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Images poetry and proverbial language

Cydias

Κυδίαν (Kydian)

Kydian is the accusative of Cydias, the poet Socrates calls exceptionally wise in ta erōtika, matters of love.

From the book

Charmides

Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordKydian is the accusative of Cydias, the poet Socrates calls exceptionally wise in ta erōtika, matters of love.
  • In the CharmidesSocrates recollects Cydias precisely when the sight of Charmides leaves him on fire and beside himself.
  • In this editionBurnet letterspaces the quotation; the edition represents that with italics.
  • A place to readSocrates invokes Cydias while describing erotic discomposure and applies the image to himself.

Meaning

Kydian is the accusative of Cydias, the poet Socrates calls exceptionally wise in ta erōtika, matters of love. His name introduces the quoted warning about a fawn approaching a lion.

Use in the book

Socrates recollects Cydias precisely when the sight of Charmides leaves him on fire and beside himself. The quoted counsel warns someone not to approach a lion as a fawn and become a portion of meat. Socrates then applies it to his own sense of capture. The quotation supplies a miniature model of erotic experience in which the conventionally pursuing older lover becomes vulnerable prey.

The praise “wisest” is therefore experiential and comic. Cydias has articulated a danger that Socrates suddenly feels, not established the technical knowledge examined in the dialogue's second half. Charmides' beauty and Socrates' loss of ease give the poetry its point before the medical fiction helps redirect the encounter.

The poet's biography is obscure. The supplied edition identifies the quotation as the secure fragment conventionally numbered PMG 714 and notes a separate ancient attribution to a Cydias of Hermione. Those external scraps should not be synthesized into a confident life. For understanding this dialogue, the securely available authorial fact is Plato's attribution of these words to Cydias.

Places to read

  1. 155d–eSocrates invokes Cydias while describing erotic discomposure and applies the image to himself
  2. 155d (apparatus)23The wording of the quotation varies, especially at d6–7

Translation in this edition

Burnet letterspaces the quotation; the edition represents that with italics. Its apparatus records a badly divergent reading in B and Cobet's proposal αἰτεῖσθαι in place of αἱρεῖσθαι. Interpretation should follow the printed text while acknowledging that the fragment's exact wording is not uniformly transmitted.

Κυδίας

Attested: Κυδίαν (kydian). Cydias, the poet whose warning about a fawn approaching a lion Socrates recalls when overwhelmed by Charmides’ beauty. References: 155d. Lexical identification: lemma: Κυδίας. See Cydias.

Source note

Fragment designation: D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford, 1962), no. 714, as identified in the supplied edition. No additional biography is inferred here from that numbering.