Alcibiades I

Outline

The divisions follow the argument, not the blocks in which the edition was made. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. The lover’s approach (103a–106c)

103a–b Socrates, the first of Alcibiades’ lovers and the only one who has not given up, explains his years of silence: “a certain divine opposition”, which no longer opposes him.

103b–104c Alcibiades’ pride: he thinks he needs no one, trusting in his beauty and stature, his family and friends, Pericles’ power and his wealth; and so he has got the better of all his lovers.

104c–e Alcibiades: “you beat me to it by a whisker”. He meant to ask Socrates what he wants, “always there, wherever I am”.

105a–e Socrates tells him on what hope he lives: to show the Athenians “that you are worthy of being honored as neither Pericles nor anyone else who ever lived”, and then to fill “all mankind, so to speak, with your name and your power”. None of it can come about without Socrates, “with the god’s help, to be sure”.

106a–c No long speech, but “one short service”: to answer what he is asked.

II. What will Alcibiades advise on? (106c–109c)

106c–e He will advise on what he knows better than the Athenians. What one knows one has learned from others or discovered, and no one seeks or learns what he thinks he knows; so there was a time when he did not think he knew it.

106e–107a He has learned letters, the lyre and wrestling, and nothing else; the Athenians do not deliberate about these.

107a–d Nor about building, divination or health, where they go to the experts, but about war and peace, “or any other of the city’s affairs”.

107d–108e One must wrestle and make war with whom it is better, when, and as much as is better. The better in wrestling is “gymnastic”, in music “musical”; what is the better in war and peace?

108e–109c Alcibiades cannot say, and is shamed. We accuse one another of being deceived, forced or robbed, “justly or unjustly”; the better in war is “the more just”.

III. Where did he learn what is just? (109c–113c)

109d–110d He neither learned it from a teacher nor discovered it: he has thought he knew what is just ever since he was a child at knucklebones, and one seeks only what one thinks one does not know.

110d–111d “From the many.” They are good teachers of Greek, about which they agree, but not of draughts, still less of what is just.

111d–112d The many disagree about what is just so violently that they fight and kill one another: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Tanagra, Coronea, “among whom your father also met his end”.

112d–113c “In saying that it is I who am saying these things”: since Alcibiades has been answering, he has said himself that he does not know what is just. “You have heard this, it seems, from yourself, not from me.”

IV. The just and the advantageous (113d–116e)

113d–114b Alcibiades: the Athenians deliberate about what is advantageous, which is different from what is just. Socrates will not repeat the old proof for one so “fastidious”, but asks him to prove it.

114b–115a “Think of me as the Assembly and the people.” Alcibiades will not make a speech; Socrates will persuade him “out of insolence”, if Alcibiades answers.

115a–116a All just things are fine; but some fine things, Alcibiades says, are bad. Helping a friend in war is fine as courage and bad as death; but insofar as it is fine it is good.

116a–d Whoever does finely does well, and those who do well are happy; so fine things are good, good things advantageous, and just things advantageous. “Aren’t you the one saying these things, and I the one asking?”

V. Ignorance that thinks it knows (116e–119a)

116e–117b “I am simply like a man in a strange state.” A man does not give contrary answers about whether he has two eyes or three; he wanders about what he does not know.

117b–118a No one wanders about what he knows he does not know, how to prepare a dish or steer a ship; mistakes come from thinking one knows when one does not. “So this ignorance is the cause of bad things, and is the disgraceful stupidity?”

118a–c Alcibiades is “living with stupidity”, and so are most of those who manage the city’s affairs, “except for a few, and perhaps your guardian Pericles”.

118c–119a Pericles kept company with Pythocleides, Anaxagoras and Damon, but has made no one wise: not his sons, not Cleinias, not Alcibiades, not anyone else, as Zeno made Pythodorus and Callias.

VI. The real rivals (119a–124b)

119a–c “Let us deliberate on it together.” The politicians are uneducated, so Alcibiades need not train: he will be “far, far above these men by nature, at least”.

119c–120c His contest is not with the men at home, Meidias and his like, but with the kings of Sparta and Persia.

120c–121a His notion that the kings are no different from anyone else does harm, for he would care for himself more if he feared them; and it is false. The kings are of better family: from Heracles and from Achaemenes, and so from Perseus and Zeus. “Why, ours too, my wellborn Alcibiades, goes back to Daedalus.”

121a–122b The kings’ wives guarded, the Persian heir’s birthday kept by all Asia; his upbringing by eunuchs, his riding and hunting, and the four royal tutors. “But over you, Alcibiades, Pericles set as tutor the household slave most useless from old age, Zopyrus the Thracian.”

