Refining Golden

Many people know that Plato was perhaps the most important philosopher ever. Few remember that he was also what we would call a high school teacher at his school, the Academy. Many of his dialogues, particularly rich in warmth and human decency, appear to have been written for his teenage students. Plato obviously loved kids and wanted to help them find the worthwhile and joyous adult lives they dreamed of. There are two ancient dialogues named "Alcibiades" and attributed to Plato. The second one, the "Alcibiades II," was almost certainly not written by Plato. This one, the "Alcibiades I," was always regarded as genuine among ancient scholars and was generally used as the first text for introducing high schoolers to Plato. Alcibiades, the man for whom the dialogue was named, was a hated historical character in Athens-a traitor. In the middle of the Peloponnesian War he had defected to the Spartans and given them intelligence and strategic advice that ultimately resulted in Sparta's defeat of the Athenian democracy. In this dialogue, though, Plato imagines the promising kid Alcibiades had once been: just on the verge of manhood, unreasonably self-confident and ambitious, arrogant and annoying. But in this brief dialogue Socrates uses what we might call an intellectual refining process to reveal in the kid a core of gold that Athenian society had failed to recognize and value: a good heart that longed for genuine greatness, a willingness to recognize and regret his own ignorance and lack of preparation, and a hunger to be better than he was. This translation was written specifically for high school kids by Frank Kaput, fictional University of Chicago Ph. D., former fictional Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale, and currently (and presumably eternally) a fictional teacher at Dry Springs High School in Gradgrind, Ohio. The translation plays an important role in the plot of "The Falconer's Call: The Knights of the Round Table at Dry Springs High" by Steve Hays, a scholar of Classical Greek, now retired from Ohio University. Despite its fictive origins, this translation is a serious one. Its particular goal is to guide contemporary kids through the reasoning that the students in Plato's Academy would have discovered in the Greek original. To that end this translation strips out the distractions of culturally exotic details and elaborates lines of thought that would have been apparent to kids in Plato's Academy, but would not be to modern American kids. "The Falconer's Call" functions as a companion volume to this text, showing how some modern students were affected by contemplating Plato's ideas.