The Life of Alcibiades
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But fi rst, we come to the area most scandalous of all, relating not to
Alcibiades’s wealth, but to his beauty: his love life.
The stories multiply. They may not all be true, of course; but together
they leave an unmistakable impression. Not surprising, either, that his
good looks would lead to scandal: he was involved with both men and
women. It was said that even here he always wanted to win.
And winning was easy for him.
Normally, relationships with women caused little gossip in Athens.
Marriage demanded that women submit to their husbands, living in the
home, seeing no one. And relationships with prostitutes were ignored.
They were talked about only in the case of Alcibiades because of the num-
ber of liaisons and the rumors that fl ew about them.
But our man went further: he managed to inject scandal into his own
marriage.
First, some gossip: while still young, he had been to Abydos, on the
Hellespont, with his uncle. There, the uncle and nephew were said to
have married the same woman; a daughter was born, but which one
was the father? Later, both would enjoy her favors, a case of pos-
sible incest. The story is outrageous and defies belief. 8 But again, he
was rich. Later, people would even say that Alcibiades was guilty of
incest with his mother, his daughter, and his sister. 9 The vile charges
transmitted under the name of Antiphon say that he went to the
women of Abydos to learn things that met his inclinations for vice
and debauchery. 10
Nevertheless, he had a real marriage. The choice was an honorable
one, for he married the intelligent and well-raised daughter of a very rich
and famous man. But there was such behavior . . .
First, he slapped his future father-in-law, following a bet. The next
day he invited this man to punish him with a whipping. But . . . he was
pardoned.
8. The primary source is a fragment of a speech attributed to Lysias. It is found again in an anecdote in Athenaeus, among other references to hetaeras known to have had ties to Alcibiades.
9. See chapter 12.
10. Fragment 4 Budé. This is all that remains of this text; hence it is not cited among the sources in our preface.
Insults
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He received a very nice dowry, but before long the young groom de-
manded more, alleging that it had been agreed to in case there were chil-
dren. His wife’s family feared they were being robbed.
Was he a good husband? Of course not. His wife knew that Alcibiades
was “frequenting both foreign and Athenian courtesans, so she left his
home and repaired to the house of her brother. Alcibiades did not care and
continued his debaucheries.” 11 She sued for divorce. Divorce by a woman was rare and looked on with disapproval, but it did exist. On the day of
the decree, according to Plutarch, Alcibiades “ran, grabbed her, and led
her home across the public square as bystanders watched without daring
to save her” (8.5). It was useless to argue, according to Plutarch, that this
was absolutely against the law. Such was the audacity of Alcibiades.
There were other women in his life. After the capture of Melos by the
Athenians in 416, all the men on the island were killed and the women
were taken as slaves. Alcibiades took one as a partner and raised the child
he had with her (16.6). Plutarch might say that is human nature; one
could say that a master suits himself and serves his passions at the expense
of the helpless people whose fate has been a constant source of shame for
Athens. It appears that Alcibiades supported the decree that called for
the harsh repression of the island—at least the proposal to enslave the
women. 12 After that, to have a child with one of them was low behavior.
Having now slipped into the political realm, led there by his amorous
adventures, we might as well continue. Two episodes in his political career
show vividly the role his relationships with women of all sorts and from
all countries would play over the course of time.
As an exile in Sparta, Alcibiades owed his new friends everything.
What did he do? According to the texts, he took advantage of the king’s
absence when he was off on a campaign to seduce his wife and father a
child (yes, another one). The queen, overcome with passion, is reported
to have named the child, from day one, Alcibiades. Scandalous! As for
our hero, he was as proud as he could be, bragging that he did it so
that one day his descendants could be kings of Sparta. The husband
was less proud, calculations confi rming his bad luck; an earthquake,
11. Plutarch 8.4–5.
12 . Thucydides does not report it, but see [Andocides] 20.
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easy to date, had forced the handsome Athenian to fl ee from the queen’s
bedroom. 13
Is there more, you ask? Oh yes. But this act resulted in Alcibiades’s
breaking with Sparta and approaching Persia, which from then on was
going to control the action. The outcome of the war was altered by his
behavior. Athens profi ted from it. But, indirectly perhaps, the fate of Eu-
rope vis-à-vis Asia was affected. The actions of a seducer in the midst of
powerful people infl uences politics whether he wants to or not.
We will skip over these years: we reach the fi nale. Alcibiades is again an
exile. He fi nds himself in a village of Phrygia with a courtesan named Ti-
mandra. 14 There he was assassinated. Our fi nal view of the young god of Athens is a body riddled with arrows and spears, a body that a courtesan
covered with her own clothes to improvise for him there, so far away, the
best burial possible. This woman was the mother of another very famous
courtesan, Laïs.
