With this lecture we begin our study of Plato and his presentation of Socrates. Because we, too, are interested in becoming the students of Socrates, we will begin by looking at the way Plato presents Socrates as a teacher of students, actual or potential. The most obvious place to begin is with Socrates’s attempts to teach Alcibiades, a historical figure who went on to have an astounding—and highly controversial—political career in the Peloponnesian War. Plato devotes four dialogues to Socrates’s relationship with Alcibiades, and we will look at each of these, paying particular attention to the Alcibiades I and to Alcibiades’s famous speech about Socrates, recorded in Plato’s Symposium. Since Alcibiades makes plain that Socrates ultimately disappointed him, and vice versa, we have to try to discover precisely what Socrates attempted to teach Alcibiades, and what he in turn failed to learn from Socrates.