Symposium

Block IX: 219b–223d (Burnet pages 66–72)

How it was made. Burnet pages 66–72 (scan pp. 230–236), 180 lines, the end of the dialogue: the rest of Alcibiades’ speech, from the night under Socrates’ cloak, through Socrates on campaign at Potidaea, enduring hunger, drink and winter and standing in thought from dawn to dawn, his rescue of Alcibiades and the retreat from Delium, to the likeness of his speeches to the sileni that open and the warning to Agathon; and, after Burnet’s blank line, the narration again: Socrates’ reply, the quarrel over the places on the couch, the revellers, Aristodemus’ sleep and waking, Socrates’ argument with Agathon and Aristophanes about comedy and tragedy, and his going to the Lyceum. The Greek was set line for line from the photographs of Burnet’s page, with his apparatus, and the English written and annotated in the approved voice; independent reviewers then checked the Greek and the apparatus against the photographs letter by letter, the English against the Greek clause by clause, and every note and the extended Editorial Note against their sources.

What the reviewers caught. In the apparatus, the reading of W and the papyrus at 220c2 is τοδ’ without an accent, which the draft had taken over from the verse above (kept as printed), and T’s reading at 223b8 is ἕαδε, with an acute beside the breathing; the short line before the verse at 220c1 is now set short, as Burnet sets it. The rest of the text, the margins, the verse at 220c2 with its indent, the letterspacing at 221b3–4, the blank line at 222c1, the two supplements and the apparatus were confirmed letter by letter on all seven pages. In the English, the participle “cut off” and the “toils” of πόνοι were restored (219e7–9); σῴζειν keeps “keep safe” (220d8); ὡς ἀληθῶς keeps “in truth” (219b7); χρήμασι and σιδήρῳ are “by money” and “by iron” (219e1–2); μετὰ Σωκράτους goes with the sleeping, not with the getting up (219c7–d1); αὖ, γε, δή, ἀλλά, μᾶλλον and καί were restored in ten places; καὶ μέντοι is “and what is more” (222a8); λόγος at 223a8 is Socrates’ “argument”; two Stephanus markers were moved (222a1, 222d1); and the phrases that followed Lamb’s Loeb translation were reworded, among them “let fly” (219b3) and “until dawn came” (220d4). In the notes, the order of praise at 222e is worked out from the Greek (Agathon, lying below Socrates, would be the next he praised); the Lenaea are given from Athenaeus, since the Symposium does not name the festival; the battle of the prize is “probably” the one before Potidaea, since Isocrates puts it in Phormio’s later campaign (16.29), and Plutarch’s chapter is 7.3–4; Laches is named as general at Thucydides 5.61.1; the word at 220a6 is karterēsis, not karteria; the satyr play is the City Dionysia’s; and the Republic is cited for what it says (395a). In the Editorial Note, Aristides is identified as Aelius Aristides, who quotes the retreat from Delium in his speech To Plato: In Defence of Oratory; the papyrus’ accented readings at 220a4 and 220c7 and its supplied letters at 219c5 and 219d7 are described; and Vind. 21 is listed at all three of its places.