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EIGHT ALCIBIADES: DIVINE SOCRATES If in Socrates’ speech the beautiful gods have effectively been separated from the city and its justice, Plato, with the entrance of Alcibiades, puts them together once again. Alcibiades makes his appearance not only drunk and supported by his “human beings,” but crowned with violets and ivy (212e). The crown of violets recalls Pindar’s description of a personified Athens (echoed by Aristophanes in his Knights),1 while the crown of ivy and his troop of attendant revelers deck Alcibiades out in the trappings of Dionysus . As the city of Athens, Alcibiades declares that reconciliation between Socrates and himself is impossible and that he “shall take my vengeance on you at another time” (213d), that is, he anticipates Socrates’ trial and condemnation. As the beautiful god Dionysus, he judges the contest in wisdom or speeches between Socrates and Agathon and finds Socrates to be the victor (213e). Socrates’ knowledge of ignorance is declared by the patron god of the poets to be superior to the wisdom of the poets, just as, according to Socrates at his trial, Apollo’s oracle in its prophetic wisdom declared him to be the wisest simply.2 In putting together the gods of the poets with the city of Athens, Plato appears to mirror the way in which Homer’s Athena has seemingly become instantiated in the city that bears her name. Alcibiades is the proper figure in this regard insofar as his ambition to embody a similar combination of the beauty and the justice of the gods allows him to appear as Athens incarnate. But if Pericles declared imperial Athens herself to be the true and proper object of the erotic longings of the Athenians,3 his ward, as personifying Athens, inevitably became the beloved of her citizens. Diotima declared the “great god Eros” to have been constituted as the result of assigning the attributes of the beloved to the personified passion of love (204c). Alcibiades—the embodiment of the politicized eros of the Athenians or their imperial longings—appears to them to be the fulfillment of this same 131 132 EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT eros. Alcibiades is, in the words of Aristophanes, the “great god Eros” as the “leader and general” (193b) of the tyrant city. He promises to fulfill completely their most far flung hopes. Alcibiades thus represents a novel possibility in regard to piety for which Athens’ daring and shamelessness paved the way: he is the incarnate god of “love” who displaces in his naked divinity both the hidden gods of the poets and the parochialism of the gods of the city and its law. Alcibiades ’ ambition, therefore, leads in the direction of a religious revolution in which the old gods and the old law are overturned through the advent of the universal tyranny of the god of love who strikes down all those who fail to succumb to his charms. That this religious revolution remained merely a possibility in Athens case is attributable, according to Plato, not only to the Athenians’ recoil before this possibility at the very moment of its realization, but to the intervention of Socrates who, Plato suggests, made it impossible for Alcibiades to understand himself in terms of the advent of a new divinity: he compelled him to recognize something superior to himself, namely, Socrates. At the end of Socrates’ speech, Aristophanes tries to offer a response to Socrates’ refutation of his understanding of eros (212c). Plato, however, does not permit him the opportunity of a reply. His words are interrupted by the entrance of Alcibiades whose arrival is heralded first by a knocking at the door, then by the sound of a flute-girl, and finally by the voice of Alcibiades himself (212c–d). On the one hand, Plato makes the bond between Aristophanes’ words and those of Alcibiades the sound of a flute-girl. He implies that both Aristophanes and Alcibiades are, like the prostitute, in the service of the multitude4 and that both, as a consequence, conceive an envy of Socrates precisely on account of his freedom from such dependency and servitude.5 On the other hand, Plato in effect makes Alcibiades speak in Aristophanes’ turn, as Eryximachus had done previously.6 Alcibiades’ speech, however, will turn out to be a demonstration of how it is possible to both satisfy one’s envy of Socrates—that is, “take one’s vengeance upon him” while “raising a laugh” (214d–e)—and at the same time defend him by...

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