Abstract

The chapter relates Alcibiades's speech in the Symposium to the dialogue Alcibiades I. I believe, the encomium on Socrates in the Symposium should be interpreted together with the Alcibiades I. There, Plato offers a fuller picture of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, one that gives a possible explanation of Alcibiades' failure and moral collapse, while keeping Socrates' position as a moral teacher intact. This approach presupposes that Plato wrote some of the dialogues in a deliberate order of the fictional chronology. Interpreting the Symposium together with the Alcibiades I allows me then to make a broader claim concerning Plato's conception of the personal self.