Sleep, hunger, thinness, and worries · Lexicon

From the book

The Lovers

Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordKatheudein means to sleep; agrypnos means sleepless or wakeful; asitos means unfed or without food.
In The LoversThe cultured lover says the athlete spends life wrestling, filling himself, and sleeping.
In this editionThe note at 134b identifies the portrait with comedy’s picture of the philosopher.
A place to readκαὶ καθεύδων πάντα τὸν βίον διατετέλεκεν — Sleeping is part of the cultured man’s caricature of his rival.

Meaning

Katheudein means to sleep; agrypnos means sleepless or wakeful; asitos means unfed or without food. Leptos means thin or slender, here of the man’s body. Merimna is a worry or care; the plural merimnōn supplies the supposed cause of thinness. These are the terms of a polemical portrait, not diagnoses made by the narrator. The dictionary infinitive katheudein appears in the text as the participle katheudōn, “sleeping.”

An unfed person and a person who eats moderately are not identical. Likewise, sleep and sleeplessness are not themselves markers of vice and wisdom. The speakers turn visible bodily habits into social labels; the argument that follows requires a different, measured standard.

Use in the book

The cultured lover says the athlete spends life wrestling, filling himself, and sleeping. That first caricature implies a life devoid of intellectual wakefulness. The athlete’s return caricature makes the supposed thinker sleepless and unfed, his neck untrained, his body thin with worries. Excessive bodily comfort and excessive intellectual strain become competing badges of ridicule.

The context gives the retort a clear target: the man who claims wisdom has failed to recognize a principle that even a pig would know. His outward signs of study are thus represented as useless expenditure. The lads reward the joke with laughter, making the embarrassment immediate. Yet the text does not say that the cultured man really never sleeps or eats. Both descriptions use a hostile voice and comic exaggeration.

The better criterion emerges alongside the abuse: appropriate exertion and food produce bodily benefit. That principle resists both caricatures. It also prepares the claim that educational inputs should be beneficially measured. Reading the scene as a simple recommendation for hunger and sleepless study, or as a dismissal of all intensive thought, would mistake the rivals’ insults for Socrates’ conclusion.

Places to read

132cκαὶ καθεύδων πάντα τὸν βίον διατετέλεκεν — Sleeping is part of the cultured man’s caricature of his rival.
134bἄγρυπνόν τε καὶ ἄσιτον — The athlete returns a portrait of sleeplessness and hunger.
134bκαὶ λεπτὸν ὑπὸ μεριμνῶν — Thinness from worries completes the comic image.

Translation in this edition

The note at 134b identifies the portrait with comedy’s picture of the philosopher. It cites the pale pupils in Aristophanes’ Clouds 103 and the passage at 412–421 in which a would-be pupil is promised happiness if he can endure cold, hunger, and abstention from exercise and boasts of sleepless worry and a frugal belly. The note distinguishes the promise to the pupil from a question. These are contextual comparisons supplied by the editor, not evidence that the unnamed lover is literally an Aristophanic character.