He is here. The stranger, the mysterious one, a traitor who is perfect in body, mind, and soul. His companions adore him selflessly today and everyone he meets will adore him selflessly for the rest of his life (due to charms, graces, strength, and the constant appeal of the love of a truly gifted man), until he inevitably betrays them. He is special, and you and me are totally unlike him. He is a genetic and mental rarity. He is perfectly capable of loyalty (Alcibiades is perfectly capable of everything) but he will not choose loyalty.
Loyalty will not be interesting enough to him.
Already in the Socratic dialogues we have met disciples and heard of their fates. Theages was trained in wisdom. He sought power, but encountered obstacles in his lust for wisdom. History doesn’t record much more of Theages. Charmides, by contrast, was trained in temperance. Nevertheless, the beautiful Charmides defaced the Hermes alongside Alcibiades in the year 415 BC, seduced by the most perfect of Socrates’ students. We do not know how Plato was trained. He did not choose to record his own face, voice, or presence in these dialogues.
Regardless it is clear that in the same way Plato forms a Yin/Yang dark/light insight/exterior mind/body pairing with Xenophon, that other great disciple of Socrates, both of them pale in comparison with Alcibiades.
A teacher has many students, but he loves the boldest and most capable best. He loves them even if they fizzle out in actuality, or disappear across the Mediterranean in a series of cruelties and debaucheries that down an entire civilization. Socrates must have loved Alcibiades more than all the rest.
“I am your first lover.”
“When the rest of the world were wearying you with their attentions,” I never spoke a word to you. Now, “I am the last of your lovers who still speaks to you”. My spirit kept me from you; now, “your superior force of character”, pride, scatters your own friends, leaving only the crooked old man.
For centuries, this Dialogue was the standard introduction to Plato.
Alcibiades is our entrance. He requires Socrates for the same reasons we require Socrates, although of course he is alien to us, “tallest and fairest”, an aristocrat’s aristocrat, pure of blood, “greatest in Hellas”, the best of the best and constantly accompanied by the best, chief among them his guardian Pericles, who “can do as he pleases not only in this city, but in all Hellas, and among many and mighty barbarous nations” (albeit a democrat, Pericles is a presage of Alcbiades in his absolute willfullness). Alcibiades needs Socrates because he is “too much for anyone”.
Young men have that power and excellence to truly exceed all others! In packs they are the danger represented by the Socratic generation; individually they cut against one another bloodily and will continue to do so for all time. To sing the praises of pure, unrestricted masculinity, unattached to any particular thing, is the muscular freedom of a pirate or cowboy, a freedom that slips from the earth and slices the top of the sky. Alcibiades will be pierced in a shower of arrows, transfixed by a thousand points in the manner of St. Sebastian. Today he is simply beautiful, as he walks a muddy street. Socrates acosts him. We must speak of our love — this is Socrates’ main point. Alcibiades has been in a foul temper and some of his best lovers have felt spurned by him. What is the purpose of this dialogue? To cheer up a beauty. To save a lovely face with downturned eyes.
It begins.
“What do you want?” he asks Socrates, who has been following him like a dog. Socrates takes it as a real question (and oddly enough Alcibiades is curious). First, he makes the young promise not to run, the ancient resort of beautiful people over-admired by the world. Next, he tells Alcibiades a hideous truth: one like him must steal more and can never be satisfied with what he has. It is like saying to someone stronger and prettier and more graceful than yourself: yes, you have all that, and nevertheless also a deep hunger which devours your future. To be proved “the greatest power among us”, then predicting Alexander perfectly, to “cross over into Asia” and dominate the world.
All this is obvious. So what prevents Alcibiades for going about this plan? Why does he stalk about this muddy alleyway with his face turned down?
“Nobody is able to deliver into your hands the power you desire, but I only — God being my helper.”
That is the demand (unsurprising from Socrates, who only speaks in grand statements or in simple, parable-like justifications).
“Why?”
“Yes, I can tell you,” says Socrates, “but you must grand me one little favor. Will you be troubled at having questions to answer?”
The minute these players in the game of conversation agree to answer a single question, Socrates has won the argument.
The poor child — if this is a true portrait of the future international pirate and romancer, he has not yet learned to ignore his elders and betters. “I do not know what I am saying,” he tells Socrates before long. “I am in a strange state, for when you put questions to me I am of different minds in successive instants.”
Before long, he is even accusing his old master of insulting him.
