Alcibiades

Alcibiades (c. 450–404 BCE), son of Cleinias, the brilliant and dangerous Athenian aristocrat — Pericles' ward, Socrates' most famous beloved, and a general whose career embodied unprincipled ambition: a leading Athenian politician in the Peloponnesian War who defected to Sparta when charged with capital crimes, then turned double agent between Athens and Persia. In Plato he is two things at once: the subject of the (disputed) Alcibiades I, the ambitious youth brought to see that he knows nothing of justice and must cultivate his soul, and the encomiast of Socrates in the Symposium, the drunken latecomer whose praise of the irreplaceable teacher he could not follow closes the dialogue. The Socrates–Alcibiades attachment — intense, pedagogical, non-sexual — is the origin of the term "Platonic love."

Key Points

  • The historical arc: gifted, beautiful, well-born, fabulously ambitious; a general of the Sicilian Expedition; defector to Sparta; later a double agent; assassinated in exile. The editor's note to the Alcibiades I supplies this arc as the ironic backdrop to the dialogue's hopeful close.
  • In the Alcibiades I: the youth who "knows nothing" of the just and the expedient yet aspires to rule (106c–119a), brought through the elenchus to recognize his double ignorance and his need for self-cultivation; he pledges to "cultivate justice in myself right now" (135e) — a pledge Socrates "presciently distrusts."
  • In the Symposium: the drunken Alcibiades' encomium (215a–222b) praises Socrates as a Silenus-figure, irresistible and unassimilable, and confesses that he flees the shame Socrates alone makes him feel (216a–c) — the man who could not become what the Alcibiades I's youth promised to be.
  • Socrates as his "only lover": the one who loves Alcibiades' soul (his self), not his bloom, and so stays when the others leave (Alc. 131c–132a) — the eros frame the Symposium dramatizes from the other side.

What's Not Obvious

  • The two dialogues are mirror images. The Alcibiades I ends with the youth's earnest pledge of devotion to Socrates; the Symposium shows the adult who broke it, confessing he "stops up his ears and flees" the one man who shames him (216a). Read together, Plato frames the hopeful pledge with its historical refutation — and the Alcibiades I's author lets Socrates voice the distrust in advance.
  • The dialogue most responsible for the philosophical Alcibiades may not be Plato's. The Alcibiades I is marked † (disputed authorship); so the figure who, in later antiquity, opened the study of Platonic philosophy is shaped largely by a text whose Platonic authorship is now a minority view. See self-knowledge.

Connections

  • is the subject of plato-alcibiades-1 — the youth turned to self-cultivation through the elenchus (authorship of the dialogue disputed).
  • delivers the encomium of Socrates in plato-symposium — the drunken praise (215a–222b) of the teacher he abandoned.
  • is the beloved of socrates — whose love, being of the soul, makes him "the only lover" (Alc. 131e); the etymon of "Platonic love."
  • exemplifies the failure that self-knowledge would cure — ambition without self-knowledge, the unexamined life of the man who "doesn't know but thinks he does."

Open Questions

  • How much of the "philosophical Alcibiades" is Plato's and how much later Academic construction, given the Alcibiades I's disputed authorship?
  • Did the historical Alcibiades' trajectory shape Plato's portrait, or does Plato use the famous name as a ready-made emblem of ungoverned brilliance?

Sources

  • plato-alcibiades-1 — Alcibiades as the ambitious youth brought to self-recognition (103a–135e); the editor's biographical note.
  • plato-symposium — Alcibiades' encomium of Socrates (215a–222b).