This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450-404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city-and his tumultuous age.Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.
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EditedbyFrederickM.Ahl,CharlesBrittain,KevinClinton,David P. Mankin, Sturt W. Manning, Alan J. Nussbaum, Hayden Pelliccia, Pietro Pucci, Hunter R. Rawlings III, Eric Rebillard, Jeffrey S. Rusten, Barry S. Strauss
JacquelinedeRomilly’slifelongcontributionstoancientGreekliteratureand history made her a major figure in French culture. In 1973 she became chair of Greek at the Collège de France, the first woman nominated to this distinguished institution. In 1988, she was elected to the Académie Fran çaise as its second female member. In her later years she became famous in France for her ardent advocacy of classical education for all. Romilly (1913–2010) was well known on both sides of the Atlantic as an intellec tual and cultural critic and served as A. D. White ProfessoratLarge at Cornell University from 1974 to1980. I was drawn to Romilly’s work in 2010, when I undertook the trans lation of her seminal bookHistoire et raison chez Thucydidebuprst,filished in Paris in 1956. That study altered the course of scholarship on Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War by revealing the au thor’s rhetorical and literary artfulness, the means by which he refined and shaped the “facts” of history. The title chosen for my translation, The Mind of Thucydides(Cornell University Press, 2012), aptly captures Romilly’s purpose and achievement.