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Similarities and verbal allusions that link the letters of Nicias in Thucydides (7.11-15) and Pompey in Sallust (Hist. 2.98M) prompt a comparison of the two men and their situations; but the contrasts that emerge from this comparison also invite the reader to observe how different the men were, and then to read through these differences to note the similarities between Pompey and Nicias's rival Alcibiades, who turned against his own city. The subsequent comparison of the recipients of the letters and their responses — Athenian democrats and Roman senators — shows a contrast even more extreme, for the former were united, strong, and public-spirited; the latter fracturing, weak, and self-centred. The contrasts that finally emerge from both comparisons suggest a fundamental parallel intended by both authors: the impending death of language, descent into ferocious action, and doom of civil war for both polities.

This chapter challenges the rather common view that Hellenistic-Roman thought shows a shift towards a more subjective and individualistic conception of self. It argues that this period expresses an ‘objective-participant’ conception, like that of Classical Greece. The account of self-knowledge in Plato’s Alcibiades is offered as an illustration of Classical Greek objective-participant thinking about the self. The chapter contests the idea, maintained by some scholars, that we find a shift towards a more subjective conception of self in the Stoic theory of development as appropriation or in Epictetus’ Stoic teachings on practical ethics. It also questions the idea that we can find in ancient thought generally certain themes associated in modern thought with subjective conceptions of selfhood, especially that of the uniquely ‘first-personal’ viewpoint; this point is illustrated by reference to Cyrenaic and Sceptical thought about impressions.

This chapter examines the democracy of classical Athens. It shows the remarkable power of a citizenry to restrict overweening individuality in its ceremonial life, but also shows the lingering potential for infatuation with kingly charisma. This can be seen in abundance in the broader Hellenistic world.

This chapter compares the treatment of Socrates by Christian writers of the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD with that by pagan authors of the same period. The Christians divided between those who regarded Socrates as a forerunner of Christianity and those who saw him — in common with the pagan world as a whole — as subject to the powers of darkness. This division focused on one phenomenon in particular, Socrates' ‘divine sign’, which those favourable to him saw as a mark of divine favour, while those opposed regarded it as an evil familiar spirit. While those writers derived their contrasting views of Socrates from their religious ideology, the pagan writers were interested in him less as a figure of doctrinal significance than as a moral exemplar and source of improving and/or entertaining anecdote. While much of this material is favourable to Socrates, there are some traces of a hostility which is absent from the major Socratic writers, and which appears to derive from a tradition of hostility to philosophy in general.

This chapter focuses on one of the first sustained encounters with Platonic sexuality, Leonardo Bruni’s Latin translation of Alcibiades’s speech at the end of the Symposium. In the Catholic-inflected context in which he worked, it might seem odd that a Florentine Humanist such as Bruni would select one of the most homoerotic passages from the ancient world to translate. This chapter argues, however, that although Bruni cannot directly articulate a sexual hermeneutics, the translation itself articulates a reading strategy that he followed in doing the translation. Bruni’s theories in his seminal tract on translation (On Correct Translation, c.1420) correspond to his approach to same-sex sexuality in the translation itself.

This chapter focuses on the sixteenth-century reception of Alcibiades’s seduction speech in the Symposium. Erasmus is aware of the issue of homoerotics, particularly in The Handbook of the Christian Soldier and in the Adages, as he evokes homoeroticism to discount it. Erasmus’s attempts to establish hermeneutic closure in his version of the Silenic image, and expunge Socratic eros. His religious approach contrasts sharply with François Rabelais’s famous Silenus Box in the prologue to Gargantua, for which Erasmus’s adage is assumed to have served as textual model. Rabelais mocks Erasmus’s straightened-out version of the image through comic means, suggesting that the reading out of Socratic sexuality should itself be mocked as an anti-historical hermeneutic approach. In this sense, the French writer directly distinguishes himself from other Renaissance translations of Plato, including Ficino whom he knew directly, and may be commenting on through the medium of fiction.

Alcibiades had the right nature to become a philosopher-king. Yet despite having Socrates as a lover and teacher, he failed to become one. Through a close reading of the Symposium, this chapter shows how Plato came to understand this failure as primarily political in nature.

This chapter explores the lessons and implications that can be derived about grand ambition from Thucydides' Alcibiades. It first gives the context of Alcibiades, from his work as a strategist in the culminating war between Athens and Sparta, to his turning traitor to his homeland, democratic Athens, and eventually leading the monarchic Persia against both Athens and Sparta. As such, there is an inherent problem in free politics as well as in Alcibiades. Even though such a man desires superiority that would threaten a free order, it also remains true that a free order requires his superior qualities and yet is unable to tolerate them. In essence, Athens needed Alcibiades, and every time it drove him out, they faced disastrous military consequences. Thus the chapter surveys Thucydides' picture of Alcibiades and his political exploits, focusing also on the soul seen in the public effects of these exploits. In effect, it sets the stage for Plato's psychological diagnosis of Alcibiades.

This chapter further looks into the psychic makeup of the soul, based on the foundation and study of the character of Alcibiades discussed in the previous chapter. It looks at two dialogues—attributed to Plato—titled Alcibiades which shows Socrates, the master interrogator, twice confronting a masterful man who would rule the world and who had that desire to seek out and employ spectacularly imperial designs. The first Alcibiades dialogue looks at a promising and hopeful youth that has gleaming prospects of political success, whereas the second Alcibiades portrays a more seasoned individual in obscurity, one who is faced with problems and complications of tyranny. Both dialogues, however, share a certain essence of Alcibiades' desires to “fill practically all people with his name and power.” This chapter thus further explores the psyche of Alcidiabes' character and how these may or may not be attributed to other figures of greatness and ambition.

