Second Alcibiades (Alcibiades II)

Author: [Plato] (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Anthony Kenny, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

A short dialectical dialogue — marked † (disputed authorship) and judged a dubium, almost certainly not by Plato but a late-4th-/3rd-century BCE Academy product from Northern Greece (per editor D. S. Hutchinson) — in which Socrates intercepts the ambitious young Alcibiades on his way to pray and argues that prayer is an epistemically perilous act: since the gods sometimes grant what is asked, a request made in ignorance of the good can be catastrophic (Oedipus prayed his sons settle the inheritance by the sword, "and what he asked for came to pass"). Against Alcibiades' complacent reply that only "a madman" would pray so, the author of Second Alcibiades argues that ordinary ignorance, not madness, is the real danger — madness being only one species of a graded ignorance. The dialogue's load-bearing thesis is that knowledge of the best ("knowledge of utility," 145c) is the architectonic precondition governing every subordinate skill and the act of prayer itself; lacking it, one should defer prayer and imitate the Spartans, who ask only for "what is good and noble." Along the way it concedes the striking point that ignorance can be good and knowledge harmful (a man who cannot recognize his intended victim is thereby prevented from the crime, 144c) — a means/ends complication of socratic-intellectualism. It is a companion to the (also disputed) plato-alcibiades-1, reusing its fog/eye imagery and humiliation arc while displacing the governing theme from self-knowledge to knowledge of the good. All doctrines below are reported hedged ("the author of Second Alcibiades"), per the dubium status.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: Prayer is dangerous — you may, all unawares, pray for great evils believing them great goods. Because: the gods sometimes grant what is asked, so a wrong request, if granted, is catastrophic (Oedipus prayed that his sons divide the inheritance by the sword, "and what he asked for came to pass," 138b–141a). Against: Alcibiades' first move — "you're talking about a madman, Socrates" (138c): a sane person would never pray so. The dialogue must defeat exactly this complacency. Location: 138a–c.

  2. Claim: It is not only madmen who pray amiss; most people do — because madness is just one species of ignorance, not its whole genus. Because: a deliberately invalid opening syllogism identifies stupidity with madness (139a–c), but that yields a whole "city of madmen" (139d), so the identification is dropped; as eye-ache is always sickness yet sickness is not always eye-ache, "people have shared out stupidity," the largest share being madmen, smaller shares fools or asses (140c). Against: a Cynic opponent refuses the partition and reasserts that all ignorance is madness — exactly the position the graded scheme is built to refute (per D. S. Hutchinson, an anti-Cynic polemic). Location: 138c–140c.

  3. Claim: Wrongdoing flows from ignorance of the best, not from malice — no one of sound mind, knowing what is best, would dare the great crimes. Because: "do you think Orestes, if he had been of sound mind and known what was best…, would have dared?" — "No" (143d); the matricide thought-experiments make ignorance, not wickedness, the cause. Against: this textbook intellectualism sits awkwardly with the very next argument (4), where ignorance prevents the crime — exposing a tension between ignorance-of-ends and ignorance-of-means. Location: 143d–144c.

  4. Claim: Some ignorance is better than knowledge; the only ignorance that is simply bad is ignorance "of the best." Because: to blame ignorance "in such general terms" is wrong — "we should specify what it is ignorance of" (143c); one ignorant of how to recognize his intended victim is thereby prevented from the crime (had Orestes failed to recognize his mother he would not have killed her, 144c), so for someone bent on evil, ignorance of particulars is protective. Against: this concedes that knowledge can be instrumentally harmful and ignorance instrumentally good — which an opponent takes to prove that knowledge is not unconditionally good. Location: 143c–144c.

  5. Claim: Knowledge of the best ("knowledge of what is best" = "knowledge of utility") is the authoritative, architectonic knowledge that must govern every other skill; without it, skills more often harm than help. Because: an orator who knows how to advise but not what advice is best, a soldier who knows how to make war but not when, is not wise (145a–c); a city full of archers, athletes, generals, and orators but none with knowledge of the best is "a hotbed of dissension and lawlessness" (146a) — like a polymath "alone on the high seas with no helmsman" (147a). Against: the argument assumes there is a single architectonic knowledge of "the best" and never specifies its content — it is asserted, not exhibited. Location: 144d–146d.

  6. Claim: Therefore one should defer prayer and sacrifice until one has the knowledge to pray rightly — meanwhile pray only as the Spartans do, for "what is good and noble," or hold one's peace. Because: the poet's prayer — give us good even unasked, withhold evil "however hard we pray for it" (143a) — is wisest; the Ammon oracle prized the Spartans' "terse Laconic utterance" over Athens' lavish sacrifices, and the gods "are not venal" (149c–d); so it is "much safer" to put off the sacrifice than to run the risk (151a). Against: the conclusion is practical quietism — indefinite postponement of worship pending a knowledge no one is shown to possess, and dependent on trusting an unnamed teacher, "the man who has his eye on you" (150e). Location: 148a–151c.