Socrates mocks the young man who dares speak in public places for not truly discerning the difference between justice and injustice. And who cares? What politician (if we accept Alcibiades as a kind of much more vital, more interesting model of this role) cares about just and unjust? Alcibiades himself accepts that politicians in this world use justice and injustice as tools, not accurate descriptors: “An awkward question, for certainly even if a person did intend to go to war with the just, he would not admit that they were just.” Socrates challenges him anyways. He challenges him on the only grounds Alcibiades cares about — skill, strength, ability, knowledge, and although they discuss justice Socrates mostly advocates for justice outside of moral grounds. Justice is expedient, more than a moral short cut. Justice is international, used by the kings of Sparta and Persia, even when it is neglected by the rulers of Athens. Alcbiades himself is a cheat, like boys playing with loaded dice. As an military strategian he will break sieges with lies and negotiation, avoiding outright assaults. His constant trickery will become a byword. We cannot pretend Socrates interested this man in justice, but rather in knowedge. Alcibiades was prideful enough to want to be capable of both justice and injustice, and wise enough to know the difference. “Some honorable things are evil, and some dishonorable things are good.” Socrates accepts this, having already advocated ‘white lies’ in the Hippias — the lies of a capable liar are immoral, but less so than the accidental lies of an idiot. Alcibiades desires to be capable in everything. Socrates bests him by showing how ignorant this perfect student happens to be. Even if all the other Athenians are ignorant, even if the Spartans and Persians are ignorant, even if Socrates himself is ignorant, so too is Alcibiades. The advantages one has in this complete ignorance are only one’s own nature, and even in his grand noble birth Alcibiades, descendant of Zeus, is no better than Socrates, whose line is traced to Daedalus, great inventor, and through Hephaestus again to Zeus. Here we learn that a King of Persia is a great enemy for the reason of education — trained in wisdom (worship of the Gods and the duties of office), justice (honesty), temperance (avoiding addiction), and finally courage (fear being only proper for slaves). Alcibiades had only a slave for a tutor, Zopyrus the Thracian. Nobody cares for the education of an Athenian “unless he has a lover to take care of him”.
“And if you cast an eye on the wealth, the luxury, the garments with their flowing trains, the anointings with myrrh, the multitudes of attendants, and all the other bravery of the Persians, you will be ashamed when you discern your own inferiority; or if you look at the temperance and orderliness and ease and grace and magnanimity and courage and endurance and love of toil and desire of glory and ambition of the Lacedaemonians — in all these respects you will see that you are but a child in comparison of them.”
It is unbearable to take the filth from this muddy street and press it into his essence in this smear of ignorance.
Alcibiades throws himself at Socrates’ feet.
He is ruined. He is “wedded to ignorance of the most disgraceful kind”, and worse, out of his own mouth, not his master’s. “Be persuaded by me,” demands Socrates, dragging Alcibiades down to where his place: “And hear the Delphian inscription, ‘Know thyself’.”
To know ourselves we proceded deeper, into the region of the soul.
A plan is man to improve Alcibiades into the man he will become. This is an intensely spiritual matter.
“Absolute existence must be considered first”.
There are two realities.
The first is the Reality of Heraclitus — constantly around us, constantly in flux, fixed before our eyes. This is the reality studied by biologists, geologists, physicists, and the like. This reality follows laws described by Newton and Einstein — but only to a certain extent. As Heraclitus warned us before science existed as a discipline, the constant flux of physical reality makes it observable but NOT intelligible.
The second reality is quite as apparent. We cannot see it with our five senses, but it is more intelligible for that fact, more obedient to laws, just as important for our existence. This reality is studied by theologians, philosophers, and imaginative children. The Reality of Plato consists of abstract but real objects and concepts.
You study the Reality of Heraclitus in Science and History, but the Reality of Plato in Mathematics and English; without the Reality of Plato and our connection to it, almost nothing would be possible in the realms of thought and theory. This ‘Theory of Forms’ which describes Plato’s reality has an unfortunately dismal understanding in the modern world. Modern man can only think physically, not theoretically. Forms are perfectly real, just often ignored.
Perhaps the wisdom of the Forms is the complete secret of the Dialogues. A separate reality into which men may enter through the sort of careful thought inculcated in the youths in the Republic — this could produce a sort of wisdom, an understanding of the truth behind reality, that might lead men to power. A human mathematics built on the forms of humankind, a deep grasp on humankind, could produce an Alcibiades. True wisdom through the Forms can even produce Socrates, complete with his daemon whispering fate into his ears. It could even produce perfect leaders, perfect civilizations, perfect worlds.
“My love breeds another love: and so like the stork I shall be cherished by the bird whom I have hatched.”
The conversation game has won something, and changed Alcibiades; he will follow Socrates like the slave he has been revealed to be, although the shadow of the obvious future nearly completely conceals the conversation’s end: one will seek wisdom, the other nuture wisdom, and “the power of the state may be too much for both of us”.
