The Life of Alcibiades
The Life of Alcibiades

Author: Jacqueline de Romilly

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1501739964

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This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450–404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city—and his tumultuous age. Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.

Nemesis
Nemesis

Author: David Stuttard

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-04-16

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0674919661

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Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.

Alcibiades
Alcibiades

Author: P. J. Rhodes

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1848849826

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The renowned classicist presents an authoritative biography of one of the most infamous and colorful characters of Ancient Greece. A charismatic Athenian and close associate of Socrates, Alcibiades came to prominence during the Peloponnesian War when he helped form an alliance against Sparta. Although his gambit led to defeat, his prestige remained high, and he was elected to lead the Sicilian Expedition of 415 BC. Shortly after arrival in Sicily, however, Alcibiades was recalled to face charges of sacrilege allegedly committed during his pre-expedition reveling. Jumping ship on the return journey, he defected to the Spartans. Alcibiades quickly ingratiated himself with the Spartans, helping them to victory against his former countrymen. But he soon overstepped the bounds of hospitality by sleeping with the Spartan queen. On the run again, he began to play a dangerous game of shifting loyalties. He had a hand in engineering the overthrow of democracy at Athens in favor of an oligarchy, which allowed him to return from exile, though he then opposed the extreme excesses of that regime. For a time, Alcibiades restored Athens' fortunes in the war, but was soon forced into exile once again. This time he took refuge with the Persians, but as they were now allied to the Spartans, the cuckolded King Agis was able to arrange his assassination by Persian agents.

Alcibiades (Routledge Revivals)
Alcibiades (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Walter M. Ellis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 131774683X

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In Alcibiades, first published in 1989, one of the most colourful and controversial figures of fifth-century Athens is presented in a sympathetic light. The author sets out to demonstrate how, in his manipulation of the Spartan representatives in 420 BC, in his successful formation of an Athenian-Argive alliance, and in his plan for the conquest of Syracuse, Alcibiades developed a style of leadership that was characterised by audacity, ingenuity and skilful diplomacy. Further, his outstanding generalship during the Hellespontine War prompts speculation on how the Sicilian expedition might have ended had he also been in command. In many respects the story of Alcibiades is the history of Athens in the twilight of its power; Alcibiades succeeds in constructing a continuous narrative of his political career without duplicating more conventional accounts, always focussing on his involvement in the course of the Peloponnesian War and his troubled relationship with his Athenian compatriots.

Socrates and Alcibiades
Socrates and Alcibiades

Author: Ariel Helfer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0812249135

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In Socrates and Alcibiades, Ariel Helfer provides a new interpretation of Plato's account of the relationship between Socrates and the infamous Athenian general Alcibiades, in the process revealing a complex Platonic teaching on the nature and corruptibility of political ambition.

Plato: Alcibiades
Plato: Alcibiades

Author: Plato

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-09-06

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521634144

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The first modern edition of Plato's Alcibiades, aimed at both students and scholars.

Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts
Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts

Author: David Johnson

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1585104655

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Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts gathers together translations our four most important sources for the relationship between Socrates and the most controversial man of his day, the gifted and scandalous Alcibiades. In addition to Alcibiades’ famous speech from Plato’s Symposium, this text includes two dialogues, the Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II, attributed to Plato in antiquity but unjustly neglected today, and the complete fragments of the dialogue Alcibiades by Plato’s contemporary, Aeschines of Sphettus. These works are essential reading for anyone interested in Socrates’ improbable love affair with Athens’ most desirable youth, his attempt to woo Alcibiades from his ultimately disastrous worldly ambitions to the philosophical life, and the reasons for Socrates’ failure, which played a large role in his conviction by an Athenian court on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate audience.

The Ambition to Rule
The Ambition to Rule

Author: Steven Forde

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1501745786

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This book is a fresh examination of Thucydides' treatment of Alcibiades in his History of the Peloponnesian War, Alcibiades' significance in the History, and his relation to Thucydides' political themes.

Xenophon’s Peloponnesian War
Xenophon’s Peloponnesian War

Author: Aggelos Kapellos

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-09-23

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 3110668319

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The advances in Xenophontic studies of the last generation have still not resulted in a definitive literary treatment of the Hellenica 1-2, so Xenophon’s description of the Peloponnesian War deserves closer examination. This book aims to show that Xenophon has crafted his narrative in such a way as to reinforce the opinion of Thucydides, whose work he continued, that the development of the Peloponnesian War depended to a great extent on Persian money, but the factors that ultimately determined its outcome were the moral virtues and the skills of the military leaders of Athens and Sparta. Regarding Athens, Xenophon wants to show that despite Persia’s support of Sparta, Athens lost the war because of its troubled relationship with Alcibiades; the moral disintegration of the Athenians who condemned illegally the Arginousai generals and the appointment of generals who were greatly inferior. Concerning Sparta, Xenophon leads his readers to believe that in spite of- not because of- the interference of Persia in the Peloponnesian War the moral and military qualities of Lysander and Callicratidas were what turned the course of the war either in favor of or against Sparta in each phase of the war.