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"Alcibiades Biography."
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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
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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
The Socratic Turn
The fact that we still group all his predecessors together as 'presocratics' indicates that Socrates significantly changed the character of philosophy. Yet it is not easy to determine exactly what change Socrates made, much less why. Socrates himself left no record of his
thoughts, so we have to refer to the writings of the three authors who knew him. But in the Clouds Aristophanes depicts 'Socrates' as a 'sophist' who taught cosmology as well as rhetoric, i.e. as a 'presocratic'. In his Memorabilia Xenophon merely declares
that Socrates did not investigate the nature of all things or the cosmos. To find out when and why Socrates turned to study the human things, we have to put together three retrospective statements he gives about his development as a philosopher in Plato's dialogues. Working on the basis
of the supposed chronology of composition, scholars have not done so.
Journal Article
Alcibiades. Athenian Playboy, General and Traitor
Alcibiades. Athenian Playboy, General and Traitor by P. J. Rhodes is reviewed.
Book Review
Alcibiades and Athens: A Study in Literary Presentation
\"Alcibiades and Athens: A Study in Literary Presentation\" by David Gribble is reviewed.
Book Review
The drama of Alcibiades
Author David Stuttard's description in his newest book, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, captures perfectly the allure of the Athenian general, a chameleonic character who, for all his qualities, will always be remembered as one of the slipperiest statesmen in history. Born around 450 B.C., Alcibiades had the mixed fortune of losing his father Cleinias as a boy and becoming the ward of Pericles, the most important figure of the period in political Athens. A notorious playboy, who carried a shield decorated with the figure of Eros, Alcibiades married the daughter of one of the richest men in Greece (who happened to be a former husband of his mother), only to upset her with his philandering.
Book Review