Alcibiades II

Note on this Edition

How the volume was made

The Greek was taken from the Perseus Digital Library’s digital transcription of Burnet and cut into Burnet’s lines by reading every line-end from the photographs of his page, in the impression described in the Editorial Note. Accents, breathings and iota subscripts were read on the sharpest image of each page that the scan provides, and a doubtful mark was settled by setting it beside sure examples of each form on the same page. The section letters and line numbers in the margin were computed from the Stephanus divisions rather than copied, and were then compared with Burnet’s: across the 585 lines of the dialogue they fall where he prints them, except in section 146e, where his count on page 15 starts a line too low and is followed. Burnet’s apparatus was transcribed from the same images, with the marks of the manuscripts it reproduces: letters written over a word and a dot over a letter. Where the digital text differs from Burnet’s page (εἶναι for his εἶναί at 138d1, πρωιζὰ without the diaeresis at 141d6, φρόνιμον with one accent for his φρόνιμόν at 145c5, three dots before the lines of Euripides at 146a, and small letters at the openings of speeches and of the paragraph at 149c, where Burnet prints capitals), this edition follows Burnet.

The work was done in three blocks of seven pages, each finished and checked before the next was begun. Each block was checked by four independent reviewers: two, dividing its pages between them, compared the Greek and the apparatus with the page images letter by letter, one compared the English with the Greek clause by clause, and one checked every fact and reference in the notes. Each finding was examined again against the evidence before it was adopted, and not all were adopted. What each block’s check caught is recorded at the end of this Note.

When the last block was done the volume was read through as one text, since a check made page by page cannot see some kinds of error: a word rendered one way in one block and another way in the next, a sentence broken badly at a page turn, a recapitulation that states a step in other words than the step itself. The translator read the whole volume, and four further reviewers read it independently: one for the consistency of terms across the whole book, two for sense, omissions and continuity in its two halves, and one for the Editorial Note against the scan of Burnet’s volume. The Introduction, the Key Words of the Dialogue, the Outline and the Glossary were then written from the finished text, and their claims and references were checked against it by three more reviewers.

What the final reading caught

It found some forty faults that the three block checks had passed, most of them small and several substantive. They fall into a few classes.

The most serious were sense errors in constructions that read plausibly on their own. At 138b the danger Socrates names is two things together, that a man should pray for bad things and that the gods should then give them; the English had made the gods’ part a separate statement, and it is now governed by “lest”, as at 150c; at 148b, where the English had made the same construction a clause of purpose (“so that one does not … pray”), it now reads “lest one should … pray” too. At 145e the commonwealth of experts lacks both the knowledge of the best and “the one who knows when it is better” to use each expert; the English had made the man depend on the knowledge. At 146e Socrates asks whether he was not “really shown to be speaking rightly”, not merely whether he appeared so, and Alcibiades’ answer, that “now it seems so to me”, grants less. At 140d a “too” that Burnet prints and the manuscript T omits had been left out, so that the English followed T’s text; at 141a a “still” had been dropped; at 144c “as it seemed to you just now” had been placed so that it could attach to the wrong half of the sentence.

Next came renderings that had drifted from the edition’s rulings or from one another. The gods “grant” at 138b but “give” everywhere else, including the passage that recalls 138b (148d); they now give there too. Boulesthai was “want” twice in the first block, where it is “wish” elsewhere except in idioms (“I should like”, “would rather”); Socrates’ oimai was once “I imagine” against “I think” everywhere else; hora was “look” at 139d, where “look” belongs to Socrates’ verbs of inquiry; the key word “good” stood for two other Greek words at 142b, “the greatest of goods” for “the greatest of good things” at 141b, and “given me good advice” for “advised me well” at 151a; “make some sense” at 142b put the word for nous on another Greek word; and two notes called the manuscripts’ deina “terrible” where the text has “dreadful”. At 147d phaulos, said of Margites, is “a sorry fellow”, as of the commonwealth at 146a, and no longer “a nobody”, which in English means a man of no standing.

Some faults concerned who says what and how. At 138c Alcibiades’ retort is now aimed at Socrates, as the Greek has it (“But you, Socrates, have spoken of a madman”); at 141b he answers for himself before he answers for everyone; at 142e the poet “is” intelligent, as the present tense has it; at 142d the words of the Odyssey in the text now agree with the note that translates them; and at 146a the quotation marks take in “part”, which Burnet’s verse layout gives to Euripides. Smaller corrections were made at 138a, 140e, 144b, 145a, 145d, 147c, 149e, 150a, 150b, 150e and 151b, and the Stephanus letters at 138b and 142b now stand at the first whole word of their sections.

