Alcibiades

P. J. Rhodes

• Verlag: Pen & Sword Military
• Jahr: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781848849822
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Biographies historiques

The renowned classicist presents an authoritative biography of one of the most infamous and colorful characters of Ancient Greece. A charismatic Athenian and close associate of Socrates, Alcibiades came to prominence during the Peloponnesian War when he helped form an alliance against Sparta. Although his gambit led to defeat, his prestige remained high, and he was elected to lead the Sicilian Expedition of 415 BC. Shortly after arrival in Sicily, however, Alcibiades was recalled to face charges of sacrilege allegedly committed during his pre-expedition reveling. Jumping ship on the return journey, he defected to the Spartans. Alcibiades quickly ingratiated himself with the Spartans, helping them to victory against his former countrymen. But he soon overstepped the bounds of hospitality by sleeping with the Spartan queen. On the run again, he began to play a dangerous game of shifting loyalties. He had a hand in engineering the overthrow of democracy at Athens in favor of an oligarchy, which allowed him to return from exile, though he then opposed the extreme excesses of that regime. For a time, Alcibiades restored Athens' fortunes in the war, but was soon forced into exile once again. This time he took refuge with the Persians, but as they were now allied to the Spartans, the cuckolded King Agis was able to arrange his assassination by Persian agents.

Chapter I

Sources and Modern Studies

Ancient Sources

As one of the leading public figures of his time, Alcibiades appears in the history of Thucydides (down to autumn 411, where the text breaks off) and the Hellenica of Xenophon (which began approximately where Thucydides’ text ends); also in the universal history written in the first century BC by Diodorus Siculus (for this part of its Greek history derived from the fourth-century historian Ephorus: based on Thucydides down to 411 but independent of Xenophon afterwards).1 We also have two biographies of him: a short one in Latin by Cornelius Nepos, written in the first century BC,2 and a longer one in Greek in the series of Parallel Lives written by Plutarch c. AD 100 (his Roman counterpart is Coriolanus; he appears in some of the other Lives too). Plutarch used a wide variety of sources, some earlier and some more reliable than others, but he identifies sources for particular items only intermittently (often when remarking on a disagreement). Among other writers who supply material on Alcibiades is Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists (‘intellectuals at dinner’), written c. AD 200, contains a large amount of material, more often frivolous than serious, derived again from a wide range of sources and often quoting from fifth-century Athenian drama. In later antiquity Alcibiades was a favourite subject for rhetorical exercises, using and embroidering what was known about him, (for instance) to attack him or defend him at a particular critical point in his life.3

Thucydides was born some time before 454, was related to Cimon and Thucydides son of Melesias, who had been leading opponents of Pericles in the mid fifth century, but himself became a strong admirer of Pericles; he was an Athenian general in 424/3, but as a result of his failure to keep the city of Amphipolis out of the hands of the Spartans he was exiled for the remainder of the Peloponnesian War. He has appealed to modern scholars as a historian who was highly intelligent and determined to get at the truth; but he was a man who must have had his own prejudices, and cannot have been the dispassionate, scientific historian he was once taken to be. His history of the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 (which includes in book I a sketch of the growth of Athenian power after 478, written to show how that led Sparta to make war on Athens) is narrowly focused on the war, and does not range as widely as many modern readers would have wished.

Thucydides seems to have been particularly well informed about Alcibiades, and his information extends beyond facts in the public domain to private conversations.4 As noted above, Thucydides was exiled from Athens from 424/3 until the end of the war, and he was a man who had interests in Thrace;5 Alcibiades was in exile from 415 to 407 (though serving with the Athenian navy from 411) and again after 406, and in 406 he too went to Thrace, where he seems already to have had interests.6 It is possible that Thucydides could have met Alcibiades towards the end of the war, and it has been suggested that he did so and that Alcibiades was indeed one of Thucydides’ sources.7 If he did not derive information from Alcibiades himself he must surely have done so from somebody who was closely involved with Alcibiades,8 and that he did have contact with Alcibiades himself is an attractive possibility. This may have led Thucydides to regard Alcibiades’ influence on the course of events as greater than it actually was, particularly when it is suggested that he was responsible for Sparta’s sending help to Syracuse in 414 and establishing a fort at Decelea in 413;9 in 412/1 Thucydides seems at first to regard Alcibiades as extremely influential with Tissaphernes but later becomes more sceptical.10 Certainly, he is not consistently and uncritically admiring of Alcibiades.11

