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The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens

Online ISBN:
9781501739965
Print ISBN:
9781501719752
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens

Jacqueline de Romilly
Jacqueline de Romilly
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Published online:
21 May 2020
Published in print:
15 October 2019
Online ISBN:
9781501739965
Print ISBN:
9781501719752
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

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 the book documents, Alcibiades' 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. The book 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.

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