In the notes, Oedipus’ curse is now said to concern his sons’ inheritance, and the tragedians’ weapon is iron, not the dialogue’s bronze; Euripides’ “prayers” stand three lines after Jocasta’s “curses”, not two; the note on the soul at 141c says how Alcibiades’ answer takes the word; the note on the names of unintelligence at 140c uses the text’s “most auspicious names”, and calls the Republic’s anoia “senselessness”; the note at 147b says that the manuscripts have bion in the accusative; the note on the palinode at 148b says that Burnet prints the corrector’s verb in the mood his sentence needs; and two notes were added, on “simple” at 149e, which recalls the names of 140c, and on “The man who cares about you” at 150d, which it suggests may be Socrates himself.

The Editorial Note was provisional, and was completed. It had described every word in angle brackets as a conjecture, though one comes from a corrector of a later manuscript (148c7) and one from the text of Euripides (151b9); it now says which deletions and additions Burnet adopts, lists the witnesses with their places, locates Proclus’ quotation in Kroll’s edition, and corrects three of its examples. The title page had kept a working label from the blocks, and now describes the complete dialogue.

Two proposals were not adopted: a note at 147a on earlier uses of “much learning”, for which the page has no room, and a note at 150b observing that the word “perplexity” there is Socrates’ and not Alcibiades’.

What remains undone

Two of Burnet’s ancient witnesses are not located: the passages of Stobaeus’ Anthology behind his readings at 140e8, 145e4–5 and 146d7, which a search of Hense’s edition did not find, and the place in Priscian’s Institutiones that quotes 143b2.

A few marks lie at the limit of what the scan can show, and are printed as read. In the apparatus: T’s οἱόν at 139a13, without a circumflex; B’s ἄρα at 138c9, whose breathing, fused with its accent, is taken as smooth; the first hand of B’s ἢ at 144d6; and B’s ἀ at 146b9. In the text: ἢ at 140d4 and 141d1, where breathing and grave run together, and the damaged sort over the ι of εἶναι at 139e1. They should be checked against another copy of the volume. Burnet’s extra space above and below the lines of Euripides at 146a is not reproduced.

The apparatus is Burnet’s alone. It has not been collated against the manuscripts, and readings proposed since 1901, including those of Carlini’s edition (1964), are not reported. The translation follows Burnet’s text even where later scholars would print something else.

The notes are a reader’s aid, not a commentary. They were chosen to explain what the English cannot carry and to mark the dramatic irony, and they label the more doubtful interpretations as such. The question of who wrote the dialogue, and when, is set out in the Introduction but not argued; a reader who wants the scholarly debate will need a commentary.

The checks described above were made by independent reviewers working from the same page images. The volume has not been read by a specialist outside the project, and a reader who finds an error is asked to report it.

The record of the blocks

The notes that follow were written as each block was finished, and are kept as a record of what each check found. Where the final reading changed something they report, the text above says so.

Block I (138a–142c)

How it was made. The first seven pages of Burnet’s text (scan pp. 369–375). The line-ends were read from enlarged images of the scan, and the margin numbers computed from the Stephanus divisions and compared with Burnet’s: all 200 lines agree. The digital text lacks the diaeresis of Burnet’s πρωϊζὰ at 141d6, which is restored, and lower-cases the openings of speeches, where Burnet’s capitals are restored.

What verification caught. Four independent reviewers checked the block: two compared the Greek and the apparatus with the page images letter by letter, one compared the English with the Greek clause by clause, and one checked every fact and reference in the notes and in the Editorial Note. The Greek text was confirmed letter by letter. In the apparatus two readings were corrected on page 6: Dobree’s αὐτῶν at 141b5 carries a raised point, which records his repunctuation of the sentence, and B’s οὐδε at 141c10 has no accent. Burnet’s raised points and angle brackets had dropped out of the typeset pages, because the Greek type has no such characters; they are now set from type that has them. Two marks are kept as printed: a damaged sort over the ι of εἶναι at 139e1, and T’s οἱόν at 139a13, which has a breathing and no accent.

