Abstract
When Socrates was accused in 399 BC of corrupting the young, the harm that his one-time associate Alcibiades did to Athens provided fuel for the charges against him. By setting the Symposium in 416 BC, just one year before Alcibiades led Athens on the disastrous Sicilian expedition, Plato revisits the charge that Socrates corrupts the young. In particular, does Socrates' freedom from the accepted opinions of his city and the “universalism” of the truth he pursues find political expression in imperialistic ambitions such as Alcibiades'? Exploring the role of Alcibiades in the Symposium, including his “praise” of Socrates, I argue that Socratic philosophy properly understood is a “middle” state (e.g., between ignorance and wisdom), and as such cannot represent an escape from one's particular political community into imperialistic politics. Moreover, as a middle state it is characterized by reciprocity, and as such offers a model for political life different from Alcibiades' imperialism.
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Notes
Allan Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” in Plato's Symposium, 166.
Mark J. Lutz, Socrates' Education to Virtue: Learning the Love of the Noble (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 127.
This is true of both the traditional interpretations that understand Alcibiades' presence in the Symposium to exonerate Socrates from the charge of corrupting Alcibiades and more recent scholars who are critical of Socrates' love of the universal. Among the first group, George Kimball Plochmann argues that Alcibiades serves as a foil for Socrates, a “clarification of what philosophy is not,” “Hiccups and Hangovers in The Symposium,” Bucknell Review, 11 (May 1963): 16; see also 14; Paul Friedlander, Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third Periods, vol. 3, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 30, 32; R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge: W. Heffner and Sons, 1969), lii.; William S. Cobb, The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato's Erotic Dialogues (Albany, New York: The State University Press, 1993), 82–84; Gary Alan Scott, “Irony and Inebriation in Plato's Symposium: The Disagreement Between Socrates and Alcibiades over Truth-telling,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 3 (Spring 1995): 30 n5; and Gary Alan Scott and William A. Welton, “An Overlooked Motive in Alcibiades' SymposiumSpeech,” Interpretation 24 (Fall 1996): 67–84. Among the latter group of scholars, Stanley Rosen describes “the peculiarity of Socrates' Eros, which can only desire divine things or beings,” Plato's Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 2nd edition, 279, and Gregory Vlastos and Martha Nussbaum argue that Socrates is able to love only the good qualities that humans share (e.g., the beautiful itself) rather than the whole person, Vlastos, “The individual as object of love in Plato's dialogues,” Platonic Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 1–34, and Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 190. Criticizing Socratic philosophizing in light of the more human, more vibrant alternative she finds in Alcibiades, Nussbaum contrasts Socrates' “attentiveness to … repeatable qualities” with Alcibiades' “attentiveness to the particular, to unique persons,” Fragility of Goodness, 193. See also Arlene Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 159–60 and 183–84. For a perceptive argument against the interpretations of Vlastos and Nussbaum, see Joseph P. Lawrence, “Socrates and Alcibiades,” Southern Humanities Review 37 (Fall 2003): 301–27.
Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,”166. See Hegel's discussion of the connection between the Ideas and freedom, in Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Francis H. Simson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), vol. I, 385–88, 406–07.
References in parentheses, unless otherwise noted, are to Plato's Symposium. Translations from the Greek are my own, although I have relied on Seth Benardete's translation in Plato's Symposium. The Greek texts for all references to Plato can be found in John Burnet, ed., Platonic Opera, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1900–07.
Nussbaum also notes this connection between Alcibiades and Plato. She suggests not a competition between Alcibiades and Plato but that Alcibiades serves as “a poet, and an inspiring god of poets (Plato?),” Fragility of Goodness, 193.
In the Alcibiades II, Alcibiades denies that there is “some third condition in the middle of being wise and unwise, that makes a person neither one nor the other” (Alcibiades II, 139a–b). Whoever the dialogue's author (many scholars think that the Alcibiades II was not written by Plato), he understood this important problem in Alcibiades' thinking. See also the “arguments” of the sophistical brothers in the Euthydemus (276a–c).
Although Alcibiades does not mention it, Marsyas' flute-playing did not have a happy outcome: after competing and losing in a music contest with Apollo, the god slew the satyr for his hubris. Whether Alcibiades intends it or not, his image of Socrates is ominous.
As Lutz comments, “According to Alcibiades, Socrates' response to his offer was very ‘ironic,’ by which Alcibiades seems to mean that it was joking and playful and false,” Socrates' Education to Virtue, 135. Rosen, however, praises Alcibiades' “brilliant description of Socrates' irony,” Plato's Symposium, 309.
Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 273.
See also Lawrence, “Socrates and Alcibiades,” 311.
For discussion, see Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 289; David M. Halperin, “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity,” Classical Antiquity 5 (1989): 68–70; Gary Alan Scott, Plato's Socrates as Educator (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 48; and Daniel E. Anderson, The Masks of Dionysus (Albany: State University Press, 1993), 123.