These women were faithful to Alcibiades. But he was never faithful.
Even up to this fi nal episode that concludes Plutarch’s written account
and shows how legends are born, starting with certain well-known traits.
Assassins would not have been hired by his political enemies, but by the
victims of a different scandal: “He had seduced and was holding a young
woman from a good family, and it was her brothers who, tired of his outra-
geous behavior,” ended, in the middle of the night, the life of the seducer.
How fi tting that would be! An ending worthy of refl ection. Plutarch
does not quite believe it. But he leaves us to wonder, inconclusively, and
without commentary. So we have a choice of these two types of women
surrounding the death of Alcibiades.
Alcibiades was a ladies’ man, and his female conquests were well
known throughout Greece. But, as was quite common in Greece, he also
knew the other kind of love. It was his good looks that attracted many
admirers, who courted him with differing degrees of success.
Plutarch shows that he could be hard and insolent. And he certainly
was with Anytus. Later Anytus would be Socrates’s accuser; but at this
time he was one of the whole Socratic group; and he was quite taken with
13 . For more about this event, see below, chapter 6.
14 . And probably another one, Theodotia of Athen
s (according to Athenaeus 13.574).
See below, chapter 11.
Insults
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Alcibiades. One evening, he gave a dinner to which he invited his beloved.
Alcibiades refused, got drunk at home, and then marched with a rowdy
band on Anytus’s house, where he ordered his slaves to take half of all the
gold and silver. Anytus’s guests were appalled, but the lover did not com-
plain, observing on the contrary: “Rather say . . . that he treated me with
consideration and kindness, because, free to take it all, he left me some-
thing” (4.5). The anecdote is well known. It may reveal the submissiveness
that love may impose, but it also reveals the insolent manners Alcibiades
might adopt toward those enthralled by his beauty.
By contrast, he was at times generous—not with his favors but with
money. He did not give it away, no. He did more. A certain metic (resident
alien) was smitten with Alcibiades; he sold all his goods to offer the profi t
to Alcibiades. The latter, amused, invited him to dinner, gave him back his
gold, and advised him to go the next day to pursue a certain offi ce. He
himself went to stand with the metic. The men who held this offi ce were
uneasy about their accounts and offered the metic money to drop the case.
Alcibiades pushed him to bargain, and the metic left one talent richer—
which was a lot more than he had offered Alcibiades in the fi rst place.
Quite an operator, the handsome young man, as clever and irritating as
you could wish. The sharp eye, the pleasure in playing a trick—both give
us a sense that he was mocking it all, his own ability to attract and those
shady types who would pay to have him.
Clearly, he did not always say no. And in this too he was never both-
ered by scandal. A story is told that as a child one day he disappeared.
People worried and wanted to organize a search; Pericles declined, know-
ing that the child was with Democrates, one of his erastai , or lovers. The
great man thought it was better to avoid drawing attention that would
compromise the boy (3.1). Alcibiades himself had no such qualms.
The texts contain frequent allusions to these relationships. People
talked about the lovers of Alcibiades. And it seems that as a young man
he was immersed in an atmosphere of pleasure and its pursuit. We men-
tioned earlier the incident of Alcibiades’s debut in the Assembly and the
quail that fl ew away. To be presented to an offi cial, one had to be an adult;
but everyone knew that common birds, cocks and quails, were often gifts
between lovers. In the Birds (line 707), Aristophanes cites the handsome
boys who “won over or ceded to lovers when they received a quail, a
waterfowl, a goose, or a cock.” The fl ight of the bird could be a clear sign
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(to those) around the young donor of the amorous relations in which he
took pleasure.
All the stories and all the profi les of the lovers taken or rejected are
enough to show that Alcibiades was no more discreet or moderate in this
domain than in others. We will see how they explain the relationship be-
tween Socrates and Alcibiades. But from now on, added together, all those
anecdotes, true or false, are enough to explain the harsh opinions many
held of the beautiful Alcibiades. Xenophon, in his Memorabilia (1.2.12),
awards him the prize for the three fl aws particularly offensive to Greek
morality: he, more than anyone else, lacking all self-control ( akratesta-
tos ), was guilty of excesses and crimes ( hubristotatos ), as well as violence ( biaiotatos ). With self-discipline he might have resisted the temptations
of amorous pleasures, popularity, extravagance; the insolence that he
showed so readily came from hubris and aggressiveness.
