fi rst among the men who stuffed the city with harbors and arsenals and
walls, leaving it the victim of an illness, for which someday, says Socrates,
Callicles will have to pay, “or my friend Alcibiades” (519a). All these
connections cannot be random. Besides, the destinies of the two men bear
many clear resemblances. Themistocles was the victor in the Persian Wars,
the man who had built the foundation of the powerful Athenian navy, and
ended in exile. His life lends itself in many respects to comparison. The
comparisons arise naturally all the time. Athenaus notes that Alcibiades
had learned Persian “like Themistocles.” In short, we are tempted to have
Alcibiades say, as he does in the play about him by Jean Galbert de Camp-
istron: “Themistocles is always in my thoughts,” a line in the tragedy that
is followed by ten more drawing the comparison. 10
Of course, Campistron is not a source. However, this passage demon-
strates how easily the parallels between the two men were made.
Returning to our sources, elsewhere Plutarch offers an explanation.
Speaking of Alcibiades, he wrote:
He decided to go up to the court of Artaxerxes. He thought he would prove
himself to be just as useful to the king as Themistocles had been, if the king
was prepared to put him to the test, while having a better excuse for being
there. For he was not going to offer his services to the king and ask him for
resources so that he could attack his fellow citizens, as Themistocles had,
but so that he could defend his country against its enemies. (37.7)
10. Jean Galbert de Campistron, Alcibiade (a play written in 1685), act 1, scene 2. The theme begins by recalling Themistocles in Persia: “That persecuted Greek who sought refuge in the same climate where I am today.” The parallel continues later in the play when Alcibiades shares the same dilemma that Plutarch ascribes to Themistocles ( Them. 31.6): to command the Persian army against Greece or refuse and anger the king.
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There it is, popping up in the middle of the crisis, the old competition with
Themistocles spoken of in the Socratic texts.
Some modern scholars are skeptical: they think that Plutarch, and all
those who followed, were the ones seeing Themistocles as a model for Al-
cibiades. 11 Hence the resemblances were the result of literary projections.
How would we know? That is possible. But the two explanations can
be joined. How can anyone deny that the thought might have crossed the
mind of Alcibiades? His welcome by Tissaphernes could hardly fail to
have caused him to refl ect. And it is diffi cult, knowing his character, to
think that this precedent did not feed his imagination and his dreams. It
is natural and it is pleasing to think that in this moment of turmoil there
was a glimmer of hope for a heroic outcome in one who was about to die.
For in spite of all this, he was going to die.
Unlike his life, the death of Alcibiades was obscure and miserable. It
was so full of pathos that no melodrama would ever dare to go so far.
Perhaps historians who cannot know have once again invented and
embellished. 12 But almost everyone relates a tale that is striking in the contrast between a brilliant life and a sorry end.
Pharnabazus sent two men close to him to carry out the assassination:
his brother Bagaeus and his uncle Susamithras. The scene took place far
away, in a village in Asia. There were only two characters: 13 Alcibiades and a woman, a devoted prostitute. Everything began, as it does in a tragedy, with a prophetic dream. This is what Plutarch writes, and it deserves
to be quoted in full:
So Lysander sent a message to Pharnabazus ordering him to do the deed, and
Pharnabazus gave the job to his brother Bagaeus and his uncle Susamithras.
Now at the time Alcibiades was living in a village in Phrygia, and he had Ti-
mandra the courtesan with him. One night he had a dream in which he was
dressed in Timandra’s clothes, and she was cradling his head in her arms
while she made up his face like a woman’s with eyeliner and white lead.
11. See B. Perrin Bernadotte, “The Death of Alcibiades,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (1906): 23–37.
12. Xenophon does not tell of the death of Alcibiades, as it did not pertain to his subject (see above, “Second Interlude”).
13. Cornelius Nepos adds another person, an Arcadian, faithful to the end (Athenaus
13.574e–f).
174 Chapter
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Others say that in his dream he saw Bagaeus cutting off his head and his
body burning, but they agree that the dream happened not long before his
death. (39.1–7)
The fi rst part of the dream obviously foresaw the cares that the courte-
san would take with the corpse of Alcibiades. But the assassins were al-
ready at work.
“The men sent to kill him did not dare to enter the house, but sur-
rounded it and set it on fi re.”
He was caught in his lair like an evil beast.
But he continued to fi ght.
When Alcibiades noticed the fi re, he picked up nearly all his clothes
and bedding, threw them onto the fl ames, and then, wrapping his cloak
around his left arm and holding his drawn dagger in his right hand, he
dashed out of the house before the clothing caught fi re. He was unharmed
by the fi re, and when the foreign assassins saw him, they scattered. Not
one of them stood his ground against him or came up to fi ght him hand
to hand; they kept their distance and hurled javelins and fi red arrows at
him instead.
