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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: help; or that he should have imagined that a mighty nature like his could
have been reformed by a few not very conclusive words of Socrates. For the
arguments by which Alcibiades is reformed are not convincing; the writer of
the dialogue, whoever he was, arrives at his idealism by crooked and
tortuous paths, in which many pitfalls are concealed. The anachronism of
making Alcibiades about twenty years old during the life of his uncle,
Pericles, may be noted; and the repetition of the favourite observation,
which occurs also in the Laches and Protagoras, that great Athenian
statesmen, like Pericles, failed in the education of their sons. There is
none of the undoubted dialogues of Plato in which there is so little
dramatic verisimilitude.
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