Alcibiades I
The most intimate of Plato's dialogues begins with a young man who has everything: beauty, breeding, wealth, and the charisma that will one day make him one of Athens' most consequential politicians. Alcibiades sits beside Socrates, confident he already knows what it takes to lead. What follows is a quiet demolition. Through characteristic questioning, Socrates strips away the politician's assumptions about justice, virtue, and wisdom, revealing that ambition without self-knowledge is just polished ignorance wearing expensive clothes. The dialogue's power lies not in dramatic confrontation but in its quiet, relentless logic: how can you advise the city on what you have never examined in yourself? Written likely as Plato's public career began, this work asks what the Symposium only hints at: not just what love should be, but what kind of person deserves to govern. It endures because it poses the question every generation must answer anew: what actually qualifies someone to hold power?
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“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.””
— Plato
“...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...””
— Plato
“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.””
— Plato
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.””
— Plato
“Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.””
— Plato
“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.””
— Plato
“He whom loves touches not walks in darkness.””
— Plato
“what if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;...would that be a life to disregard?””
— Plato
“...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.””
— Plato
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