It is at precisely this point of sublimity—Socrates having concluded his vision of cognitive bliss and erotic bliss made one—that Plato brings Alcibiades into the action. His presence is announced first by some undignified ruckus outside—those inside hear someone pounding on the door—and when Alcibiades makes his grand entrance he is so deep in his cups that he needs to be supported by a flute-girl and some other attendants. (This flute-girl had been sent outside to entertain the women when the men decided to make this symposium a temperate one.) Ivy and violets and ribbons are wreathed into his hair—a form of dressing up that mocks the garlands that have been genuinely won that day. (Perhaps this calls attention to another mockery he will allegedly perform, the parody of the Eleusinian mysteries.) He immediately takes command of the room in his outrageously adorable manner: “Are you laughing at me for being drunk?” he announces as he staggers in, letting us know the affectionate indulgence he provokes, the knowing laughter of the men in the room. “You may laugh,” he lisps, “but I nevertheless know quite well that what I say is true,” and we are meant, as Nussbaum stresses in her reading of the dialogue, to take this pronouncement seriously. Alcibiades is going to tell us something important, even if in a drunkenly disordered fashion. Informed that all of the men have been delivering praises to Erōs, Alcibiades agrees that he will do so as well, though first he drinks a huge vat of wine and gets others to start drinking as well, the disorder he requires as his backdrop already making itself felt.
He goes on to give a memorable account of Erōs. But he doesn’t praise the god in the way that all the others have done, trying to capture the essence of the ideal love, concentrating on the transcendent divinity of Erōs in terms appropriately impersonal. Even Aristophanes had tried to do justice to the god in mythical terms. Alcibiades changes the terms of the assignment. It is a man he describes and not a god. It is Socrates. Or rather what Alcibiades describes is what it is like for him, for Alcibiades, to love this man—more unique, he declares, than Achilles himself (221c). It is the phenomenology of loving a particular individual, and an extraordinary one at that, which Alcibiades recounts. And now Alcibiades, in inverting everything Socrates has just said, ends up overtly declaring that the greatest philosopher in their presence, namely Socrates, does indeed exceed Achilles. But he exceeds Achilles in his personal uniqueness, in the achievement of being more of himself, of coming into possession of his own individuality. Socrates has just been preaching a sort of stripping away of all that is personal. The extraordinary individual not only is in love with the True-the Beautiful-the Good, but, to the extent that his love takes him over, he becomes one with it, which is why Socrates describes such love as a sort of immortality, everything individual, and therefore mortal, dropping away. But Alcibiades stresses the personal. He describes what is so extraordinary about Socrates in terms that are implicitly Nietzschean, an exaltation of the extraordinary individual precisely because he is irreducibly and irreplicably individual.45
Alcibiades resists Socrates’ ascent into the impersonal. He insists on personal terms. Alcibiades’ account of what it has been like for him to love Socrates is thoroughly human, filled with both the transformative sense of wonder that we feel when we are deeply in love, but also the absurdity of that state, the indignities that we are made to suffer when it is an embodied person we love, rather than a god or a mathematical theorem or the abstraction of Beauty itself, embedded in the structure of to on.
Alcibiades has loved Socrates in the only way that he knows how. That’s what’s so wrong with his love. It never transforms him. He could love the most extraordinary man in Athens and never be changed in the loving. He’s Alcibiades when he falls in love with Socrates, and he’s the same Alcibiades when the experience is over, and that’s because Alcibiades is too intent on being Alcibiades. He never loses sight of what it is to be Alcibiades. He never wants to. And in that lack of wanting is his doom.
Having Alcibiades—drunk, no less—crash the party at a late hour not only makes the Symposium that much more dramatic but turns it into a morality play. This is one of the aims that Plato accomplishes by bringing Alcibiades onstage so late in the evening. Alcibiades is the very inverse of all that Socrates has just been saying. Alcibiades, reveling in his excesses, projecting the edgy glamour of the dissolute outlaw, of living beyond the bounds, is also, in his own way, battling against the constraints of being merely human. It’s a way of pretending we’re not quite mortal, this abandonment and recklessness, exulting in doing what no ordinary mortals can get away with; and it proved to be the way Alcibiades not only loved but also lived and also died.
And by presenting Alcibiades as the very inverse of Socrates’ teaching, Plato exonerates Socrates of the crimes of Alcibiades. He is underscoring the point that Alcibiades isn’t the conclusion of Socrates’ reasoning, but is rather its very negation. The polis might very well have had the ruinously willful defiance of Alcibiades in mind in charging Socrates with the corruption of the young. Alcibiades had defied the politicizing of aretē, and Socrates, too, defied the politicizing of aretē. For both of them it is the individual who must achieve exceptionality; the polis can’t do it for him. It’s true that Socrates’ defiance is made in the name of moral philosophy, whereas Alcibiades’ defiance is made in the name of Alcibiades. Small difference, the Athenians might be heard protesting in bringing their charges against Socrates; you opened the door to such rebellion. Huge difference, Plato is insisting in the Symposium. Alcibiades may have dramatically rejected the Athenian answer to what makes a life worth living—the politicized aretē that channels the energies of the extraordinary person so that it serves the extraordinary polis—but he rejected the Socratic answer just as dramatically. In fact, his rejection of the Socratic point of view, as Plato develops it in the Symposium, is even more emphatically rebellious.
