Wonder and strangeness · Lexicon

From the book

Alcibiades I

Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordWonder is the response to something puzzling or unexpected; atopos and its forms describe strangeness or being out of the ordinary.
In Alcibiades IAlcibiades’ first puzzle is another person: why has Socrates alone persisted in loving him while remaining silent?
In this editionThe edition’s “strange state” preserves the echo of Socrates’ earlier strangeness without equating the adjective with a medical condition.
A place to readThe persistence and silence of the lover provoke wonder.

Meaning

Wonder is the response to something puzzling or unexpected; atopos and its forms describe strangeness or being out of the ordinary. Neither word by itself is the technical name of the argumentative impasse, though the drama links them to changing self-understanding.

Use in the book

Alcibiades’ first puzzle is another person: why has Socrates alone persisted in loving him while remaining silent? Socrates correctly anticipates that wonder, and Alcibiades says he had intended to ask about it. Once Socrates speaks, the young man finds him stranger still. Speech therefore does not immediately dissolve the puzzle; it enlarges it through a surprising claim of indispensability. At 116e strangeness turns inward. Alcibiades now says he is like someone in a strange state, giving different answers at different times, and admits that he does not know what he is saying. The difference matters: an intriguing lover has become the means of discovering an unrecognized problem in the respondent himself. Wonder also returns in the imagined reactions of Amestris and Lampido, whose bafflement concerns his lack of preparation. It is thus a recurrent dramatic response to mismatches between claim, expectation and reality rather than a single philosophical doctrine about wonder.

Places to read

103a–104d2The persistence and silence of the lover provoke wonder.
106aBeginning to speak makes Socrates appear stranger.
116eAlcibiades describes his own unstable condition as strange.
123c–124a2The royal women are imagined wondering at his challenge.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s “strange state” preserves the echo of Socrates’ earlier strangeness without equating the adjective with a medical condition. The royal women’s wonder remains hypothetical, not a reported historical reaction.

ἄτοπος

Attested: ἀτόπως (atopōs; 116e); ἀτοπώτερος (atopōteros; 106a). At 116e: Strangely disposed: Alcibiades describes the disturbing condition in which his answers keep changing. Strange or unusual: Socrates becomes stranger by speaking, and Alcibiades later calls his own condition strange. Lexical identification: lemma: ἄτοπος. See Perplexity; Wonder and strangeness.

θαυμάζω

Attested: θαυμάζειν (thaumazein; 103a); θαυμάζω (thaumazō; 104d). To wonder or be astonished, first at Socrates’ persistent silence. Lexical identification: lemma: θαυμάζω. See Wonder and strangeness.