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C h a pte r 1 Alcibiades I and Pederasty The Neoplatonic philosophers believed that the study of Plato should begin with the Alcibiades I. I similarly will begin my study of Plato’s literary and philosophical craft with this dialogue. The authenticity of Alcibiades I has sometimes been doubted, though I do not believe that a compelling case has been made for rejecting Plato’s authorship.1 Whether it was in fact written by Plato or not, the dialogue does powerfully and clearly demonstrate and introduce the creative approach to the traditional institutions of Athens that I will argue is characteristic of the Platonic dialogues. I will begin by recapitulating the basic conversation the dialogue presents between Alcibiades and Socrates. I will then look at the particular ways in which the theme of learning is explicitly and implicitly raised in this conversation to show the significance of tradition. Next I will look at Socrates’s discussion of his love for Alcibiades to show how what Socrates and, through him, Plato, present through this understanding of eros is both a continuation and a radical transformation of the Athenian institution of pederasty. It is this transformative enactment of tradition that we will see,through the ensuing chapters, to be characteristic of the Platonic writings. The Conversation of Alcibiades I As is so often the case in Platonic dialogues, Socrates’s conversation with the young Alcibiades in Alcibiades I is a conversation about competence: in this instance about Alcibiades’s competence to give advice at a meeting of the Athenian assembly (105a–b, 106c) and about Socrates’s competence to help Alcibiades achieve all of his ambitions (105d–e). This second point, Socrates’s competence to help Alcibiades, is what moves the conversation, when Alcibiades asks Socrates how it is that Socrates can help him more than any other and Socrates offers to show (endeixasthai) Alcibiades that he can (106a–b). Socrates’s demonstration will take the form of a series of questions for Alcibiades to answer (106b). The first line of questioning concerns what 5 6 chapter 1 precisely it is about which Alcibiades will be able to advise the Athenians and why precisely Alcibiades will be the one who is able to give this advice (106c and following). The subject of Alcibiades’s advice and the reason that he will be in a position to give advice, it seems, rest on the fact that he will be advising about things that he knows better than the Athenians do (106d). More precisely, Alcibiades will be giving advice to the Athenians about their own affairs (peri tōn hautōn pragmatōn) (107c), more specifically, about war and peace or something else of that kind (107d). More precisely still, it emerges, Alcibiades will be giving advice about waging war or not, against whom to wage war and against whom not, and when to wage war and when not, in terms of the wars being just (109c). Having clarified, through questioning, what Alcibiades thinks he will be giving advice to the Athenians about, Socrates turns to the questioning of Alcibiades’s competence to give advice about justice. The two agreed at the beginning of Socrates’s demonstration that Alcibiades would give advice about matters he knows better than the Athenians.They agreed, further, that there are two ways to come to know something: to learn it from others (par’ allōn emathes) or to discover it by oneself (autos exēures) (106d).Socrates,then, expresses some surprise at 109d, when Alcibiades agrees that he will be giving advice about the justice of war, asking if Alcibiades has had some teacher of the more just and the more unjust of whom Socrates was unaware. Alcibiades asks in return whether he could not have come to know what is just and what is unjust in some other way (109e), to which Socrates replies that he could have if he had discovered it himself (109e), the second way of coming to know agreed on at 106d,which Socrates then sets out to show cannot have been the case.This demonstration rests on another point settled at 106d, that learning and discovering both depend on the learner’s being willing (ethelein) to learn because he sees that he does not understand something. So, at 109e and following, Socrates shows Alcibiades that he has always believed himself to know what is just and unjust, even as a child (109e–110c). Alcibiades insists , at 110c, that he thought that...

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