Is it possible for a good life to combine seeking renown, living extravagantly, and striving to advance the public good? Can political ambition and goodness coexist, even enhance each other when mingled? How might this be attained? This book proposes that an examination of Plato’s portrayal of the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates is a good place to think through these questions in political theory. In particular, Ariel Helfer proposes to read the Alcibiades I and II and the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium as a set that, when taken together, offer a clever depiction of the distinctively Socratic practice of trying to direct, curb, and inspire an ambitious young man’s desires.

The figure of Alcibiades in the Platonic corpus is a good anchor for these questions. Reviewing just some of what is known about the historical figure with whom the Athenians were, “alternately, besotted and infuriated” (Debra Nails, People of Plato, 2001, p. 13) should make this clear. Alcibiades was raised by his uncle Pericles after the death of his own father in combat. Already as a youth, his physical beauty, social standing, verbal acuity, athleticism, ambition, and taste for extravagance made him something of a celebrity. While still young he became enamored of Socrates. They served as hoplites (armed infantry soldiers) together in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Soon after they returned from that deployment to plague-ravaged Athens, Pericles died. In the following years, an eager Alcibiades spoke out in the assembly and appears to have sought a military command of Athenian forces at the earliest age allowed by law. In addition to his military service and while the war raged, he dramatically sponsored multiple victorious chariots at the Olympic Games.

Perhaps most memorably, Thucydides portrays Alcibiades whipping up an extraordinary measure of enthusiasm among the Athenians for the expansionist Sicilian Expedition and successfully seeking election as a general in charge of the campaign—only to be recalled to Athens while still in route to Sicily with the fleet to stand trial for impiety. He fled to the enemy camp (to Sparta and later to the Persian Court) and was convicted in abstentia, his property seized and sold. While he actively assisted the enemies of Athens (using deceit and trickery to gain military advantages over his own fellow citizens), after the oligarchic episode of 411 bce collapsed he was urged to return to Athens and take up a military command. He did and seems to have been exonerated and to have again commanded troops. New military successes eluded him, however, and it appears that he was assassinated by Spartan sympathizers in 404 bce. When the Athenians punished an aged Socrates in 399 bce for having “corrupted the youth” and, by implication, for bearing some measure of responsibility for the disasters suffered by Athens throughout the long war, the example of his well-known relationship with Alcibiades as a youth was surely among the things on their minds.

Helfer assumes the reader’s knowledge of this background. His argument is that Plato intends the three texts as a set to supply an account of Socrates’ efforts to influence the development of Alcibiades’ attitude toward “political ambition.” The book walks the reader through Socrates’ scrutiny of the youthful Alcibiades’ own views of courage, the demos, honor, rhetoric, fame, and such in the Alcibiades I and II. Then Helfer pauses to puzzle over the fate of that “education” in evidence in Alcibiades’ drunken speech about Socrates depicted in the Symposium (set around 15 years after the action of the two eponymous dialogues featuring the youthful Alcibiades and close in time to Alcibiades’ greatest moment of apparent personal triumph in politics—the Athenians’ embrace of his advice regarding the merits of the massive Sicilian Expedition and his election as its main commander). Plato’s Symposium presents the speeches it recounts as quite memorable since the narrator is recalling them more than a decade later and within weeks of Socrates’ own death.

Helfer stresses that the content and setting of these texts support reading Plato’s picture of Socrates and Alcibiades together as exemplary of the “two-sidedness of the best nature” (Laws 908b4-d7). And Helfer shows that it is possible to see the portrait of Socrates’ efforts to engage the youthful Alcibiades as a model of the Socratic project of trying to “educate” a corrupted philosophic nature (Republic 495a1-b6). The book painstakingly reconstructs Socrates’ critical engagement with the youthful Alcibiades’ views of ambition, tracking patterns across texts. The apparent “turbulence of his Socratic education” (p. 205 n. 13), not the events of his life, is the “drama” of Helfer’s title. The looming possibility of tyrannical power is its antagonist.

Somewhat puzzlingly, why the Alcibiades I and II were for so long considered spurious is passed over very quickly. More sustained critical attention to the history of scholarship might have been revealing. Expectations aroused by the image on the book’s jacket (Edward Armitage, The Siren, 1888) are unmet; there is no effort to weave into the discussion any commentary on the reception history of the Platonic portrait of the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates in the postclassical arts (performing, visual, or literary), even though these traditions have, over centuries, addressed the role of Socrates as Alcibiades’ “teacher,” as well as Alcibiades’ own political ambitions and the pair’s unconventional eroticism. There is also very little discussion of any of the other ancient portraits of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades beyond his selected three texts. As a result, how Plato might be trying to intervene in the shaping of a public memory of this relationship or attempting to use the story of Alcibiades to add dimensions to public discourse in his own time (maybe introduce a discussion of politics and celebrity?) is not on Helfer’s agenda. This study is also inattentive to the human costs associated with the martial dimensions of the particular cast of political ambition it takes as given (as well as Plato’s possible interest in such issues).

All in all, Socrates and Alcibiades achieves the goal it sets out for itself. It is careful to map the twists and turns of Socrates’ questioning of Alcibiades regarding an ambitious person’s understanding of how to manage his relations with the demos. The study’s detachment from critique leaves the reader to wonder if Helfer’s reading of the practice of Socratic education engages contemporary thinking about the allure of tyranny to the would-be tyrant, to his minions, and, frighteningly, sometimes to a mass public today.