Key Findings

  • Prayer is treated as an action under the same epistemic constraint as any other action — and so becomes a test case for the architectonic-knowledge thesis. The dialogue's novelty is to route the standard "skills without knowledge of the best are harmful" argument through worship: praying is doing, and doing safely requires knowing the good.
  • The conclusion is a via negativa on prayer. When particular requests are deferred, what remains is the minimal Spartan formula "good and noble" (148c) — the positive residue of an argument that is mostly about what not to ask for.
  • A means/ends fracture inside intellectualism. Asserting that wrongdoing is ignorance of the end (143d) while conceding that ignorance of the means/particulars can prevent wrongdoing (144c), the dialogue splits a doctrine that pure socratic-intellectualism keeps whole — knowledge of means without knowledge of ends is harmful.
  • An anti-Cynic, datable polemic. The graded madness-vs-ignorance scheme and the negative use of megalopsychia (140c, 150c) — "big-hearted" as a euphemism for stupid, which Hutchinson notes is "not found elsewhere in ancient Greek" — read as a deliberate inversion of a Cynic cardinal virtue.

Concepts Developed

The dialogue's distinctive contributions have no dedicated wiki page yet; they are recorded here in plain text (not wikilinked) so as not to fabricate dead links:

  • knowledge of the best / "knowledge of utility" (epistēmē tou beltistou, 145c) — the authoritative, architectonic knowledge that tells one when, on whom, and whether to deploy any subordinate skill, explicitly identified with "knowledge of utility." The precondition not only of right action but of right prayer. (Conceptually the Socratic "the good"; see socratic-intellectualism.)
  • prayer as epistemically perilous act / deferred prayer (151a–b) — prayer treated as a practical action that, like any action, requires knowledge of the good to perform safely; lacking it, the safe course is to defer or to pray only minimally. The "wait-for-the-knower / put off the sacrifice" ending is the dialogue's signature move.
  • ignorance-as-sometimes-good (143c–144c) — relative to a person's evil intentions, ignorance of particulars can be a good; a deliberate complication of the blanket condemnation of ignorance.
  • megalopsychia as euphemism for stupidity (140c, 150c) — "big-hearted" listed among euphemisms for the stupid, a polemical inversion of the Cynic virtue (per Hutchinson, unattested elsewhere).

Concepts Referenced

  • socratic-intellectualism — deployed via the Orestes cases (143d) but not argued for; assumed as Socratic common ground, then strained by the means/ends concession (144c).
  • socratic-ignorance — divergent use: the canonical motif is Socrates' avowal of his own not-knowing; here ignorance is diagnosed in others (Alcibiades, "most people") and, crucially, argued to be sometimes good — a variant, not a straightforward instance.
  • self-knowledge — the governing theme of the companion plato-alcibiades-1, here invoked through the shared fog/eye imagery (150e) but displaced: the precondition is now knowledge of the good, not self-knowledge.
  • statesmanship — the architectonic "knowledge of the best" governing subordinate crafts (145c) is a cousin of the kingly/political science; invoked structurally, not developed.
  • poetic-inspiration — Homer, the Margites, and Euripides are quoted as riddling bearers of concealed wisdom to be decoded (142d–143a, 147a–d, 151b–c) — a use of poetry as encrypted doctrine, distinct from (and in tension with) the Ion picture of poets who speak divinely without knowing what they say.

Key Passages

"you might, all unawares, be praying for great evils when you think you are asking for great goods" (138b) — anchors arg. 1.

"But you're talking about a madman, Socrates" (138c) — Alcibiades' complacency, the position arg. 2 must defeat.

"it looks as if stupidity and madness are one and the same thing" (139c) — the rejected syllogism; "But do you think we could live comfortably in a city of so many madmen?" (139d) — its reductio (arg. 2).

"those who have the largest share we call madmen, those with a smaller share we call fools or asses" (140c) — the graded partition / megalopsychia (arg. 2).

"do you think that Orestes, if he had been of sound mind and known what was best…, would have dared" (143d) — intellectualism (arg. 3).

"we were wrong to blame ignorance in such general terms; we should specify what it is ignorance of" (143c); "for those in that state, with such intentions, these are things which it is better not to know" (144c) — ignorance-as-good (arg. 4).

"if someone lacks knowledge of what is best, the possession of other skills will only rarely help, but in most cases will harm" (144d); "knowledge of what is best—which no doubt is the same as knowledge of utility" (145c) — the architectonic thesis (arg. 5).