See Scott's excellent analysis of the ways in which Plato presents Socrates' understanding of love as a subversion of the traditional opposition between lover and beloved, ruling and being ruled, in Plato's Socrates as Educator, 121–34. As Scott points out, Socrates' response to Alcibiades' proposition of exchange of sexual favors for wisdom accuses Alcibiades of the desire to dominate: since you are proposing to exchange bronze for gold, Socrates tells Alcibiades, “you're planning to gain an advantage (pleonektein) over me” (218e), in Plato's Socrates as Educator, 124; see also Schein, “Alcibiades and the Politics of Misguided Love in Plato's Symposium,” Theta Pi 3 (1974), 158–67, and Anderson, The Masks of Dionysus, 114, 122. After Alcibiades stops speaking in the Symposium, Socrates claims that Alcibiades is still trying to get the better of him (222d).
The young Alcibiades is present in the Protagoras when Socrates makes this distinction, and even supports Socrates' preference for conversation over lengthy speeches (Protagoras, 336b–d; see also Protagoras, 347b, 348b). Rosen understands Alcibiades' remarks in the Protagoras to indicate that the young Alcibiades is more open to Socrates than the man who appears in the Symposium, Plato's Symposium, 285.
Anderson, The Masks of Dionysus, 116.
Alcibiades uses “conversing” in reference to Socrates' speeches only at 217b, where he admits that he expected Socrates to “converse” with him as a lover would with his darling, although Socrates conversed with him in his usual manner.
Alcibiades claims that Socrates' speeches possess him and others just as the worshippers of Cybele, the Corybantes, are inspired by wild music and frenzied dancing (215e). In the Ion, Socrates refers to the Corybantes to illustrate the effect of the poet's divine inspiration, which acts like a magnet, drawing first the poets, then the rhapsodes and actors, and then their audiences (Ion, 533d–36b; see also Lawrence, “Socrates and Alcibiades, 318). Of the inspired poets Socrates says that they are “out of their senses (ekphrōn),” and that “the god takes away their mind (nous)” (534b, c). Similarly, as Socrates describes them here the rhapsodes and actors may act as “middles” between the poet and audience (536a), but they make no independent contribution to the process. The medium is not the message; in fact, it must be nothing at all. Socrates' interlocutor Ion, a rhapsode with an affinity for Homer, however, remains unconvinced, and “would wonder if [Socrates] could speak well enough to persuade him that he is ‘possessed’ when he praises Homer” (536d). Perhaps he perceives that if inspiration were as Socrates describes it, he could be equally inspired by all poets, not just Homer in particular (but consider Ion, 534b). In any case, Socrates' speeches fail to “possess” their hearer, at least when they maintain his possession by an outside source (cf. Crito, 54d, 46b). Consider also Alcibiades I for Alcibiades' denial and Socrates' insistence that the one who answers questions is responsible for the conclusions reached (Alcibiades I, 106c, 109b–c, 112d, 113a). Alcibiades uses the Greek ego no fewer than seven times between 112e and 113b.
Bloom substantiates Alcibiades' “image of Socrates as the sorcerer” by reference to “the golden speeches of Socrates [that] can be found all over Plato's dialogues,” such as his “great speech about divine madness in the Phaedrus” and his speech about Love in the Symposium, “The Ladder of Love,” 159. We should also note, however, that those two speeches address previous speeches in the works in which Socrates delivers them, and are therefore part of a dialogue. Moreover, those speeches each give way to further conversation (212c and Phaedrus, 256c ff.). Finally, Socrates' Symposium speech, like the Symposiumitself, includes narration of dialogue. If one were to narrate (or dramatize) the dialogue itself, with Socrates responding to particular interlocutors, one could preserve for a larger audience the dialogic character of Socrates' speeches and therewith the crucial role of the particular addressee. Plato thus differs from Alcibiades in demanding by means of his dialogic form that we take a middle step in understanding any “repetition” of a Socratic speech, inasmuch as it is addressed to a particular individual or group of individuals.
Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 309.
Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 300.
See Michael Davis, The Autobiography of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 70.
See Rosen's discussion of Alcibiades' euphemism in this passage, Plato's Symposium, 307, as well as Anderson's observation that Socrates “in his reply ignores the submissiveness of the eromenos [beloved] implied in this passage,” The Masks of Dionysus, 122–23.
Strauss observes that in his description of Socrates Alcibiades collapses moderation, which “has to do with the right attitude toward pleasure,” and endurance, which involves “the right attitude toward pains.” For Alcibiades “this virtue [endurance] swallows up everything,” in Strauss, On Plato's Symposium, 274.
Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 315.
