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"Alcibiades"
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Dreams in Plutarch’s Lives of Alcibiades and Demosthenes
This article argues that the ante mortem dreams of Alcibiades and Demosthenes articulate key themes of moral doubt in Plutarch’s biography of each man. Alcibiades’ dream of being dressed as a courtesan alludes to his uneasy stance between masculine and feminine postures; Demosthenes’ dream of himself as a failed tragic actor draws upon his lifelong concern with performance and insincerity. In these two Lives, Plutarch deploys the ambiguity and uncertainty of dreams to pose an interpretive problem for the reader which can never fully be resolved, particularly appropriate to these unpredictable and untrustworthy men.
Journal Article
Nemesis : Alcibiades and the fall of Athens
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's 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's journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades's 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 2,000 years.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Aristophanes and Alcibiades
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.
eBook
Self-Knowledge, Elenchus and Authority in Early Plato
Abstract
In some of Plato's early dialogues we find a concern with correctly ascertaining the contents of a particular kind of one's own psychological states, cognitive states. Indeed, one of the achievements of the elenctic method is to facilitate cognitive self-knowledge. In the Alcibiades, moreover, Plato interprets the Delphic injunction, 'know yourself', as crucially requiring cognitive self-knowledge, and ending in knowing oneself as subject to particular epistemic norms. Epistemic authority for self-knowledge is, for Plato, conferred on the basis of correct application of norms to cognitive self-ascriptions, and not confined to the first-personal perspective. This implies first-personal plural epistemic authority for self-knowledge.
Journal Article
Who Was Callicles? Exploring Four Relationships between Rhetoric and Justice in Plato's Gorgias
The Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered rhetoric, opening the door for a “true” rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic.
Journal Article
Speaking Truth to ‘Platonism’? Some Thoughts on Alcibiades and Erôs
This article reads Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium in terms of the later Foucault’s examination of ‘parrhēsia’, or ‘frank spokenness’. It contends that, in part, Alcibiades’ stress on the sheer particularity and individuality of erotic attraction—in his case, attraction to Socrates himself—acts as a kind of rejoinder to the ‘impersonal’ aspect of erôs highlighted in the famous speech of Socrates/Diotima.
Journal Article
Self-Knowledge in the Eye-Soul Analogy of the Alcibiades
Abstract
The kind of self-knowledge at issue in the eye-soul analogy of the Alcibiades (132d5-133c7) is knowledge of one's epistemic state, i.e. what one knows and does not know, rather than knowledge of what one is. My evidence for this is the connection between knowledge of one's epistemic state and self-improvement, the equivalence of self-knowledge to moderation, and the fact that 'looking' into the soul of another is a metaphor for elenctic discussion. The final lines of the analogy (133c1-7) clarify that the part of the soul one 'looks' into and the part one learns about when learning about one's epistemic state is divine.
Journal Article
Thucydides as a Critical Thinker and Historian: Introducción
Thucydides was born when Aeschylus dominated the tragic scene, young
Sophocles had for the first time defeated him and Pericles was starting his
political career; he was about twenty years younger than Euripides, Herodotus,
and Protagoras, and a contemporary of Socrates, Democritus, and Hippocrates.
Journal Article
Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy
This book explores the cultural and political significance of ostracism in democratic Athens. In contrast to previous interpretations, Sara Forsdyke argues that ostracism was primarily a symbolic institution whose meaning for the Athenians was determined both by past experiences of exile and by its role as a context for the ongoing negotiation of democratic values.
The first part of the book demonstrates the strong connection between exile and political power in archaic Greece. In Athens and elsewhere, elites seized power by expelling their rivals. Violent intra-elite conflict of this sort was a highly unstable form of \"politics that was only temporarily checked by various attempts at elite self-regulation. A lasting solution to the problem of exile was found only in the late sixth century during a particularly intense series of violent expulsions. At this time, the Athenian people rose up and seized simultaneously control over decisions of exile and political power. The close connection between political power and the power of expulsion explains why ostracism was a central part of the democratic reforms.
Forsdyke shows how ostracism functioned both as a symbol of democratic power and as a key term in the ideological justification of democratic rule. Crucial to the author's interpretation is the recognition that ostracism was both a remarkably mild form of exile and one that was infrequently used. By analyzing the representation of exile in Athenian imperial decrees, in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and in tragedy and oratory, Forsdyke shows how exile served as an important term in the debate about the best form of rule.
eBook