SOCRATES. — Tell me, Alcibiades, in your best days were you ever possessed of all the faculties that you required or might have united to advantage? ALCIBIADES. — No: I have always wished to swim and ...

THE STRANGER. — I see, Alcibiades, how truly Socrates describes you when he tells us that you were the occasion of all his wisdom. “That goodfor-nothing boy,” he says, “is marvelously beautiful, and ...

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, ...

Alcibiades was born with pretty much everything. He was young and handsome and rich, the scion of one of Athens' most distinguished families, the Alcmaeonidae, who could trace their lineage back to ...

Alcibiades was a gifted politician and general, but he is ultimately remembered as a traitor to Athens for defecting to ...

Prologue I learned a few things about Plato in high school and in my university classes on ancient and medieval Greek history. I improved that meager ...

Boris Johnson believes himself to be a reincarnation of Winston Churchill. In fact he much more closely resembles a political figure of an earlier era, the charismatic Athenian chancer Alcibiades.

Though his disciple Plato always made strenuous efforts to point out that Socrates was no sophist, there were times when his challenges to common sense came very close to the pointless wordplay he so ...