David Stuttard, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (2018).
Good Reads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 4.29 by 169 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Greek.
Verdict: Amazing.
Tagline: The bigger the lie, the more often it is repeated.
Alcibiades is the most singular figure of the 500+ individuals named in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades was larger than life; he was also a changeling. He could be all things to all people writ large. That makes him altogether a fascinating subject. Though like all the other writers drawn to this flame, the author cannot penetrate the mystique, but not for the want of trying.
Alcibiades traced his lineage back to the mythical Ajax, but there is no doubt Alcibiades was of mortal woman and mortal man born. His singular qualities were human, not divine. When his wealthy father died, he was adopted by Pericles, and later became a teacher’s pet of Socrates. Both the politician and the philosopher found him attractive, impulsive, smart, stubborn, brave, daring, mercurial, and erratic even as a boy, and he remained so as a man.
In the boy we can see the man coming; and in the later man we can see the boy he remained. But not completely. That shape-shifting ability to convert himself instantly into being more Spartan than any Spartan; to become in a flash more Persian than the Great King himself; to live a rustic with ease, these remain behind the curtain. By what alchemy was he able to use protean magic immediately and completely remains a mystery. I also wondered about languages but got no enlightenment.
Despairing of the boy, Pericles sent him to his brother to rear, who in turn gave up and let this privileged and spoiled brat run wild. Socrates tried to turn Alcibiades to philosophy, and failed. (There are two Platonic dialogues named for Alcibiades in which Socrates has some success with the eponymous man, but these are later fictions. He is also a character in at least one other Platonic dialogue.) It is unlikely, on dates, that Plato ever met Alcibiades, though another older Socratic student certainly did, namely Xenophon, himself a soldier of distinction.
This author suggests that Thucydides interviewed Alcibiades for details that he included in his History of the Peloponnesian War when both were exiles from Athens in the north east of Greece. That is intriguing possibility partly because Thucydides is critical of, even hostile to, Alcibiades in his book.
***
The author offers a continuous narrative by piecing together shards from many sources, like those Platonic dialogues, other Greek fragments, and later Roman works of both fact and fiction, as well as Thucydides. It is an impressive quilt made from every mention of the man in the available, mainly fragmentary record, and sewing together the patches into this detailed, nearly month-by-month account, is a remarkable achievement.
Those Roman sources came many hundreds of years later, but the supposition is that they were based on still earlier and more proximate sources, now lost to posterity, rather than simply made-up. It is plausible, but….there would have been a market for fiction, too. Lies do sell. Demand creates supply.
I assumed, correct me if I am wrong, that these ancient sources have all been scanned and transcribed, and much searching for Alcibiades now can be done at a computer screen. Prior to that, delving into so many original sources, held all over the European world, would have been the labour of the lifetime, or more!