The record would be overwhelming if we could forget that for all his
excesses, Alcibiades was charming. The devilish man was charming. He
could raise eyebrows in his fi nancial dealings and then dazzle with his
generosity. He could pursue, provocatively, lovers of all kinds, and re-
main the nice boy everyone loved anyway. He could offend, strike, insult,
and be forgiven because he always did it with grace and good humor. As
Plutarch said, “Even his fl aws were met with indulgence and favor.” He
also noted that “he was not despised by his fellow citizens, even those he
had wronged,” whereas Coriolanus, “as admirable as he was, was never
well-liked.”
All the damning superlatives that Alcibiades unquestionably deserved
were softened by the indulgence that for so long attached to him and that
all of us today continue to feel a bit, even as we censure unreservedly his
indisputable faults.
This very fact leads us to pause a moment to conclude with two fi nal
incidents that drew attention in antiquity, and in which the reputation
of the man and his moral failings came together. The fi rst concerns his
relationship with Socrates, which is colored by the romantic mores of the
time; the other leads us right into his role as a leader involved in politics.
Socrates is widely regarded as one of Alcibiades’s suitors. Plutarch
speaks of Socrates’s love for Alcibiades ( erōs , several times) and of his
rivals. The First Alcibiades begins with a speech by Socrates, who calls
himself the fi rst to have loved ( erastēs ) Alcibiades, and the only one who
Insults
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remained faithful to him. The fi rst words of Protagoras are addressed to
Socrates: “Where do you come from, Socrates? I wager that you have been
chasing after handsome Alcibiades?” In Gorgias, Socrates says he has two
loves: Alcibiades, son of Cleinias, and philosophy. In all cases, and Alcibi-
ades’s arrival in the Symposium proves the point, the relationship between
the two men is presented to us in the light of pursuit and fl irtation, with
a hint of homosexual tenderness openly expressed, perhaps slightly in jest
and also treated with irony, perhaps because it was serious.
There would be no point here in trying, as so many others have done
and without the slightest bit of evidence, to determine Socrates’s actual
feelings. But one fact emerges from all the evidence: whatever his feelings
were, Socrates did not seek a physical union but a spiritual one. In this
case, as in those mentioned in the Symposium , his fi rmness (his karteria ) was legendary. He withstood temptations just as he resisted cold, fatigue,
and sleep. Moreover, he expressed indignation about making sexual de-
mands of a loved one. 15 Several texts show Socrates contrasting love of the body with that of the soul, physical beauty versus internal beauty. Confusion occurred easily because of the vocabulary used. This has sometimes
led critics to misunderstand a very beautiful text by Aeschines of Sphettos
in which Socrates compares the feelings he experienced toward Alcibiades
with those of the bacchants. There was a rush to proclaim ecstasy and pas-
sion. But if you read the sentence to the end, you see that his meaning is
just the opposite. Why then, the bacchants? “Because the bacchants, when
they were possesse
d by the god, drew milk and honey from wells where
others could not even fi nd water. In the same way, having no knowledge
the teaching of which would make me useful to him, I still believed that
by spending time with him, my love would improve him.” 16 Drawing milk and honey from so unlikely a soul—that is how Socrates was comparable
to the bacchants.
While scholars may have been mistaken, the fi rst to be mistaken was
Alcibiades himself. Not that he, savvy as he was, was foolish enough to
regard Socrates as an ordinary lover. He was troubled, and surprised. He
15 . Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.29, relates how he considered Critias a pig for having wanted to demand sexual favors from young Euthydemus.
16. Fragment 11; see the excellent commentary of G. Vlastos, Socrate: Ironie et philoso-phie morale, 340–41, of the French translation.
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felt that Socrates had something that he himself lacked. But he believed
that all he had to do was to offer himself as he would to someone else.
That, at least, is what Plato has him say with self-awareness and irony and
inimitable charm.
Alcibiades fi nds himself with Socrates; he has sent his servants away;
he is anticipating an advance to which he wants to yield. But nothing
happens. Next, he invites Socrates to exercise with him, alone. Again,
nothing. “So I invite him to have dinner with me, in the very friendly way
of a lover who wants to attempt something with his beloved.” Socrates is
reluctant to accept and then wants to leave right after dinner. Alcibiades
insists, obliges him to stay . . . The story is delightful, the outcome almost
obvious. But the result is that Socrates and Alcibiades are fi nally stretched
out under a blanket while nothing happens except a lofty discussion about
inner and outer beauty. Socrates’s inner beauty won.
After that, the roles may have reversed. In the Symposium , Alcibiades
frankly admits to feeling drunk when he listens to Socrates: “My heart
beats harder than the Corybants in their frenzy; his words make my tears
fl ow” (215e). The feelings have changed sides, and love has changed its
very nature.
To admit all this, one had to have the boldness of Alcibiades. The story
implies overtures that made him look ridiculous when they failed. This
was a venture to suppress. But Plato saw it clearly: Alcibiades’s audacity,