This dialogue is carried on between Sokrates and Alkibiades. It introduces Alkibiades as about twenty years of age, having just passed through the period of youth, and about to enter on the privileges and duties of a citizen. The real dispositions and circumstances of the historical Alkibiades (magnificent personal beauty, stature, and strength, high family and connections, great wealth already possessed, since his father had died when he was a child,--a full measure of education and accomplishments--together with exorbitant ambition and insolence, derived from such accumulated advantages) are brought to view in the opening address of Sokrates. Alkibiades, during the years of youth which he had just passed, had been surrounded by admirers who tried to render themselves acceptable to him, but whom he repelled with indifference, and even with scorn. Sokrates had been among them, constantly present and near to Alkibiades, but without ever addressing a word to him. The youthful beauty being now exchanged for manhood, all these admirers had retired, and Sokrates alone remains. His attachment is to Alkibiades himself: to promise of mind rather than to attractions of person. Sokrates has been always hitherto restrained, by his divine sign or Dæmon, from speaking to Alkibiades. But this prohibition has now been removed; and he accosts him for the first time, in the full belief that he shall be able to give improving counsel, essential to the success of that political career upon which the youth is about to enter.[1] [Footnote 1: Plato, Alkib. i. 103, 104, 105. Perikles is supposed to be still alive and political leader of Athens--104 B. I have briefly sketched the imaginary situation to which this dialogue is made to apply. The circumstances of it belong to Athenian manners of the Platonic age. Some of the critics, considering that the relation supposed between Sokrates and Alkibiades is absurd and unnatural, allege this among their reasons for denying the authenticity of the dialogue. But if any one reads the concluding part of the Symposion--the authenticity of which has never yet been denied by any critic--he will find something a great deal more abnormal in what is there recounted about Sokrates and Alkibiades. In a dialogue composed by Æschines Socraticus (cited by the rhetor Aristeides--[Greek: Peri\ R(êtorikê=s], Or. xlv. p. 23-24), expressions of intense love for Alkibiades are put into the mouth of Sokrates. Æschines was [Greek: gnê/sios e(tai=ros Sôkra/tous], not less than Plato. The different companions of Sokrates thus agreed in their picture of the relation between him and Alkibiades.] [Side-note: Exorbitant hopes and political ambition of Alkibiades.]