From the book
Alcibiades II
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordThe phrase “to know badly” combines knowing with the adverb kakōs.
- In Alcibiades IIThe Margites line at 147b says that its subject knew many works but knew them all badly.
- In this editionBurnet prints kakōs at 147c where T has kalōs, and Bekker’s ēpistato at 147d1 where B and T have epistasthai.
- A place to readThe line is quoted and Alcibiades questions its relevance.
Meaning
The phrase “to know badly” combines knowing with the adverb kakōs. Socrates instead proposes that the poem’s point is the badness for its subject of knowing the works. His grammatical distinction turns on adverb against adjective and finite past-tense verb against infinitive. It is an interpretive reconstruction of verse, not an ordinary definition of epistēmē.
Use in the book
The Margites line at 147b says that its subject knew many works but knew them all badly. Alcibiades objects that it has no bearing on the argument. Socrates responds that poets speak in riddles and that Homer, called the wisest and most divine poet, could not have been ignorant of the impossibility of knowing badly. That impossibility is asserted; the dialogue does not separately prove that knowing is incapable of degrees, limitation or poor execution.
The proposed solution at 147d is to take “badly” in place of “bad” and “knew” in place of “to know”. The reconstructed sense is: he knew many works, but it was bad for him to know them all. This does not describe faulty knowledge of the crafts. It describes genuine acquisition as harmful to a person lacking its proper direction, thus fitting the argument that has just been made.
Socrates openly concedes that putting the words together this way takes them outside the metre. That concession prevents treating the reconstruction as a recovered literal text of the poem. It is a claimed riddling intention, plausibly playful and certainly shaped by the philosophical argument. The conclusion that Margites was a sorry fellow is then made dependent on trusting those prior arguments, rather than established by the poem independently.
The apparatus also shows that the quoted wording itself is mediated by editorial choice. A careful account must distinguish what Burnet prints, what Socrates says Homer means, and what the reader may judge about that interpretation. None should be passed off as an uncontested external fact about the lost poem’s original intention.
Places to read
- 147bThe line is quoted and Alcibiades questions its relevance.
- 147b–cRiddling poetry is invoked to explain the difficulty.
- 147c–d2The impossibility of knowing badly is asserted and the grammar is reinterpreted.
- 147dThe reconstructed sense is acknowledged to fall outside the metre.
- 147d–eThe conclusion relies on earlier arguments and receives Alcibiades’ trust.
Translation in this edition
Burnet prints kakōs at 147c where T has kalōs, and Bekker’s ēpistato at 147d1 where B and T have epistasthai. The English italicises the contrasted words. “Bad for him to know” must not be flattened back into “he was bad at knowing”, which would undo Socrates’ entire move.