He fell fi nally, mortally wounded. The cowardice of his assassins in sharp
contrast with the faithfulness of the woman with whom he lived: “After
the assassins had left, Timandra collected his body for burial. She wrapped
her own clothes around the body to cover it, and gave him the most splen-
did and ambitious funeral she could under the circumstances.” Plutarch
says that Timandra was the mother of Laïs the Corinthian, whom he de-
scribes in the Dialogue on Love (767f) as the one whom poets sang about
and greatly loved: “You know that she enfl amed Greece with desire and
was fought over from sea to sea.” He may have been the victim of assassi-
nation in a town in Phrygia, but Alcibiades, with the panache of the brave,
retained an elegance in his choice of lovers, and died in the presence of a
passionate woman.
Plutarch’s account agrees with that of other historians. All of them de-
scribed the burning house. There is some discrepancy about the presence
of Timandra and a man, or about Timandra and another woman: skepti-
cal modern scholars suppose that these different accounts were invented
to add authenticity to the story. Let’s keep Timandra, at least. Knowing
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Final
Appearance 175
Alcibiades as we do, how could we even think he was alone? Another
discrepancy concerns the handling of the corpse, and relates to the two
premonitory dreams. Either the corpse was prepared by Timandra, or it
was decapitated by the two assassins. Cornelius Nepos clearly says that
they took the head of Alcibiades back to Pharnabazus.
; We will never know for sure. But two impressions emerge from all of
these accounts.
What strikes us fi rst in this whole episode is the combination of treach-
ery and cruelty. It is a combination that, to a great extent, is the sign of
barbarians. There are frequent allusions made by Greek authors to these
two faults in the people of Asia, so offensive to Greek ideals. We have
already seen the cruelty of another satrap, Tissaphernes, whom Plutarch
described as having no integrity but great wickedness and perversity, and
we encountered the cruelty of one of his lieutenants whose treachery
caused the deaths of Greeks on Delos. 14 Barbarians were generally viewed by Greeks as bloodthirsty and deceitful, in contrast with themselves. 15
This explains the meaning that the modern word “barbarian” retains,
signifying “cruel.”
In one sense, the contrast between the assassins hiding in the shadows
and the man who goes out alone, unprotected, into the fl ames and forces
them to fl ee symbolizes perfectly the cultural differences of which Greeks
were highly conscious. Pharnabazus’s treachery and the approach at night
were signs of barbarism.
However, the picture is not so black and white; it was marked with
nuances as well.
We should not forget that Pharnabazus was in this instance carrying
out the orders or the wishes of Lysander, and Lysander was Greek. Add-
ing to this point, even Plutarch had faulted him for the severity he had
shown throughout his life; that had been apparent after the battle of Ae-
gospotami. True, but Athenians had shown themselves capable of great
cruelty, at least of cruel intentions, at that time. Alcibiades’s exile by the
Thirty, ordered without a valid rationale, doomed him to what would
14. See above, chapter 7.
15. On barbarian cruelty, see our two recent studies: “Les barbares dans la pensée de la Grèce antique,” Phoenix (1993): 283–92; and “Cruauté barbare et cruautés grecques,” Wie-ner Studien, Festschrift H. Schwabl (1994–95): 187–96.
176 Chapter
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follow. 16 To the contrast between Greeks and barbarians we must allow for an additional element: the moral hardening that was increasingly part
of this period. This hardening was no doubt a function of the intensity of
the battles that were causing rage in Greece and also in the cities. Was not
the narrative of Alcibiades’s life riddled with condemnations and assas-
sinations and from one chapter to the next?
Still, this hardening did not pass without a reaction among the Greeks.
Unlike barbarians, or at least those known to them, the Greeks were
shocked by their own behavior. Thus we fi nd, penetrating the works of
some authors, the softer values like indulgence, tolerance, humanity, and
these burst out everywhere at the end of the war. 17
Alcibiades was crushed by these confl icts, which the century that fol-
lowed would work hard to cover up with a renewed idealism.
In this way, Alcibiades’s death assumes meaning in the history of moral
ideas. But it does not need such commentary to have a strong impact and
to take on a tragic quality, obvious to everyone.
Naturally the details of it are uncertain. How could there be any cer-
tainty? Alcibiades’s end came in a faraway place, with almost no wit-
nesses. Contemporary authors never speak of it. The fi rst source we have
was an author who lived fi ve long centuries after the event, and the old-
est sources they cited wrote at least fi fty years after the event. Literary
taste and imagination may have played a part in the account. The fact is,
though, that the end it describes was one worthy of his life. It has all the
elements necessary to move us and to encourage us to refl ect on the highs
and lows of human destiny.