The Socrates of the Symposium is asking a person to travel as far away from the personal point of view as is possible, to a place in which not only the particular beauty of a beloved will pale to insignificance but a person’s very own identity will seem of little concern to the person himself. Reason itself can bring one to a state of ecstasy, literally standing outside oneself, that Bacchanalian frenzy of philosophy mentioned in chapter α. This rationalist ecstasy is pointedly referred to in Alcibiades’ speech, describing what the arguments of philosophy can do when they “seize the soul of a not untalented youth.” Socrates is here grouped with the other not untalented youths, for, from the point of view of Plato’s mature philosophy perhaps that is what he was, though a youth who had the seminal intuition that was needed to extract aretē from its social and political embedding. It’s politics that have to be shaped in the light of moral values, and not the other way round. The state toward which philosophy’s arguments can bring us—a state of ecstatic estrangement from the self, slipping the bonds of one’s own particular identity—is the state that Plato holds out as paradigmatically philosophical, the attitude toward which we are sojourning in making progress in philosophy. One’s connection with one’s own self has been attenuated to a degree that one can contemplate even one’s own personal demise with equanimity. To live and to think and to love as a philosopher is to live sub specie aeternitatis—that is, under the form of eternity, which was the way that Spinoza, who philosophized much in the spirit of Plato, was to put it some millennia later.
Socrates’ speech in the Symposium is urging us on in the direction of an impersonal vision, promising us that in losing our personal attachments, even our attachment to our own self, we will achieve a knowledge that will make us over in its light—the perfect proportions of the True-the Beautiful-the Good assimilated into our knowing minds, knowledge become aretē, which is what wisdom is. The implication is that it was toward this vision that a young man’s love for Socrates was meant to take him. For here is where it took Plato, who, in loving Socrates, managed to carry philosophy, Socrates’ own love, far past the point that Socrates had reached. To love Socrates is
to have been impregnated with his intuitions—the Symposium is filled with references to impregnation—in the manner in which Plato was. The very proof of this impregnation—the living child, as it were—is the ideas that Socrates is given to speak in the Symposium. Because Plato loved Socrates, because he—and not Alcibiades—was Socrates’ ideal erômenos, just as Socrates was Plato’s ideal erastês, Plato has given birth to a unity of metaphysics and epistemology and aesthetics and ethics that lay implicit in Socrates’ intuitions.
In contrast, Alcibiades’ love for Socrates was sterile. Nothing creative or beautiful ever came of it. His career, in which his connection to his own self—his impulses and his ambitions—is promoted before all else, the exaltation of individuality, could not have been more distant from what it was to have been truly a student and lover of Socrates, to have taken him into one’s self, been penetrated by what he had to offer.
By bringing Alcibiades so vividly to life before us, reminding us of how abundantly he failed to transform himself in the light of Socratic love, Plato doesn’t just provide a motivation for the difficult path of educating our erotic strivings (you don’t want to end up like Alcibiades, do you?). He also provides an exoneration for Socrates: he no more corrupted Alcibiades than Athens did. Both Athens and Socrates failed to win Alcibiades over to a love greater than self-love. If anything, Athens was even more to blame, for allowing itself to be so manipulated and seduced by Alcibiades. Socrates, in contrast, refused to be seduced. “There is no reconciling you and me,” Plato has Alcibiades declare to Socrates (213c), and though Alcibiades tosses off the remark in a flirty way, Plato doesn’t want the irreconcilability to be lost on us. The story of Socrates and Alcibiades is a story of a mutually failed seduction.
It is rather Plato who was successfully seduced by Socrates. It is Plato who demonstrates the effect that loving Socrates was meant to have on the young men who counted themselves the lovers of Socrates. Plato’s demonstration consists in the life he is living, the works he is writing, including the Symposium.
For here is the paradox that Plato’s conception of love presents to us: In recounting this vision of a love so transcendent and impersonal, that “vision of the mind [that] begins to see keenly when that of the eyes starts to lose its edge” (219a), Plato still does not lose sight of Socrates. The very dialogues he creates to speak his vision of depersonalized philosophy keep the person of Socrates a constant before him, and so before us.
* * *
1Petitioners didn’t question the Delphic oracle, or Pythia, directly. Our best information is that people wrote or dictated their questions and requests and then gave them to priests who took them to the Pythia. There were also priests who then interpreted the responses—often ravings—of the oracle.
2Adam Lankford, The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), p. 108.
3“[The Olympian gods] are more powerful than man but otherwise no different. Their immortality is no true immortality but an inability to succumb to death, which defeats their pygmy brother man. They are no wiser, no happier, and no more complete than those whose minds have contained their picture.” David Grene, Greek Political Theory (Chicago: Phoenix House, 1965), p. 194.
4Translated by Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead, http://sacredtexts.com/cla/aesch/promet.htm.
