First Alcibiades

He is extremely proud of his good looks, noble birth, many friends, possessions and his connection to Pericles, the leader of the Athenian state.

Prodded by Socrates’ questioning, Alcibiades admits that he has never learned the nature of justice from a master nor has discovered it by himself.

Later they agree that man has to follow the advice of the famous Delphic phrase: gnōthi seautón meaning know thyself.

[6] Julia Annas, in supporting the authenticity of Rival Lovers, saw both dialogues as laying the foundation for ideas Plato would later develop in Charmides.

Nicholas Denyer suggests that it was written in the 350s BC, when Plato, back in Athens, could reflect on the similarities between Dionysius II of Syracuse (as we know him from the Seventh Letter) and Alcibiades — two young men interested in philosophy but compromised by their ambition and faulty early education.

[7] This hypothesis requires skepticism about what is usually regarded as the only fairly certain result of Platonic stylometry, Plato's marked tendency to avoid hiatus in the six dialogues widely believed to have been composed in the period to which Denyer assigns First Alcibiades (Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws).

[8] A compromise solution to the difficult issues of dating attending the linguistic features of First Alcibiades has also been sought in the hypothesis that the first two-thirds of the dialogue was written by some other member of the Platonic Academy, whose efforts were completed by Plato himself in his late-middle period.

Bluck, although unimpressed by previous arguments against the dialogue's authenticity, tentatively suggests a date after the end of Plato's life, approximately 343/2 BC, based especially on "a striking parallelism between the Alcibiades and early works of Aristotle, as well as certain other compositions that probably belong to the same period as the latter.