A dialogue in which Socrates warns Alcibiades that praying to the gods without wisdom is dangerous, since ignorance can make us pray for our own ruin.
Alcibiades 2 (also called On Prayer) is a short Socratic dialogue set as Socrates meets Alcibiades on his way to the temple to pray. Socrates stops him with a disturbing question: since the gods sometimes grant prayers and sometimes refuse them, might it not be safer, before praying, to make sure we know what we are actually asking for? Using the example of Oedipus, who cursed his own sons in what he took to be a prayer for justice, Socrates argues that most people pray in ignorance, asking the gods for things that will destroy them while believing they are asking for goods.
The conversation moves through Socrates's characteristic method of drawing analogies from health and craft-knowledge: just as illness is a broader category than any particular sickness, senselessness is a broader condition than any particular kind of folly, and it afflicts far more people, including statesmen and generals, than anyone assumes. Socrates presses Alcibiades to see that public speakers who advise cities on war, peace, walls, and harbors are for the most part offering only opinion dressed up as knowledge, and that a city or a soul that wants to live well must cling to genuine knowledge of what is best the way a sick man clings to his doctor.
The dialogue closes with a story about the Spartans, who once asked the Delphic oracle how to relieve their troubles and were told, in effect, that lavish sacrifices count for nothing against injustice, and that only the just and wise know how to act and speak rightly toward gods and men. Alcibiades, unsettled, decides to postpone his sacrifice until he has been crowned by Socrates with wisdom rather than a garland alone. Alcibiades 2 is widely regarded by scholars as spurious, likely composed by a later member of the Academy rather than Plato himself, but it circulated in antiquity as part of the Platonic corpus and addresses a genuinely Socratic worry: that ritual without understanding is not just useless but risky.
“don't you think that the gods, when it comes to what we pray for, privately and publicly, sometimes grant some of it and not the rest”
— Alcibiades 2 · read this chapter →
“everyone with a fever is sick, but not everyone who's sick has a fever, or gout, or an eye disease, I imagine”
— Alcibiades 2 · read this chapter →
“how many who desired a generalship and won it are, some of them, still exiles from this city today, and others have lost their lives”
— Alcibiades 2 · read this chapter →
“You keep shifting back and forth without ever stopping; whatever seems best to you at one moment, you slip right out of it and no longer think the same thing”
— Alcibiades 2 · read this chapter →
“the gods, since they can't be bribed, look down on all of this, as the god and his prophet say”
— Alcibiades 2 · read this chapter →
It is a Socratic dialogue about the dangers of praying without wisdom. Socrates convinces Alcibiades, who is on his way to the temple, that asking the gods for things while ignorant of what is truly good can bring ruin rather than benefit, as it did for Oedipus.
Most modern scholars consider it spurious, probably written by a later Academic rather than Plato himself, though it was transmitted in antiquity as part of the Platonic corpus alongside the genuine Alcibiades 1.
Socrates cites Oedipus as an example of someone who prayed in anger for what he thought was justice but was actually cursing his own sons to their doom, showing how ignorance can turn a prayer into self-destruction.
It illustrates that the gods value justice and wisdom far above costly sacrifices and ritual, since sacrifices offered by the unjust are worthless and the gods cannot be bribed by wealth or ceremony.
He is the young, ambitious, and famously indecisive Athenian statesman and Socrates's companion, shown here still unsettled about what he truly wants and willing to postpone his sacrifice until he gains wisdom.
That knowledge of what is genuinely good must come before both prayer and action, because without it, favorable fortune, wealth, or public honor only magnifies the errors that follow from ignorance.
Alcibiades 1 · Apology · Charmides · Cleitophon · Cratylus · Critias · Crito · Epinomis · Euthydemus · Euthyphro · Gorgias · Hipparchus