Alcibiades II

Introduction

The dialogue

The Alcibiades II, called the Second Alcibiades to tell it from the longer dialogue of the same name, is a conversation between Socrates and Alcibiades, son of Cleinias (141b), on the way to pray. Socrates meets the young man on his way to pray to the god (138a), with a gloomy face and his eyes on the ground, and the question of the whole conversation is the one his errand raises: what a man should pray for. No one else speaks, there is no narrator, and the setting is no more than the meeting itself. At the end Alcibiades puts off his sacrifice and puts on Socrates’ head the wreath he has with him, saying that the gods shall have wreaths later (151a–b). The dialogue runs from page 138 to page 151 in the pages of Stephanus’ edition, by which Plato is still cited, and fills twenty-one pages of Burnet’s Oxford text.

The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.59), places it second in the fourth tetralogy, after the Alcibiades I and before the Hipparchus and the Lovers, and Burnet’s second volume prints the four in that order. Thrasyllus gives it the subtitle “On prayer” and classes it, like the Alcibiades I, as “maieutic”, a dialogue that brings a thought to birth. Its authorship was questioned already in antiquity: Athenaeus, writing about AD 200, reports that some said it was by Xenophon (11.506c). It is now generally held not to be Plato’s, and no date for it is certain; most of those who have studied it place it after his death, in the generations of his successors (see “What is most exposed”, below).

The question and the answers

Socrates begins with a fact and a danger. The gods give some of the things men pray for and not others, and to some men and not to others; so great forethought is needed, “lest one should, without noticing it, pray for things that are very bad while thinking them good”, and the gods should then give them (138b). His example is Oedipus, who prayed that his sons might divide their inheritance “with the bronze” (138c). Alcibiades answers that Oedipus was mad, and the first part of the dialogue follows the word. Madness is the opposite of being intelligent; there is no third condition between intelligence and unintelligence; one thing cannot have two opposites; so unintelligence and madness look to be the same (138c–139c). But then most of the city is mad, and Socrates and Alcibiades, living among so many madmen, would long ago have been “struck and pelted” (139c–d). The conclusion is withdrawn, and replaced by a division: as fever and ophthalmia are diseases but not all disease, and shoemakers and carpenters craftsmen but not all craftsmen, so men “have divided unintelligence among them too”: those who have the largest part of it are called mad, those who have a little less idiots and thunderstruck, and those who wish to name them “by the most auspicious names” call them great-souled, simple, innocent, inexperienced and tongue-tied (139d–140d).

The argument then starts again from “who on earth the unintelligent and the intelligent are” (140d). The intelligent are “those who know what they must do and say”; those who know neither “will, without noticing it, both say and do what they must not” (140e). Oedipus was one of them, and so are many who think they are praying for good things. If the god offered Alcibiades the tyranny of Athens, of all the Greeks and of all Europe, he would “go away overjoyed”; yet he would not wish to have the land and the tyranny of all the Greeks and barbarians in exchange for his soul, nor if he were going to use them badly (141a–c). Tyrants have been murdered for their tyranny, as Archelaus of Macedon was by his beloved; of the generals some are in exile, and some of those thought to fare best are so besieged by informers that they pray “to be men who were never generals”; parents pray for children who bring them grief (141d–142c). The many pray for these things and, after waiting a little, sometimes “sing a palinode, unpraying whatever they prayed for at first” (142d). Socrates quotes Zeus in the Odyssey, that men blame the gods for the sorrows their own recklessness brings them, and the prayer of a poet whom he takes to be an intelligent man: “King Zeus, the good things, he says, both when we pray and when we pray not, give us; but the wretched things, even when we pray, ward off” (142d–143a). Alcibiades draws the moral: ignorance is the cause of many bad things for men, since because of it, without noticing it, they both do and, “what is most extreme”, pray for the worst things for themselves (143a–b).

The argument’s main stretch

Socrates complicates the moral. Ignorance of some things, for some people in some state, is good (143c). Orestes would not have killed his mother if he had been intelligent and had known what was best for him to do; and if Alcibiades should come to think it better to take a dagger to Pericles, his guardian, and were ignorant of him when he found him, he would not kill him (143c–144c). So ignorance of the best is a bad thing (143e), but for a man so disposed, to be ignorant of such things is better (144c).

