Alcibiades crashes in, and praises Socrates

The doors burst open. A crowd of revelers pours in — flute-girl, garlanded young men, much shouting. At the head of them is Alcibiades, very drunk, ivy and violet-crowned, propped between two of them. He demands to be led to Agathon to crown him for his prize, then sees that the couch beside Agathon is already occupied by Socrates and stops. Socrates, he says, you are everywhere I am. He sits down. Wine is brought; Alcibiades drinks an enormous cup and orders Socrates to drink one too. Eryximachus, who has been running the speeches, suggests Alcibiades give one too. Alcibiades refuses. He cannot praise Eros while Socrates is there; he will not be able to keep his eyes off him. He will praise Socrates instead.

He begins with the comparison that has stuck for two and a half millennia. Socrates is like a Silenus statue — those workshop figures of the satyr that, when opened, reveal small images of the gods inside. Ugly outside; divine within. He looks like an old satyr; if you listen to him, you find a god. Then Alcibiades testifies. On campaign at Potidaea, Socrates went without sleep, walked barefoot in the ice, and once stood in one place from sunrise to sunrise thinking through a problem; soldiers slept beside him and woke to find him still there. In the disastrous retreat at Delium he walked away from the battle as calmly as he walked through the agora. He saved Alcibiades's life there and refused the prize that was rightly his, insisting Alcibiades be honored instead. He has neither the appetites nor the fears most men have.

Then the confession. As a young man Alcibiades was so beautiful no one in Athens could refuse him; he expected Socrates would also fail to. He engineered every excuse to be alone with him — wrestling matches, late dinners, eventually staying overnight — and finally, when nothing else worked, lay down beside him on a couch and offered himself directly. Socrates received the offer with gentle refusal and lay all night beside him as a brother lies beside a brother. Alcibiades got up in the morning, he says, more confused and more in love than he had ever been. He warns Agathon not to be charmed the way he was. The night winds down. Aristodemus dozes and wakes near dawn to find only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon still arguing — Socrates pressing the claim that the same poet should be able to write both comedy and tragedy. Aristophanes falls asleep, then Agathon. Socrates gets up, walks to the Lyceum, bathes, and spends the rest of the day as he spends every day.