{"id":44155,"date":"2018-07-15T05:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-07-15T09:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44155"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:41:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:41:33","slug":"alcibiades-the-athenian-byron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/15\/alcibiades-the-athenian-byron\/","title":{"rendered":"Alcibiades, the Athenian Byron"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not for poetry, but for the Byronian swathe he cut through a large portion of Classical Greece<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero\u2019s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of Samuel Johnson\u2019s conversation in Boswell\u2019s biography and know at once that he was magnificent, lovable and desperately unhappy. But as to what it was like to have Lord Byron turn the full force of his attention onto you \u2013 well, we have no conceivable way of knowing. We just have to trust his contemporaries that it felt like \u2018the opening of the gate of heaven\u2019.<\/p>\n

This causes problems for a biographer of Alcibiades. On the face of it, the man was utterly insufferable. Born in around 450 BC into one of the oldest and richest families of ancient Athens, Alcibiades was the only Old Etonian (as it were) to play a leading role in the late-fifth-century radical democracy. The account of his childhood in Plutarch\u2019s Life of Alcibiades<\/em> suggests a bad case of antisocial personality disorder: biting during wrestling, mutilating dogs, punching his future father-in-law in the face for a dare. His later political career makes Boris Johnson seem like a man of firm and unbending principle. Exiled from Athens in 415 BC over some particularly odious Bullingdon Club antics, Alcibiades promptly sold his services to Sparta (where he seduced the king\u2019s wife) before double-crossing both sides and wheedling his way into the court of a Persian satrap.<\/p>\n

But Alcibiades, like Byron, clearly had that indefinable something. One catches a glimpse of it in the unforgettable last scene of Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em>, when he crashes into the room, blind drunk, flirting with everything on legs, shouting about his love for Socrates. Thucydides captures it in his report of Alcibiades\u2019s speech whipping up the Athenian assembly to vote for the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415 BC \u2013 an extraordinary stew of egotistic bragging (about how successful his racehorses are), mendacious demagoguery and brilliantly acute strategic thinking. The unwashed Athenian masses, not usually prone to atavistic toff-grovelling, absolutely adored him: when Alcibiades finally returned to Athens in 407 BC after eight years of exile, sailing coolly into Piraeus on a ship with purple sails, they welcomed him back with paroxysms of joy.<\/p>\n

Behind the Peloponnese-sized ego, Alcibiades was a general of spectacular genius \u2013 when he could be bothered. In 410 BC, shortly after his controversial reinstatement as admiral of the Athenian navy (on the back of a bogus promise of Persian support), he wiped out the entire Spartan fleet at the Battle of Cyzicus; two years later, through sheer chutzpah, he captured the city of Selymbria near Byzantium with only fifty soldiers, and without striking a blow. When things went wrong \u2013 as in 406 BC, after a disastrous campaigning season in the eastern Aegean \u2013 he showed an infuriating ability to wriggle out of trouble. His final years (406\u2013404 BC) were spent once again in exile from Athens, holed up in a private castle on the Gallipoli peninsula. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery. One story tells that he died in the remote mountains of central Turkey at the hands of the brothers of a Phrygian noblewoman whom he had decided to seduce. This is, I fear, all too believable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the introduction to a review by Peter Thonemann of a new biography of Alcibiades by David Stuttard in the Literary Review<\/em> for July, 2018. H\/T to Never Yet Melted<\/em> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not for poetry, but for the Byronian swathe he cut through a large portion of Classical Greece: Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero\u2019s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of Samuel Johnson\u2019s conversation in Boswell\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,370],"tags":[732,1391,572,1101,1347,1346,1151],"class_list":["post-44155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-middle-east","tag-athens","tag-biography","tag-leadership","tag-persia","tag-plato","tag-socrates","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bub","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54391,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44155\/revisions\/54391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}