Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato's Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy

In the classical world, political ambition posed an intractable problem. Ancient Greek democracies fostered in their most promising youths a tension-ridden combination of the desire for personal glory and deep-seated public-spiritedness in hopes of producing brilliant and capable statesmen. But as much as active civic engagement was considered among the highest goods by the Greek citizenry, the attempt to harness the love of glory to the good of the city inevitably produced notoriously ambi...