In the English, Socrates’ question at 139a13 had been printed as a statement, and is now a question again. At 142a the generals who “ended their lives” have now “come to the end of their lives”, since the English idiom suggests suicide. Quotation marks that Burnet does not print were removed at 141a (“all the Greeks as well”) and 141d (“yesterday and the day before”). At 138b the gods’ being in the very state in which they give whatever is prayed for is now part of the danger, as in the Greek, and not a condition of it; at 139d Socrates’ suspicion reads “perhaps this is not so”, which Alcibiades takes up at once; at 140b it is the diseases, not the doctors, that differ in what they bring about; the sentence on Archelaus at 141d now keeps the Greek’s order and makes plain who loved whom; and at 142b the condition is in the present, answering “as it is”. At 139c the many are the subject, as in the Greek: “the many, of course, are unintelligent”. The turn from page 1 to page 2 now falls after “he had”, four section letters were moved to the word where the section begins (138c, 140c, 141b, 141d), Alcibiades’ Ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ is “I think so” as in the Alcibiades I, and φαῦλος of a thing is “trivial”, as there. Smaller corrections of particle, mood and reference were made at 138d, 139b, 140b, 140d, 141a, 141c, 141d, 142a and 142c, and a note now explains that the word for “healthy” at 138c also means “of sound mind”.

In the notes, the lines of the Phoenician Women on Oedipus’ curses are given to Jocasta, who speaks them; the Iliad’s tag at 140a is set in its place, Diomedes asking for a companion before he goes into the Trojan camp by night, and the Symposium is said to adapt it; the death of Archelaus is told from both sources, Diodorus’ accident in a hunt and Aristotle’s deliberate attack; the exiled and executed generals at 142a are offered as the reader’s association, since Socrates names no one, with the generals of Arginusae counted exactly (eight condemned, six put to death); the word for “never generals” is called rare, not coined; and the note on Ast’s reading at 139a13 is labelled as a judgement. The Editorial Note now dates the impression by its publisher, Humphrey Milford, to between 1925 and 1945; it explains the entries with no colon, the entry at 139a13 that combines two witnesses, the witnesses’ own spellings, the abbreviated word at 141c2 and Burnet’s misprints; it identifies the scholars named in the apparatus; and it gives Burnet’s view that the corrections in the Coislinianus are conjectures.

Block II (142c–146e)

How it was made. Burnet pages 8–14 (scan pp. 376–382), made as Block I: the line-ends read from enlarged images of the scan, and the margin numbers computed and compared with Burnet’s, all of which agree. Two quotations of verse are set as Burnet sets them: the couplet at 143a, whose first line runs over into a short second line, and the lines of Euripides at 146a, the first of them only a half-line set far to the right. The digital text adds three dots before the Euripides, which Burnet does not print and which are removed; it prints Burnet’s φρόνιμόν at 145c5 with one accent instead of two; and it lower-cases the openings of speeches, where Burnet’s capitals are restored.

What verification caught. Four reviewers checked the block as before. The Greek text was confirmed letter by letter. Burnet letterspaces more of the Odyssey at 142d than the first transcription showed: κακά and οἱ δὲ are spaced as well as the words around them, so that every word he takes from Homer is marked; the punctuation after a spaced word is now set close, as he sets it. In the apparatus, B’s form at 146b9 has a smooth breathing and no accent (ἀ), not a grave. The indents of the verse lines were brought closer to Burnet’s measure, and an apparatus key is no longer parted from the reading it introduces at the end of a line.

In the English, the quotation marks at 142d now follow Burnet’s spacing exactly, taking in “blame” and “bad things”; and in Block I the words “yesterday and the day before” at 141d, which Burnet also spaces, are again in quotation marks. “Sing a palinode” now stands in the text as in its note. At 143d Alcibiades’ cry is “for Zeus’ sake”, an appeal, as in the Alcibiades I, and not an oath. At 144a the future δόξει is translated as Burnet prints it (“if it will seem so to you”), not as the optative that Buttmann proposed. At 146b the adverb that “accompanies” the action is given its article (“the beneficially”), and at 146d–e Socrates’ closing question is a question again. Renderings were aligned with the Alcibiades I: ἐθέλειν “be willing”, νοῦς “sense”, ἱκανός “good enough”, ἐννοεῖν “take in”, and the answer “Of course”; the recapitulation at 146b now recalls 144d in the same words, and nine section letters were moved to the word where the section begins. The couplet at 143a is “King Zeus”, not “Zeus our king”, and “the wretched things”, not “the wretched”, which could be taken for people.