The phrase from Homer with which Alcibiades describes Socrates is used by Helen to describe Odysseus, when he disguised himself as a lowly beggar in order to sneak into Troy undetected. As Helen recounts, she was the only one able to recognize Odysseus, who eventually admits to her who he is and tells her “all the purpose of the Achaeans.” No doubt that analogy appeals to Alcibiades inasmuch as the disguised Odysseus reveals himself and his secrets to the one who penetrates his disguise. However, Plato's irony may be again at Alcibiades' expense: in his pride (in seeing through appearances) Alcibiades compares himself to a woman who first betrays her people and escapes to Troy, and then by not revealing Odysseus' disguise betrays the Trojans in turn (Odyssey IV, 242–62). Like Alcibiades, Helen is a double traitor. Helen seems even ready to betray the Greek cause again when their army hides within the “Trojan” horse: in the words of her husband Menelaus, Helen is “moved by some divine spirit” to circle the hollow horse imitating the voices of the wives of the men within. The men, including Menelaus himself, have to be restrained by Odysseus from rushing out to their deaths at the sound of Helen's calls (Odyssey IV, 271–89). In recounting this episode, Menelaus thus indicates Odysseus' immunity from Helen's Siren-like charms that captivate his fellow Greeks.
Helen Bacon, “Socrates Crowned,” Virginia Quarterly Review 35 (1959): 424; John Anton, “Some Dionysian References in the Platonic Dialogues,” Classical Journal 58 (1962–1963): 50; Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 194; Benardete, “On Plato's Symposium,” 91; Lutz, Socrates' Education to Virtue, 131. At 218b, Alcibiades speaks of “a philosophic madness and bacchic frenzy” that possesses him. He understands philosophy, or at least his own experience of it, in terms of the god Dionysus.
Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 287 n35.
Geier points out that it is not until Alcibiades' arrival that the gathering becomes “a drinking party.” Moreover, Alcibiades “introduces into the dialogue both the word for drinking partner, sumpotēs (212e4, 213b7, 216d7) and the word for drinking together, sumpinein (213a2), in Plato's Erotic Thought: The Tree of the Unknown (Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 2002), 53. By this means, Plato allows Alcibiades to give his dialogue its title.
Bacon, “Socrates Crowned,” 424 and 427; Anton, “Some Dionysian References in the Platonic Dialogues,” 50; Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 287; and Strauss, On Plato's Symposium, 26 and 257.
Gary Alan Scott, Plato's Socrates as Educator, 123.
Seth L. Schein, “Alcibiades and the Politics of Misguided Love,” 159.
This is also the suggestion of Geier, Plato's Erotic Thought, 57. The only other person, from among the named guests, who might have departed, is Pausanias.
Scholars suggest various connections between the symposium at Agathon's house and the crimes of which Alcibiades was accused; see Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” 72; Strauss, On Plato's Symposium,1, 15, 24, 40, and 287; and Rosen, Plato's Symposium, 285.
The word Alcibiades uses for statuary's shops, hermoglupheia,is not a common one, but occurs only here in extant Greek literature. It means literally, the place of those who carve Hermes statues, and therefore of those who carve statues more generally.
Rumors of Alcibiades' involvement in the breaking of the Hermae, as well as of his revelation and desecration of the Eleusinian mysteries, aroused the public's fear of his tyrannical ambitions and ultimately led to the official charges against him (Thucydides, 6.27–28). Plato alludes to the latter charges against Alcibiades as well when he has Alcibiades present his revelations of Socrates' inner nature as if he were revealing secrets to the uninitiated (e.g., 218b).
Rosen maintains that Socrates' statement in the Alcibiades I that he pursues Alcibiades in order to assist him in fulfilling his desire to rule over all human beings (Alcibiades. I, 105c–e) is “not simply ironical,” Plato's Symposium, 282. It is in light of an understanding of the character of philosophy that one understands Socrates' more arrogant claims to be not simply ironical, and his more modest ones as simply so. See, for example, Plato's Symposium, 215. See David Bolotin, “The Life of Philosophy and the Immortality of the Soul: An Introduction to Plato's Phaedo,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987), 38–49.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 3, section 7.
Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” 167.
Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” 168.
See Mary P. Nichols, “Socrates' Contest with the Poets in Plato's Symposium,” Political Theory 32 (2004): 186–206.
See Lawrence's excellent discussion of the place of the lover's love of a particular beautiful soul in Diotima's account of love in the Symposium, in “Socrates and Alcibiades,” 320.
Benardete, “On Plato's Symposium,” 192.
Saxonhouse, The Fear of Diversity, 178.
Rosen notes the difference between the lengthy contemplation Alcibiades attributes to Socrates and Socrates' briefer one just before the party, but draws the opposite conclusion. “The banquet and its participants,” he writes, “make up a more pressing external circumstance for Socrates than the military campaign and his fellow soldiers,” Plato's Symposium, 313. Like Alcibiades, Rosen presents Socrates as moved by compulsion rather than attraction. Socrates' admirer Aristodemus, who is present at the party, tells Agathon that such states of contemplation are “customary” for Socrates, but that Socrates “will come presently” (175b).
For a different speculation, see Benardete, “On Plato's Symposium,” 198–99.
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I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Polity for their helpful suggestions and to the Earhart Foundation for its generous support of my research.
Seth Benardete, “On Plato's Symposium,” in Plato's Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 192.
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Nichols, M. Philosophy and Empire: On Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. Polity 39, 502–521 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300066