Reading room

First Alcibiades

Socrates

Socrates approaches the young Alcibiades, about to enter politics, and shows him that he does not know the just and the advantageous he claims to teach the Athenians. Before ruling others he must take care of himself, and the "self" is the soul, which knows itself by looking into another soul as the eye sees itself in the pupil of another eye. The Neoplatonists read it as the introduction to the whole of Plato's philosophy.