In this essay I will be arguing that, late in his career, Nietzsche viewed Socrates as the most profound exemplar of what he called a “Caesarian cultivator”— the strongest type of human being who can come to be in an age of cultural decline (BGE §207). Rendering that somewhat controversial thesis plausible, however, is only the secondary goal of my essay. What, in the context of the governing theme of this volume, I am more interested in rendering plausible, is the interpretive method I employ to argue for that thesis. I will offer a reading of the “Problem of Socrates” section of Twilight of the Idols that stresses a profound intertextual relationship between Nietzsche's apparently polemical treatment of Socrates and the Urbild for any such apparent polemic against Socrates, Alcibiades' ambiguous encomium to Socrates in Plato's Symposium. We know from an essay written during his time at Schulpforta, entitled “On the Relationship of Alcibiades' Speech to the Other Speeches in Plato's Symposium,” that the young Nietzsche considered Alcibiades' speech to be the key to understanding the Symposium. We also know that the dialogue was his professed Lieblingsdichtung at that time. Moreover, as James Porter has recently stressed, the Symposium provides “a virtual leitmotif” for The Birth of Tragedy and the Nachlass materials related to its creation. I want to suggest that a similar intertextual relationship exists between Alcibiades' speech in the Symposium and the “Problem of Socrates” section of Twilight of the Idols—a work in which Nietzsche explicitly claims to be returning to the insights first expressed in The Birth of Tragedy.