5Iliad 9.189.
6See Charles H. Kahn, “Aeschines on Socratic Eros,” in The Socratic Movement, ed. Paul A. Vanderwaerdt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 90.
7One story told by Plutarch is that, when Alcibiades was fighting with another little boy who had wrestled him to the ground, he bit his finger. “You bite, like a woman,” the boy said. “No,” answered Alcibiades, “like a lion.”
8http://www.cracked.com/funny-5516-alcibiades/. I recommend the whole Cracked article on Alcibiades.
9In the chariot races it was the person who paid for the chariot and driver, rather than the driver, who won the prize.
10Herodotus writes of this famous curse in Histories, Book V. In 632 B.C.E., an Olympic victor named Cylon decided to parlay his fame into political power, attempting to become the tyrant of Athens. He and his followers attempted to seize the Acropolis, but their attack failed and so they sought sanctuary at the goddess’s temple, which meant that they could not be attacked so long as they were suppliants of the goddess. But a member of the Alcmaeonid family violated their sanctuary, telling them to come down and be judged and they would be safe. The story is that they came down, but kept themselves attached to the sanctuary by a rope or thread, but when that broke, it was taken by the Alcmaeonidae to be a sign from the goddess that she did not offer her protection, and they killed the failed tyrant and his supporters, thus incurring the curse. For some time, they were banished from Athens.
11Pericles had explicitly shifted the focus of exceptionalism to the polis, collectivizing both the burden and the glory of superiority. “To be hated and to cause pain is, at present, the reality for anyone who takes on the rule of others, and anyone who makes himself hated for matters of great consequence has made the right decision; for hatred does not last long, but the momentary brilliance of great actions lives on as a glory that will be remembered forever after.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, ii, 64, trans. Woodruff. See Appendix B.) Alcibiades just as explicitly shifts the focus of exceptionalism back to the individual—specifically to him—translating the burden and the glory into personal terms. The short-lived enmity of the envious is focused on him: “What I know is that persons of this kind and all others that have attained to any distinction, although they may be unpopular in their lifetime in their relations with their fellow-men and especially with their equals, leave to posterity the desire of claiming connection with them even without any ground, and are vaunted by the country to which they belonged, not as strangers or ill-doers, but as fellow-countrymen and heroes” (Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, vi, 61, trans. Woodruff). The reverse mirroring of the language Pericles had employed is noteworthy.
12Alcibiades, with all his daring, and Nicias, who was very cautious, had taken opposite positions on the subject of invasion, so they were appointed co-generals. To break any ties on the field, Lamachus was appointed co-general with authority equal to that of the other two.
13See Debra Nails, The People of Plato, pp. 17–20, for a list of sources and a summary of the events.
14Thucydides vi, 61.
15Plutarch, Parallel Lives, “The Life of Alcibiades,” 6.2, vol. IV of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1916.
16Plutarch (ca. 45–120 C.E.) was a Platonist who had studied at the Academy, though he lived centuries after the events of the fifth century B.C.E., a reason that he can’t be altogether trusted. He includes many salacious details about Alcibiades’ life, which I have left out as unreliable, though, again, they’re a lot of fun. He had a truly wonderful job: he was one of the two priests on duty at the Delphic oracle, who interpreted the Pythia’s ravings. Not only was this interesting work, but it seemed to have left him a lot of time for writing.
17Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.4.20.
18Plato’s dialogue Laches features both of these generals in conversation with Socrates and deals with the nature of courage.
19Thucydides, vi, 92.
20Thucydides, too, regarded the Macedonians as barbarians, not Greeks. They were, in Greek eyes, barbaric, as we use the term, savage and uncouth. They hadn’t gone through the civilizing steps that not only Athens but all the poleis had worked out for transfers of power. In Macedonia those transfers were regularly effected by way of assassination. (It’s still a matter of speculation how far down the line of Macedonian kings this practice continued. Philip II’s suspiciously sudden death might have been the handiwork of his son, Alexander.) The Greek system of independent poleis, the very context for the Greek notion of aretē, was a thing as foreign and unintelligible to the Macedonians as the Gre
ek language itself.
21This is not to say that the Greek polis ceased to function, however. “The Macedon conquest of Greece put an end to the oppression of one Greek city by another, both because of Macedon’s overwhelming military power and because Macedon conquests outside Greece removed the potential for using international power politics to cajole cities into preferring subordination for the known quantity of another Greek city, rather than to the uncertain quantity of a foreign power. But for many Greek cities, loss of an independent foreign policy was nothing new, and the characteristic life of the Greek city-state continued long after Philip of Macedon’s establishment of the League of Corinth in 338 B.C.” Robin Osborne, Greek History (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3–4.
22Lord Byron, who is in so many ways reminiscent of Alcibiades, took up the cause of Greek autonomy, and spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet to attack the Ottoman Empire, planning, despite his lack of military experience, to lead the charge together with Alexandros Mayrokordatos, a Greek politician and military leader. He became ill before his plans could be fulfilled, but he’s still revered in Greece, with Vyron a popular name for boys and Vyronas, a suburb of Athens, named after him.
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