party at the house of the tragic poet Agathon in which the participants each give a
speech in praise of love (eros), Alcibiades bursts in and announces that the only
encomium he will give will be of Socrates himself, whom he likens to the figures of
Silenus in statuaries’ shops; their unprepossessing exterior belies their inner reality,
for they are hollow inside and when opened up can be seen to contain little figures
of the gods. In mythology, Silenus is a pot-bellied, sleep-prone drunkard who in sober
waking moments dispensed wisdom to those who could pin him down and constrain
him to do so. The flesh-and-blood Socrates was snub-nosed and ugly, not at all the
image of the dignified philosopher that has come down to us in the idealised busts of
Plato and Aristotle, in which the physical and intellectual are harmoniously blended
in the typical Greek way. He was the butt of comedians and into this comic portrait
fits the figure of his second wife Xanthippe, an archetypal shrew who gave her
husband a bad time. Alcibiades also likens him to Marsyas the satyr, who can
entrance men with his flute: Socrates casts his spell simply with his words and speech.
Then comes the confession of Alcibiades, which might be thought to be Plato’s
answer to Socrates’ detractors:
He compels me to realise that I am still a mass of imperfections and yet persistently
neglect my own true interests by engaging in public life. So against my real
inclination I stop up my ears and take refuge in flight, as Odysseus did from the
Sirens.
(216a)Only Socrates has induced in him a feeling of shame.
He then exposes the Silenus figure, with the observation that Socrates (like all
the Athenians present at the banquet) has a tendency to dote on beautiful young men
and (unlike his fellows) pretends to be ignorant and know nothing:
But this is exactly the point in which he resembles Silenus; he wears these
characteristics superficially, like the carved figure, but once you see beneath the
surface you will discover a degree of self-control (sophrosyne) of which you can
hardly form a notion, gentlemen. Believe me, it makes no difference to him
whether a person is good-looking – he despises good looks to an almost incon-
ceivable extent – nor whether he is rich nor whether he possesses any of the other
advantages that rank high in popular esteem; to him all these things are worthless,
and we ourselves of no account, be sure of that.
(216d–e)As proof of his self-control, Alcibiades then tells a remarkable story. As a handsome
young man he deliberately set out to offer himself to the older man in fulfilment of
194 THE GREEKS