This chapter examines Alcibiades's place in Thucydides's reflections on freedom by focusing on his advocacy of the Sicilian expedition during the Peloponnesian War. During the sixteenth year of the war, the Athenians invaded the island of Melos. Soon after the Athenian forces destroyed Melos, the Athenian assembly voted to send an expedition to conquer a much larger island, Sicily, an expedition that proved to be disastrous for Athens and the beginning of the end of its empire. Thucydides traces the Sicilian expedition to a liberation of erōs that leads to disaster. This chapter first provides an overview of Athenian politics in the years following the Peace of Nicias before discussing Alcibiades's role in undermining Athens's peace with Sparta. It argues that the position of the Athenians at Melos reflects Alcibiades's politics.

This chapter examines Thucydides's account of the efforts of both Alcibiades and Nicias to return home once they leave Athens on the Sicilian expedition, along with the problems that their homecomings present for human freedom. Alcibiades is recalled home to stand trial for charges of impiety, but escapes to Sparta and conspires with the enemy so that he might repossess his city. Even then his goal is going home, as it is for Nicias with the expedition in Sicily. This chapter considers how Alcibiades negotiates with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, and specifically his attempt to show the Athenians that he is useful to them if he can bring them an alliance with Tissaphernes and Persia. It suggests that Thucydides, by making homecoming a theme, demonstrates the possibility of human action (and therefore the freedom it manifests) in response to time and place.

What healthy vegetables and rich meatstuffs are to Persius’ metaphorical division of poetry into good and bad, friendship and sexuality are to his discussion of pedagogy as itself morally charged for better or worse. In Satire 4, Persius takes on and reformulates Plato’s Alcibiades I, in which Socrates’ seductive ways are shown as reforming Alcibiades and making him ready to study philosophy. This satire challenges that happy picture by bringing in the Symposium to show up Alcibiades as a pedagogic failure, and both sexuality and dialectic are criticized as ineffective elements in the Platonic depiction of teaching philosophy. Instead, Persius praises the inwardly turned gaze of the Stoic student and, in Satire 5, demonstrates through the figure of Cornutus the kind of teacher that should replace Socrates as an ideal.

This chapter reviews the aspects of Plato and Sappho's reflections on love, pointing to similarities and differences between their visions of Eros. Love is a lacking and a reaching for more that mediates and moves between opposites. Diotima's love is a mediation moving between opposite terms but never reaching a static conclusion and always in a process of becoming. Alcibiades provides his own account of love. His speech is generally regarded as light comic relief following the more profound and serious Socratic image of philosophy as love of knowledge. Plato's Phaedrus like the Symposium speaks of love — though in the form of a conversation between two friends, Phaedrus and Socrates. Alcibiades' simultaneous passion for Socrates and for his wisdom, and the games of seduction and obstruction that Alcibiades and Socrates both employ indicate that seeking knowledge is not antithetical to, but rather facilitated by, erotic passions.

Benjamin Jowett, in his rendering of the Symposium, concedes the obvious as a condemnation: “It is impossible to deny that some of the best and greatest of the Greeks indulged in attachments, which Plato in the Laws, no less than the universal opinion of Christendom, has stigmatized as unnatural”. Daniel Boyarin's rereading of the Symposium brings us back to Jowett's claims. Boyarin's (Platonic) Socrates does condemn male–male copulation. This chapter looks at the juxtaposition of Alcibiades's courtship of Socrates with Saint Augustine's account of his “conversion” in Confessions, a piece of relatively early Christian writing full of consequences for Christian sex. In Socratic teaching, there are no unambiguous transits from the love of one body to all physical beauty, then to minds and customs or institutions and knowledge, so that one can swim at last in beauty itself. This chapter perceives in the highly ironized and powerfully seductive exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which the Symposium concludes an unsettling of the certainties of all of the prior speeches—not least Diotima's cited doctrine of radical sublimation.

Like comedy, Athenian forensic oratory provides insight into popular attitudes toward homosexual practices. The orators give a rich store of valuable information about Greek daily life and thus afford a glimpse into some details about the actual practice of Athenian pederasty not available elsewhere. Fragments from On the Mysteries, Against Teisis, Against Alcibiades, Against Simon, On the Estate of Aristarchus, Against Androtion, Against Timarchus, On the Corrupt Embassy, On the Embassy, Against Ctesiphon, Hyperides, Erotic Essay, and Leucippe and Clitophon are presented as well.

This chapter provides a background of Alcibiades. One quality is immediately apparent about Alcibiades: he is exceptionally gorgeous. All the sources speak of his beauty and describe all the love affairs in which he figures. It should be remembered that at that time beauty was a virtue, widely recognized and celebrated. Along with beauty, Alcibiades had charm and the power of seduction. He was a celebrity, the spoiled child of Athens, allowed to do whatever he pleased and admired for everything he did. Indeed, Alcibiades came from an aristocratic family, a fact not to be ignored even in the egalitarian democracy that governed Athens at the time. Around the middle of the fifth century BCE, powerful families were highly regarded and enjoyed considerable authority. Alcibiades came from the two largest of these families. He was thus born with every advantage, everything money could buy to advance his career, from an excellent education among the greatest minds to the means of achieving fame throughout the democracy. The chapter then describes the friendship between Alcibiades and Socrates.