Symposium - AIC

Giovanni R.F. Ferrari
abandons him along the road, then, Aristodemus is getting his symbolic come-uppance.
In this behavior, Aristodemus at the dialogue's opening turns out to be a precursor of
Alcibiades at its close. Like Aristodemus, Alcibiades makes Socrates, rather than the divine, the
focus of his love. His aspiration is not simply, as he claims (218d), to become the best he can be, but,
as his behaviour reveals, to have Socrates acknowledge him as the best. And once again, Plato
deploys the theme of invitation-seeking and uninvited arrival to help make his point.
We have seen how Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue, seems to have been invited to
the feast but ends up coming uninvited. Alcibiades, at the dialogue's end, seems to show up
uninvited, with much drunken banging on the doors, but turns out to be responding to an invitation
after all. "I couldn't come yesterday, so here I am now," are among his first words (212e). 4 Then, in
the story Alcibiades tells of his pursuit of (not wisdom, but) the wise Socrates, we learn that, in his
impatience to receive an invitation from Socrates, he went so far to issue his own invitation to the
feast (217c), inviting Socrates to dinner at his house as if he were the older lover and Socrates the
young man whose love he sought. In this role, Alcibiades could be described as the inferior inviting
the superior to the feast in order that the superior may approve of him. But the description should ring
a bell: it is based on Agathon's instruction to his servants at the start of the evening's dinner:
"Imagining that I and these others have been invited to dinner by you, serve us, so that we may praise
you" (175b). Agathon, the master, here comments wryly about being at the mercy of his slaves.
Alcibiades attempts the same trick, but cannot disturb Socrates' mastery.
4 It is once again Socrates who appears uninvited, startling Alcibiades when he turns around to find him sitting as third guest
on the couch. "Always popping up where I least expect you," says Alcibiades (213c).
133