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Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael Vickers challenges this view and argues that Sophocles makes regular and extensive allusion to Athenian politics in his plays, especially to Alcibiades, one of the most controversial Athenian politicians of his day.Vickers shows that Sophocles was no closeted intellectual but a man deeply involved in politics and he reminds us that Athenian politics was intensely personal. He argues cogently that classical writers employed hidden meanings and that consciously or sub-consciously, Sophocles was projecting onto his plays hints of contemporary events or incidents, mostly of a political nature, hoping that his audience's passion for politics would enhance the popularity of his plays. Vickers strengthens his case about Sophocles by discussing other authors - Thucydides, Plato and Euripides - in whom he also demonstrates a body of allusions to Alcibiades and others.
The conventional view of Aristophanes bristles with problems. Important testimony for Alcibiades’ paramount role in comedy is consistently disregarded, and the tradition that “masks were made to look like the komodoumenoi, so that before an actor spoke a word, the audience would recognize who was being attacked” is hardly ever invoked. If these testimonia are taken into account, a fascinating picture emerges, where the komodoumenoi are based on the Periclean household: older characters on Pericles himself, younger on Alcibiades. Aspasia, Pericles’ mistress, and Hipparete, Alcibiades’ wife, lie behind many female characters, and Alcibiades’ ambiguous sexuality also allows him to be shown on the stage as a woman, notably as Lysistrata. There is a substantial overlap between the anecdotal tradition relating to the historical figures and the plotting of Aristophanes’ plays. This extends to speech patterns, where Alcibiades’ speech defect is lampooned. Aristophanes is consistently critical of Alcibiades’ mercurial politics, and his works can also be seen to have served as an aide-mémoire for Thucydides and Xenophon. If the argument presented here is correct, then much current scholarship on Aristophanes can be set aside.
At the beginning of the second century C.E., Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote a series of pairs of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. Their purpose is moral: the reader is invited to reflect on important ethical issues and to use the example of these great men from the past to improve his or her own conduct. This book off ers the first full-scale commentary on the Life of Alcibiades. It examines how Plutarch's biography of one of classical Athens' most controversial politicians functions within the moral program of the Parallel Lives. Built upon the narratological distinction between story and text, Simon Verdegem's analysis, which involves detailed comparisons with other Plutarchan works (especially the Lives of Nicias and Lysander) and several key texts in the Alcibiades tradition (e.g., Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon), demonstrates how Plutarch carefully constructed his story and used a wide range of narrative techniques to create a complex Life that raises interesting questions about the relation between private morality and the common good.
Three children try to catch an escaped cat.
Is he just a troublemaker with an attitude? Or will this spunky youth grow up to do something great? The populace of Athens holds varied opinions about Alcibiades, a handsome boy who exhibits a devious and audacious personality. Based on historical record, author Jack Meyer reconstructs the life of Alcibiades, a man who uniquely impacted classical Athens during the Peloponnesian War. An orphan, Alcibiades grew up in the household of Pericles, was Socrates' favorite student, and was immensely handsome and rich. This narrative tells the story of the stunning career of this brilliant tactical military commander, persuasive orator, and consummate traitor who switched sides three times during the war. The city's own favorite son, this product of the Golden Age, was a man as morally corrupt as he was convincingly eloquent. The reconstruction of Alcibiades' story breeds both fiction and farce, and this story of the Greek experience serves as an analogue for a critique of today's American foreign policy.
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.
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.
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.