Alcibiades appears also in contemporary literature. There are allusions to him in the comedies of Aristophanes and in fragments quoted from lost comedies (though a recent claim to detect previously unrecognised allusions to Pericles and Alcibiades, in Aristophanes and elsewhere, has gone much too far12). Preserved with the speeches of Andocides there is (IV) Against Alcibiades, which purports to be a speech delivered by Phaeax, one of the men who along with Alcibiades were threatened with ostracism in 415, but which is probably a later rhetorical exercise; some of the stories to be found in it, but not all, are mentioned by other sources too.13 He features also in law-court speeches written in connection with his son, Alcibiades IV. Isocrates’ (XVI) Chariot-Team is the defence speech of Alcibiades IV when charged c. 397 that his father had wrongfully deprived the prosecutor of a chariot-team for the Olympic games of 416;14 and two speeches of Lysias, (XIV) Against Alcibiades i and (XV) Against Alcibiades ii, were written as supporting speeches for the prosecution of Alcibiades IV on a charge of failing to serve in the army when required, c. 395. Because our Alcibiades had been one of the young men who associated with the philosopher Socrates, he appears also in the dialogues of Plato: in particular, he bursts riotously into the Symposium to praise Socrates; the dialogue known as Alcibiades i is acepted by some scholars but not by all as an authentic work by Plato, but Alcibiades ii is generally regarded as a later composition.

We also have the evidence of some Athenian public documents inscribed on stone in Alcibiades’ lifetime; I mention here those which are of particular significance. One, recently discovered, is the beginning of a decree of the Athenian assembly proposed by him in 422/1, slightly earlier than any other reliable attestation of him as a public figure.15 There is a frustrating set of fragments which seem to record decisions concerning the Sicilian expedition of 415, earlier than and superseded by what Thucydides reports.16 The ‘Attic stelai’ are a collection of texts recording the sale of property confiscated from men condemned for involvement in the religious scandals of 415, including Alcibiades, listing items of various kinds and the prices which they fetched.17 One other text gives us a treaty made by the Athenian fleet with Selymbria, on the Propontis, in 408, when Alcibiades was acting as a commander of the fleet but his condemnation in 415 had not yet been annulled, followed by the decree of the Athenian assembly to ratify the treaty which Alcibiades proposed in 407 after his return to Athens (and we have a smaller fragment of a similar text for a body of exiles from Clazomenae, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor).18

Modern Studies

In modern work as in ancient, Alcibiades appears in general histories of the period, such as the Cambridge Ancient History,19 and he appears in the four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War and its antecedents by D. Kagan.20 J.K. Davies’ Athenian Propertied Families is not always easy to use, but is a very rich collection of evidence for and discussion of family connections and property.

The best of the earlier books devoted specifically to Alcibiades is in French and dates from the mid twentieth century: J. Hatzfeld, Alcibiade. An article by M.F. McGregor, ‘The Genius of Alcibiades’, was uncritically admiring;21 at the other extreme, E.F. Bloedow, Alcibiades Reexamined, argued that Alcibiades was both unsuccessful and unimportant. W.M. Ellis, Alcibiades, is like this book an account of Alcibiades written for a wide readership. D. Gribble, Alcibiades and Athens, is as its sub-title (A Study in Literary Presentation) indicates not a life of Alcibiades but a study of the presentation of him in Greek literature. A recent book in German, C. Mann, Die Demagogen und das Volk, argues that Alcibiades marked a fundamental break with the kind of political leader Athens had in the century before him. I outlined Alcibiades’ career and significance briefly in my inaugural lecture, ‘What Alcibiades Did or What Happened to Him’.

