Alcibiades

Biography

Alcibiades was the most brilliant, most charismatic, most dangerous, and most self-destructive Athenian of his era. Ward of Pericles, intimate of Socrates, victor at the Olympic Games, and serial traitor to every city he inhabited, he embodied in one person both Athens's tremendous capability and its fatal inability to discipline that capability in service of consistent strategy. He championed the Sicilian Expedition with an oratory so compelling it swept away the objections of the experienced Nicias. Then, recalled to Athens to face charges of religious sacrilege, he defected to Sparta — giving Sparta the intelligence and advice that enabled Syracuse to defeat the expedition. When Sparta tired of him (he had seduced the queen), he defected to Persia. When that too soured, he was recalled to Athens in triumph, won several battles, and was then exiled again when a subordinate suffered a naval defeat. He died in Phrygia, reputedly strangled on orders from the Thirty Tyrants whom Sparta had installed in Athens after the war. Socrates, who loved him, knew exactly what he was: 'the most gifted and most dangerous of all my pupils.' Plutarch paired his biography with Coriolanus. He is the paradigm of talent without character.

Key Battles