In his famous outburst before the gathered men of the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades declare that behind his ‘Silenus-like’ mask, Socrates is full of ‘divine and golden images’. He can see the gold where others see only the mask, and it is this which makes Alcibiades so desperate for the old man’s approbation. 

Alcibiades comes, like many students, to describe the way he feels for his old master as ‘love’. What he is really grappling with is something altogether more fragile: the sense of mentorship. The closeness of a teacher is sometimes more intense, and more confusing, than love. It is also a rare thing, growing rarer in proportion to the institutionalisation of education.