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113 n o t e s Chapter 1 1. Arguments against authentic Platonic authorship tend to ground themselves either in particular scholars’ views about the interpretation of Plato (for example, Nicholas D. Smith, “Did Plato Write the Alcibiades I?” Apeiron 37 [2004]: 93–108) or in stylistic analysis (for example, R. S. Bluck, “The Origin of the Greater Alcibiades,” Classical Quarterly N.S. 3, nos. 1–2 [1953]: 46–52; Pamela M. Clark,“The Greater Alcibiades,”Classical Quarterly N.S. 5, nos. 3–4 [1955]: 231–40). Each of these areas is highly contentious and does not really allow for any conclusive findings.See Nicholas Denyer for a careful assessment of the question of the dialogue’s authenticity (Plato: Alcibiades [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 14–26); Denyer concludes that Plato did in fact write the Alcibiades I. 2. For these “old charges,” see Apology 18b, and see the discussion by George Gregory, “Of Socrates, Aristophanes, and Rumor,” in Reexamining Socrates in the “Apology,” ed. Patricia Fagan and John Russon (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 35–61. 3. As we will see repeatedly throughout this book, this is exactly the form of a traditional tale or “myth.” 4. This point sits for readers of Plato in Europe and North America since the nineteenth century as central to understanding Plato, as it drives the Apology, which for us is the key Platonic dialogue. See John Russon for a discussion of this “hearsay”that complements strongly the argument I develop here (“The [Childish] Nature of the Soul in Plato’s Apology,” in Reexamining Socrates in the “Apology,” Fagan and Russon, 191–208). 5. All of which learning presupposes an already well-developed knowledge of how to speak Greek. 6. In Classical Athens, adult women and minors shared the same legal status, living always under the care and authority of an adult male, their kurios. 7. More exactly, what Alcibiades has learned is not Greek as such, or Greekness as such—he has learned the Greek and Greekness of a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. He is an Athenian of the late fifth century. His language is Greek, but it is the Greek of Athens as distinct from the Greek of other Greek city-states at other times. Alcibiades’s Greek is both particular and universal, a “national” language in a local form. 8. For the concept of “traditional referentiality,” see John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 9. On Athenian stereotypes of Persia, see Edith Hall, who studies the formation of the Athenian view following the Persian Wars (Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989]); and Margaret C. Miller, who considers changing phases of Athenian stereotypes of Persians (Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). See also Thomas Harrison for a study of the perspective embodied in Aes- 114 notes to pages 11–19 chylus’s tragedy (The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century [London: Duckworth, 2000]). 10. See, for example, Xenophon, The Constitution of the Spartans. 11. Socrates may feel that this citation is necessary because the story of the wealth of an entire region being spent on the wardrobe of only one woman, even the wife of the Great King, seems beyond probability. 12.As we have seen,he tries to stick to his claim that he could learn serious things from the many at 110e and following.Compare his attempts to maintain the position that there can be philia in the polis only because each does his own things at 127b and following. 13. This institution is studied in detail in Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 14. See Mark Munn, The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chapter 1. 15. See Eric Csapo for an account of the agonism of the pederastic relationship in Classical Athens and in particular of what was at stake for the boy beloved in this relationship (“Deep Ambivalence: Notes on a Greek Cockfight [Part I],” Phoenix 47, no. 1 [Spring 1993]: especially 18–28). Victoria Wohl takes up similar themes in an analysis of Alcibiades in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (“The Eros of Alcibiades,” Classical Antiquity 18, no. 2 [October 1999]: 349–85); Wohl notes, 353–56...