. It matches, without commentary, what Alcibiades had said two speeches earlier about Socrates' endurance on campaign at Potidaea and his capacity to drink until dawn without effect (220a–e). The Phaedrus, this dialogue's companion piece on the same subject, closes the same way — two men getting up and walking off at midday, with no doctrine pronounced at the end of either conversation.
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