It moves us because this man, whose plots and subterfuges we have
seen, suddenly reveals the full strength of his spirit. It makes us think
of the lovely portrayal of him by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in Travels of
Anacharsis the Younger in Greece: “One could not look into his heart to
fi nd the stature virtue produces; but one found there the boldness that a
sense of superiority produces. No obstacle, no suffering could overcome
or discourage him; he seemed to be convinced that those who lack the will
16. In the tragedy by Campistron cited above, the threat came from a Greek delegation
that took credit for Alicibiades’s death; no one else wished to do him harm. At times the play contains a trace of historical truth.
17. On the emergence of this, see my book La douceur dans la pensée grecque (Les Belles Lettres, 1979).
A
Final
Appearance 177
to do everything they want to do are those who do not dare to do every-
thing they are capable of doing.” His action in confronting death gave to
Alcibiades the stature of a hero.
Even his death was that of a tragic hero. Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, 18
Alcibiades plunged from the height of glory to deepest disaster. The most
talented of Athenians, the man with the greatest intellect, beauty, and
courage, who led fi rst Athens’ government and then Sparta’s, and then
that of a Persian satrap, the man given the most sumptuous homecoming
Athens could provide, was fi nally assassinated, by order of a barbarian;
a solitary fi gure rejected by everyone except perhaps a woman. He had
experienced everything. He was not yet fi fty years old.
Athenaeus wrote, in the third century CE, that Alcibiades’s tomb could
still be seen in the small town where he died. The emperor Hadrian erected
a statue to Alcibiades, and he made an annual sacrifi ce there. 19
There were other statues of Alcibiades—fi ve or six centuries after his
death—whereas the name of Pharnabazus has been forgotten by everyone
and Lysander is very little known. Death is not the end for a man like
Alcibiades.
18. See above, chapter 5.
19. Cornelius Nepos 13.574c.
12
Repercussions
Alcibiades was dead. His story, however, was not over. On the contrary,
after his death and the end of the war, all the Athenians were fasci-
nated by him. He became the center of intense literary activity. Histori-
ans studied his career and attempted to assess it. First Thucydides, and
shortly after, Xenophon’s Hellenica . Questions about Alcibiades and
opinions of him preoccupied many others. Alcibiades’s son underwent
trials. Socrates was tried and condemned to death at this time, an event
that provided an opportunity to inquire into the role he had played in
the life of Alcibiades. Plato, Xenophon, all or almost all the Socratic phi-
losophers started writing about Alcibiades, drawing inspiration from the
lessons of his life. His personal history created a barrage of analysis ex-
tending to our own day.
First, though, we return to the quarrelling in Athens, particularly about
Alcibiades, beginning with the trials of his son.
Repercussions 179
The son was an unfortunate substitute: he had resented his father, and
Alcibiades had hardly cared for him. 1 Whether he was being attacked or defended, the real object of every
action was his father.
We described previously the business of the chariot that Alcibiades
had used in the Olympic Games of 416. 2 The case was retried more than fi fteen years later, and we have the second part of a speech written by
Isocrates on that occasion, between 398 and 395, for Alcibiades’s son.
It is speech 16, entitled On the Team of Horses . More than a defense of
his son, this is a eulogy of the father. Isocrates recalls that the same men
who destroyed the democracy had exiled Alcibiades (the second time); he
retells the whole story of the mysteries as a coup mounted by people who
were actually enemies of the democracy. He mentions the obstinacy of
the enemies of Alcibiades, his condemnation, and declares that Alcibiades
had thus been “compelled” to seek refuge in Sparta (9). Next, he accuses
the enemies of Alcibiades of bad faith; it is then that he compares Alcibi-
ades’s actions in exile with the actions of the democrats of 404. 3 Finally, the speech praises his action at the time of his return, his efforts with Tissaphernes, his victories, and claims that under his command “never did
the enemy erect a trophy of victory over you” (21). Beyond this, Isocrates
goes over his ancestry, his youth, his victories at Olympus: in short, the
whole of Alcibiades’s life is recalled, twelve pages of defense and praise,
and not a single fault. The text is one of unqualifi ed ebullience. And all
that, I repeat, less than ten years after the death of Alcibiades and in a
newly democratic Athens.
It seems, moreover, that this is not simply the speech of a lawyer. Fifty
years later, Isocrates returned to the subject of Alcibiades the man, without the
need to do so. He did this in a treatise entitled Ad Philippum. And while in
this work he recognizes all the harm that Alcibiades did to Athens by helping
Sparta, the orator offers him to Philip as the prime example of a man’s power. 4
1. He had given up one of his father’s forts; on the latter’s feelings about him, see Lysias 14.27.
2. See above, chapter 2.
3. See above, chapter 6.
4. Isocrates, Philip 58–61. Consistent with his great idea, Isocrates shows how Alcibiades harmed Sparta insofar as he made it acquire a maritime empire.
180 Chapter
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In contrast to these eulogies, we have the accusations. Alcibiades’s son
The Life of Alcibiades Page 26