In the notes, the lines of the Odyssey are quoted more exactly; the note on the couplet adds that the Greek Anthology and Proclus both read “the baneful things”; the note on Dobree’s proposal at 144d says that he would add only an article; the note on Pericles cites the Alcibiades I for Cleinias’ death as well as for the guardianship; and the note on Euripides records that Burnet prints the indicative from the Gorgias. New notes mark four places where Burnet’s choice of reading changes the sense: 143a (ὅσων κακῶν), 145b (ὅτε), 145c (τοιοῦτον) and 145e (οὓς). A few phrases that followed an existing English translation too closely were rewritten. The Editorial Note now explains add. as used of an ancient author’s quotation (Priscian at 143b2), the hand marked “rec. t”, the Venetus 184, and the ancient authors Burnet cites in this block, with Proclus’ place identified; and its list of scholars no longer sorts them more precisely than the evidence allows. The section letters in the margin of the English, which had sometimes slipped from their lines, now stand beside them.

Block III (146e–151c)

How it was made. Burnet pages 15–21 (scan pp. 383–389), to the end of the dialogue, made as the earlier blocks: the line-ends read from enlarged images of the scan, and the margin numbers computed and compared with Burnet’s. They agree everywhere but in section 146e, where Burnet’s count on page 15 starts a line too low; his count is kept, since his apparatus keys follow it. The verse is set as Burnet sets it: the lines of the Iliad at 149d–e, with the line that Socrates turns into prose letterspaced inside his sentence; the half-line from the Iliad at 150d; and the two lines of Euripides at 151b. Two marks of the manuscripts that Burnet prints in his apparatus are reproduced: letters written over a word (147a5, 149a6) and a dot over a letter (150a6). The digital text again lower-cases the openings of speeches, where Burnet’s capitals are restored.

What verification caught. Four reviewers checked the block as before, and the Greek text was confirmed letter by letter. In the apparatus, the later hand’s ὀλίγω at 149a4 has no iota subscript; T’s ἐπει at 149a6 has no accent, and its δ stands over the last letter, as T’s πολυ at 147a5 stands over the first letters of φιλοτεχνίαν, not before the word; and B’s προφήταις at 150a6 carries a dot over its final letter. The comma after ἔργα at 147b4 is now set close, outside the spacing; the indents of the verse lines were brought to Burnet’s measure; and a reading is no longer parted from its witness at the end of a line of the apparatus.

In the English, the wind of fortune at 147a blows “more strongly”, not “more brilliantly”, and the hamartēmata there and at 150a are “mistakes”. Alcibiades’ palin au moi dokei at 147e now has a note saying how it is read. At 148a his margon is “madcap”, which keeps the play on the Margites. At 148b the English names Zeus as the one whom the poet bade ward off the wretched things. The word that Burnet supplies at 148c is translated without his angle brackets, as elsewhere. The Athenians’ question at 148e keeps its “besides these things” and its turn into the first person (“we who … offer”), and the money they paid out is “as much as not even all the other Greeks together” paid. Ammon at 149b “says he would rather”; an altar the Greek does not mention was removed at 149c; at 149e it is “the way of the gods” that is not led astray by gifts; at 150a the gods, named, are the ones who take no gifts, and “the god and the prophet of the gods say”. Socrates’ aside at 150c is again a reason (“for this is the finest of the names in unintelligence, at least”). At 151b Creon’s “he says” stands inside the verse, as in the Greek, Teiresias’ garlands are first-fruits “because of his craft”, and Socrates takes as an omen Alcibiades’ “opinion”, with a note on the word. Smaller corrections were made at a dozen places, among them “cared about”, “neglectfully disposed”, “maimed victims”, “find out” and “savor”.

In the notes, the Margites is said to have been commonly ascribed to Homer in antiquity, as by Aristotle and by Socrates himself; Plutarch’s Spartan Customs is cited by its Latin title as well; the note on Ammon says that no other ancient author tells of this consultation, and gives the two consultations of Ammon that Plutarch reports, Cimon’s and the one before the Sicilian expedition; the note on the lines of the Iliad says exactly which of them stand in the manuscripts of Homer and which recur elsewhere, and marks the contrast between perfect and maimed victims as a reading; Athena’s words to Diomedes are quoted in full; and the note on Teiresias gives his own account in Euripides of the crown he wears. New notes mark four places where Burnet’s choice of reading changes the sense or the words: 147a5 (πολυμαθίαν and πολυτεχνίαν), 148b3 (the later hand’s palinode), 148b6 (δειλά again) and 148d4 (the words he brackets). The Editorial Note now counts the lines of 146e correctly, places Winckelmann among the editors of Plato, describes the letters written over others and the dot over a letter, and gives the deletion at 150b2 and the addition at 148c7 as examples.