"King Zeus, whether we pray or not, give us what is good for us" (143a); "the Spartans… pray the gods to give them first what is good and then what is noble" (148c); "It would be a strange and sorry thing if the gods took more account of our gifts and sacrifices than of our souls" (149c–d); "I think it is better to put off the sacrifice for the time being" (151a) — deferred prayer (arg. 6).

"You too need to get rid of the fog which is wrapped around your soul… to tell good from evil" (150e) — the fog/vision motif echoing plato-alcibiades-1.

What's Not Obvious

  • The dialogue breaks intellectualism in half and never repairs it. Argument 3 makes wrongdoing a matter of ignorance of the end — Orestes would not have dared "if he had been of sound mind and known what was best" (143d) — while argument 4 makes ignorance of the particulars protective: failing to recognize his mother, Orestes "would not have killed her" (144c). The same matricide is cited on both sides within a single Stephanus page. The result is a means/ends split that pure socratic-intellectualism (knowing the good suffices for right action) does not contain.
  • The most telling philological fingerprint is a euphemism. The negative use of megalopsychia — "too big-hearted (to use the favorite euphemism for stupidity)" (150c; cf. 140c) — is, per Hutchinson, "not found elsewhere in ancient Greek." That a Cynic cardinal virtue is here a polite word for stupid is itself the evidence that the dialogue's madness/ignorance machinery is aimed at the Cynics — a datable polemical purpose hidden inside a throwaway gloss.
  • It is plato-alcibiades-1 with the theme swapped out. The closing image — Athena removing the fog from Diomedes' eyes, "the fog wrapped around your soul" (150e) — reuses Alcibiades I's eye-seeing-itself / care-of-soul imagery, and Hutchinson records verbal parallels (141a–b ≈ 105a–c; 145b–c ≈ 107d–108a). But where Alcibiades I turns on self-knowledge, Second Alcibiades turns on knowledge of the good as the precondition of prayer and action: the same scaffolding, redirected. (The two may instead both descend from the lost Alcibiades of Aeschines of Sphettus — undecidable on surviving fragments.)

Critique / Limitations

Disputed authorship is load-bearing. Cooper marks the dialogue † and Hutchinson judges it a dubium — almost certainly not by Plato, the work of a late-4th-/3rd-century BCE Academic from Northern Greece. Its doctrines must therefore not be read as Plato's own: this page runs at confidence: low and epistemic_status: historical, and every attribution is hedged ("the author of Second Alcibiades"). The verbal overlap with plato-alcibiades-1 (itself disputed) means the companion relation cannot bear genealogical weight in either direction without a genuine-Plato attestation surfacing.

Argumentative weaknesses (often self-aware). The opening syllogism identifying stupidity with madness (139a–c) is plainly invalid — equivocating on "opposite" — and the author knows it fails, using the reductio (the "city of madmen," 139d) to force a refinement; but this leaves the genus/species partition (borrowed loosely from division-method texts) resting on an admittedly broken premise. The central architectonic thesis (145c) asserts a single "knowledge of the best" without ever specifying its content. And the conclusion is practical quietism: worship is deferred indefinitely, pending a knowledge no interlocutor is shown to possess and a teacher — "the man who has his eye on you" (150e) — who is never named.

Connections

  • is a reformulation of plato-alcibiades-1 — reuses the fog/eye imagery (150e) and the humiliation-and-discipleship arc, with editor-attested verbal parallels (141a–b ≈ 105a–c; 145b–c ≈ 107d–108a), but displaces the governing theme from self-knowledge to knowledge of the good.
  • applies ... to ... socratic-intellectualism — applies the intellectualist thesis (no one knowing the best does wrong) to the act of prayer (143d), then strains it with the means/ends concession that ignorance of particulars can prevent a crime (144c).
  • shares mechanism with statesmanship — "knowledge of the best" = "knowledge of utility" (145c) operates as architectonic knowledge governing subordinate crafts, the same role as the kingly/political science (cf. also the search for an architectonic science in plato-euthydemus).
  • contrasts with self-knowledge — Alcibiades I's precondition (know your soul) is here replaced by knowledge of the good as the thing one must have before one may safely pray or act.
  • shares mechanism with plato-euthyphro — the "gods are not venal" critique (149c–d), prizing the soul's holiness over gifts and sacrifices, rhymes with Euthyphro's rejection of piety as commerce with the gods.

Sources

  • Alcibiades II, trans. Anthony Kenny, in Plato: Complete Works (Hackett, 1997), Stephanus 138a–151c; raw file lines 16993–17405. Includes D. S. Hutchinson's editor's note (the authenticity, anti-Cynic, and verbal-parallel framing).
  • Depth layer: wiki/sources/.extraction-plato-second-alcibiades.md.