From this comes the dialogue’s main claim, that “the possession of the other kinds of knowledge, if someone possesses it without the best, looks as though it seldom benefits and for the most part harms the one who has it” (144d). Orators advise the city on war and peace, walls and harbors, knowing or thinking they know (144d–145a). But a man is intelligent only if “the knowledge of the best accompanies him”, and this is the same as “the knowledge of the beneficial” (145c); the horseman, the boxer and the flute-player know their crafts, but are not on that account intelligent (145c–e). A commonwealth of archers, athletes, soldiers and orators “without the knowledge of the best and without the one who knows when it is better to use each one of these” would be “full of great confusion and lawlessness” (145e–146b). The many have “missed the best” and “trusted opinion without sense”, and it profits them “neither to know anything nor to think they know”, if they will be the more eager to act on what they know or think they know and be harmed by it more often than benefited (146c–d). A city or a soul that is going to live rightly must hold fast to the knowledge of the best, as the sick hold fast to a doctor and one who would sail safely to a pilot: without it, the more strongly the wind of fortune blows fair, for money or strength of body, the greater the mistakes, and the man of “much learning and much craft” who lacks it will meet “a great storm” (146e–147b). The poet of the Margites, Socrates says, meant the same when he wrote of his hero that “he knew many works, but badly”; and he explains how the line should be read (147b–d).

The ending

Alcibiades agrees, and at once wavers. Socrates, seeing him shift “up and down”, asks again what he would do if the god appeared and offered him a choice before he prayed (147e–148a). Alcibiades answers that it is “a madcap thing, and truly in need of much caution” (148a–b). Socrates then tells two stories. The Spartans, in private and in public, ask the gods only to give them “the fine things on top of the good”, and have not been less fortunate for it (148b–d). And once, when Athens kept losing to Sparta, the Athenians sent to the oracle of Ammon to ask why the gods gave victory to the Spartans, who neglect them, rather than to the Athenians, who offer the most and finest sacrifices of the Greeks; the prophet answered only that Ammon “would rather have the Spartans’ auspicious speech than all the rites of the Greeks together” (148d–149b). By the auspicious speech, Socrates thinks, the god means their prayer; the other Greeks pray “for whatever comes, whether good or bad”, and the gods, hearing them speak ill-omened words, do not accept their costly processions and sacrifices (149b–c). Homer’s Trojans sacrificed in vain to gods who hated them; the way of the gods, Socrates thinks, is not such as “to be led astray by gifts, like a bad moneylender”, and they look to the soul, whether a man is holy and just; and “justice and intelligence are held in especial honor both by gods and by men who have sense” (149c–150b).

So it is not safe for Alcibiades to pray, and he must wait “until one learns how one must be disposed toward gods and toward men” (150c–d). Asked who will teach him, Socrates says only, “The man who cares about you”, who must first take the mist from his soul, as Athena took it from the eyes of Diomedes (150d–e). Alcibiades will refuse nothing that man orders, puts off the sacrifice, and crowns Socrates with his wreath; Socrates accepts it and, as Creon in Euripides took Teiresias’ garlands of victory as an omen, takes Alcibiades’ “opinion” as an omen, hoping to be “the fair victor over your lovers” (150e–151c).

What is most exposed

Four things in this dialogue are likely to trouble a first-time reader, and they are best stated plainly.

First, it is almost certainly not Plato’s. The doubt reported by Athenaeus has been shared by nearly all modern scholars. Their reasons are of several kinds: its close likeness to the Alcibiades I, whose persons and offer of power from a god it repeats and on which it seems to draw; turns of argument looser than Plato’s (below); a vocabulary that differs from that of the dialogues no one doubts; ideas that some have traced to the Stoics or to the later Academy; and a slip in the history. Socrates speaks of the murder of Archelaus of Macedon as recent news “yesterday and the day before” (141d); Archelaus died in 399 BC, the year of Socrates’ own death and five years after Alcibiades’, while Pericles, who died in 429, is spoken of as living (144a). Some scholars put the dialogue in the later fourth century, others in the third or later. This edition calls it Plato’s only in the sense of the tradition that handed it down among his works.

Second, the argument’s steps are not all sound, and the dialogue sometimes says so. The proof that unintelligence is madness (139a–c) rests on the rule that one thing has one opposite, and is dropped as soon as its consequence is drawn; the division of unintelligence that replaces it rests only on an analogy with diseases and crafts. The knowledge of the best, on which everything turns from 144d, is never defined beyond being “the same as the knowledge of the beneficial” (145c), and the dialogue does not say who has it. Alcibiades himself, once the argument about the Margites is done, finds that “it seems the other way to me again” (147e), which Socrates at once takes as one more shift.

Third, some of its claims are startling, and are meant to be. Ignorance can be good, so that a would-be murderer is saved by failing to know his victim (143c–144c); it profits the many “neither to know anything nor to think they know”, if knowing only makes them readier to act to their harm (146d); and the Athenians’ magnificent worship counts for less with the gods than the Spartans’ plain prayer (149a–b). The dialogue does not soften them.

