Platonic allusion in Plutarch's Alcibiades 4-7

Duff, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7000-4950 (2011) Platonic allusion in Plutarch's Alcibiades 4-7. In: Millett, P., Oakley, S. P. and Thompson, R. J. E. (eds.) Ratio et res ipsa: Classical essays presented by former pupils to James Diggle on his retirement. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society supplement (36). The Cambridge Philological Society, Cambridge, pp. 27-43. ISBN 9780956838117

Abstract/Summary

Plutarch deals with Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades in chs. 4-7 of his Life. He draws heavily here on two Platonic works, the First Alcibiades and the Symposium, but engagement with the Platonic texts is denser and more profound in Alcibiades than a study of just those two texts would suggest. In fact, this part of the Alcibiades contains allusions to several other Platonic texts in which Alcibiades does not occur as a character and in which his name is not mentioned: Republic Books 6 and 8, Charmides, Phaedrus, Apology, and Lysis. These texts function as ‘intertexts’ against which the Alcibiades is to be read.