Chapter II

Background

Fifth-Century Greece

In the fifth century the world of Greece and the Aegean came to be polarised between the two major city states of Athens and Sparta. Both were much larger than most Greek states. Athens controlled the region of Attica, about 1,000 square miles / 2,600km2, and all free adult male Athenians were citizens of Athens (in the 430s there were perhaps about 60,000 citizens, 240,000 citizens with their families and a total population of 500,000). Sparta controlled Laconia and neighbouring Messenia, about 2,400 square miles / 6,200km2, in the south-west of the Peloponnese, but citizen rights were limited to a privileged minority (declining from about 8,000 at the beginning of the fifth century to 1,000 or fewer by the middle of the fourth). The rest of the population consisted of perioikoi (‘those living around’), free to run the local affairs of their own communities but subject to Sparta in foreign policy, and helots (‘captives’), serfs farming the land for the Spartan citizens who owned it. By contrast, most Greek states were much smaller: it has been estimated that of all the Greek city states, including those elsewhere around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, 79 per cent had an area of under 77 square miles / 200km2 and another 11 per cent 77–193 square miles / 200–500km2.21

By the beginning of the fifth century Sparta had become the strongest power on the Greek mainland, with most states in the Peloponnese attached to it through a network of alliances in which Sparta was the leading partner, which modern scholars refer to as the Peloponnesian League. In the course of wars against the invading Persians, in 490 and 480–479, in which Sparta was the overall commander of the mainland Greeks resisting the invaders, Athens spent a surplus from its silver mines on an up-to-date navy of two hundred triremes (ships with three banks of oars, which were thus made more powerful than simpler ships without being impracticably long), far more than any other state possessed. When, after that, the Spartans withdrew from an on-going war against the Persians (to prevent or resist another Persian invasion, and to liberate those Greeks, particularly on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, who were still subject to Persia), Athens became the leader of the Greeks who did want to persevere, in an alliance which modern scholars call the Delian League, because its original headquarters was the sacred island of Delos (in the centre of the Cyclades, the islands of the southern Aegean).

At first the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League coexisted; but from c. 460 Athens, while continuing to fight against Persia not only in the Aegean but also in Cyprus and Egypt, also began to build up its power on the Greek mainland, and that led to conflict with Sparta and its allies, in the First Peloponnesian War. But the Athenians were overstretching themselves: regular warfare against Persia came to an end after c. 450 (but there is no good fifth-century evidence for a peace treaty: the so-called Peace of Callias was probably invented to make the glorious past more vivid after a treaty of 387/6 had returned the Asiatic Greeks to Persia2), and in 447–446 Athens lost most of what it had gained on the mainland. The Thirty Years’ Peace of 446/5 recognised the existence of a Spartan bloc based on the mainland and an Athenian bloc based on the Aegean. This seemed to represent a victory for Sparta, but the lesson which Athens took from it was that it could not expand in Sparta’s orbit but could still expand elsewhere, and the allies in the Delian League were increasingly subjected to Athens in what can fairly be described as an Athenian empire.

The two great states of Athens and Sparta came to be seen, and to see themselves, as opposite in many ways. Athens had a large citizen body, and, with its power based on the navy whose ships were rowed by the poorer citizens, had developed a participatory form of government in which considerable power was exercised by the whole citizen body. By c. 460 the term demo-kratia (‘people’s power’) had been coined to refer to this form of government, and Athens began to encourage, and occasionally demand, demo...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Maps
• Preface
• References and abbreviations
• Chapter I: Sources and Modern Studies
• Chapter II: Background
• Chapter III: Childhood and Early Career: 451–416
• Chapter IV: The Sicilian Expedition and Alcibiades’ Exile: 415–413
• Chapter V: Sparta, Persia and Athens: 413–411
• Chapter VI: Alcibiades and the Athenian Navy: 411–406
• Chapter VII: Final Years: 406–404/3
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index