Fourth, its stories and quotations are not all found elsewhere. The consultation of Ammon is known from no other ancient source. Of the five lines of the Iliad that Socrates quotes at 149d–e, only one stands at that place in the manuscripts of Homer; the others are known only from this passage, though the last recurs elsewhere in the Iliad. Socrates’ reading of the Margites (147b–d), by which “he knew many works, but badly … he knew them all” is made to say that “he knew many works, but it was bad for him to know them all”, is offered as an interpretation of a riddling poet, and is one. And the dialogue’s readers knew how Alcibiades’ life went: he was suspected of aiming at tyranny, held a generalship, was exiled and died by violence, so that its warnings against praying for tyranny and generalship, which it shows ending in exile and death, can be read as pointed at him.

The manner

The dialogue’s comedy is gentler than the Alcibiades I’s, and much of it lies in the logic itself. When the argument has made the many mad, Socrates observes that he and Alcibiades would long ago “have paid the penalty, struck and pelted and all the other things madmen are in the habit of doing” (139c–d). The polite names for stupidity are a joke in a list (140c–d), and Socrates comes back to it at the end, when he says that Alcibiades will not use the Spartans’ modest prayer “because of your greatness of soul—for this is the finest of the names in unintelligence, at least” (150c). The generals who “pray to be men who were never generals rather than men who have been” (142a–b) are a joke against the Athenian democracy, and Alcibiades’ cry when Socrates mentions Orestes, “Speak auspiciously, for Zeus’ sake, Socrates!”, is turned against him at once: it is not the one who says Alcibiades would not kill his mother who should be told to speak auspiciously, “but much rather anyone who might say the opposite” (143d). The Margites is solemnly reconstrued, “putting badly in place of bad, and knew in place of to know” (147d), and Alcibiades’ answer, that the question of what to pray for is “a madcap thing” (148a), uses the word from which Margites is named. The gods are not to be bought “like a bad moneylender” (149e); a careless prayer may bring a man “something else besides” (150c); and the last words make the wreath a victory over Alcibiades’ lovers (151c). The translation tries to keep all of this and to add nothing. Where the English cannot carry a joke, a note says what it was.

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is a page of Burnet’s Oxford text, line for line, with his apparatus at the foot; each right-hand page translates it, with the Stephanus section letters in the margin so that any passage can be found on both sides. Words in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ in the Greek are not in the two principal manuscripts and have been supplied, by a scholar’s conjecture, from a later manuscript or from the text of the poet quoted; they are translated. Words in square brackets [ ] are ones Burnet thought spurious; they are not translated. Burnet letterspaces the words Socrates takes from a poet, or sets them as verse, and the English marks exactly those words: verse he sets as verse is set as verse in the English too, except at 146a, where the lines of Euripides are woven into Socrates’ sentence and stand in quotation marks. The Key Words of the Dialogue, which follow, explain the words on which the argument turns and how they are rendered. At the back, the Outline gives the argument’s joints by Stephanus page, the Editorial Note sets out the conventions of both pages and explains the abbreviations of the apparatus, the Glossary lists the renderings for reference, and the Note on this Edition says how the volume was made and where a reader should be careful.

A note on the persons

The dialogue itself establishes little about Alcibiades beyond his name and his father’s, “Alcibiades son of Cleinias” (141b), and that Pericles is his “own guardian and friend” (144a). He is on his way to pray (138a), and at the end has a wreath with him to give (151a); Socrates supposes that he would gladly be tyrant of Athens and of all Europe (141a–b), and teases him for his “greatness of soul” (150c). Of Socrates it says little: that he knows the fortunes of the city’s generals at first hand (“having been there ourselves”, 141e), that he once heard the story of Ammon “from certain people” (148d), and, in the last sentence, that he would like to be “the fair victor over your lovers” (151c), which makes him their rival.

The rest comes from other sources and from the Alcibiades I, which this dialogue seems to presuppose. Alcibiades (about 451–404 BC), a kinsman of Pericles through his mother, was brought up in Pericles’ house; he was one of the generals of the expedition against Syracuse in 415, was recalled to stand trial for profaning the Mysteries, escaped to Sparta, later returned to Athens, and was killed in exile about 404. Socrates (469–399 BC) was tried and executed in 399. Pericles died in 429 in the plague. The dialogue’s details cannot all be true at one date: Pericles spoken of as living (144a) puts the conversation before 429, and the death of Archelaus as recent news (141d) puts it in 399, when Alcibiades had been dead some five years. In the Alcibiades I Socrates is the lover who did not go away; in the Symposium (212c–222b) Plato has Alcibiades tell how Socrates’ talk enthralled him and how he once tried and failed to win him.