122b–123b The Persians’ luxury, the Spartans’ virtues, and the Spartans’ wealth, which goes in like the animals in Aesop’s lion’s cave and never comes out.

123b–124b The Persian king’s wealth, the queen’s girdle and veil. Amestris would wonder what Alcibiades trusts in, and Lampido that he means to contend with her son. “Know thyself: these are our rivals”; “there is nothing else by which we could surpass them, unless by care, at least, and by craft”.

VII. Good at what? (124b–127e)

124b–d “Let us deliberate together on how we might become as good as we can.” Socrates’ guardian is better than Pericles: “The god, Alcibiades.”

124d–125d Good at managing affairs: the affairs of “the fine and good”, the intelligent; the shoemaker is good and bad at once. To rule men in the city who make use of one another: not ruling boatswains who make use of rowers (that is the virtue of piloting), nor pipers who make use of dancers (chorus-training).

125d–126c The knowledge of ruling those who share in the city is “good counsel”; it makes the city better ordered and kept safe, as health makes a body, when “friendship comes to be among them toward one another”.

126c–127d Friendship is concord; but concord comes from the crafts, arithmetic and measurement, and husbands and wives are not in concord about wool-working and hoplite fighting. If each does his own business, there is no friendship. “No, by the gods, Socrates, I don’t even know myself what I am saying.”

127d–e “But you must take heart”: at fifty it would be hard, but this is the age at which to perceive it.

VIII. Caring for oneself and for what is one’s own (127e–129b)

127e–128d “Come, then: what is caring for oneself?” Caring for what is one’s own is not caring for oneself: shoemaking for shoes, gymnastics for the feet; weaving and the other crafts for what belongs to the body.

128e–129b We could not know what craft makes oneself better without knowing what we ourselves are. Is it easy to know oneself, and was the one who dedicated the inscription at Pytho a nobody? “In what way could the self itself be discovered?”

IX. Man is soul (129b–130e)

129b–130a Socrates talks with Alcibiades by means of speech; the user and what he uses are different, as the shoemaker and his tools, his hands and his eyes; a man uses his whole body. “Then what on earth is man?” What uses the body: the soul.

130a–c Man is soul, or body, or the two together; the body is ruled, and the two together cannot rule; “that man turns out to be nothing other than soul”.

130c–e “If not precisely, then adequately at least”: they have looked into “what each thing itself is” instead of the self. So Socrates and Alcibiades converse “soul to soul”, and the one who enjoins us to know ourselves bids us know the soul.

X. Knowing oneself; the lover of the soul (131a–132c)

131a–c The doctor and the trainer know what is their own, not themselves; the craftsmen know what belongs to the body. If temperance is knowing oneself, none of them is temperate by his craft, and so the crafts are “menial”. Whoever tends his money tends what is further off still: “the money-maker is no longer doing his own business”.

131c–132a The lover of Alcibiades’ body goes away when it stops blooming; the lover of his soul stays. “Then be eager to be as beautiful as you can.”

132a–c Socrates’ fear: “that you may become a lover of the people and be corrupted”. “The people of great-hearted Erechtheus” has a handsome face, “but one should look at it stripped”. Alcibiades is to exercise first, and they are to care for the soul.

XI. The eye and the soul (132c–133c)

132c–133b “See thyself”: an eye sees itself by looking into an eye, into the pupil, “since it is a kind of image of the one looking in”, the region in which the eye’s virtue comes to be.

133b–c So a soul must look into a soul, into the region where wisdom comes to be, the most divine part of it; whoever looks into this knows himself.

133c The god as the finest mirror (in angle brackets, from Eusebius).

XII. Temperance, the city and virtue (133c–135c)

133c–134a Knowing oneself is temperance; without it we cannot know what is our own, or what belongs to it, or what belongs to others or to cities. Such a man will be no statesman, will make mistakes, do badly and be wretched.

134a–c “Then it is not walls or triremes or dockyards that cities need, Alcibiades, if they are to be happy.” Alcibiades must give the citizens a share of virtue, and first acquire it.

134c–135a Not license or rule to do whatever one wishes, but justice and temperance; looking toward what is divine and bright, Alcibiades and the city will do well. The sick man who is a tyrant, the ship without a pilot’s sense.

135a–c “Then it is not tyranny, Alcibiades, best of men, that one must procure.” Before one has virtue, it is better to be ruled; vice befits a slave, virtue a free man.

XIII. The change of parts (135c–e)

135c–d Alcibiades perceives his condition, and will escape it “If you wish it, Socrates.” “That is not well said”: “If god wills.”

135d–e “We are likely to change parts, Socrates, I taking yours and you mine.” Socrates’ love will be no different from a stork. Alcibiades will begin “from this very moment to care for justice”; Socrates dreads “the strength of the city”.