From his earliest youth Alcibiades displayed a voracious hunger for attention and approbation. He attracted ardent lovers and admirers, as well as rivals and enemies, throughout his life. The biographer Plutarch, who wrote a Life of Alcibiades in the late first or early second century BC, recounts a number of anecdotes for which the young Alcibiades became notorious. Once, in a wrestling-match, he avoided being thrown by digging his teeth into his opponent’s arm. When the latter dropped his hold and accused Alcibiades of biting ‘like a woman’, he replied that he did bite – like a lion. The self-idealising image persisted. In later times Alcibiades was often accorded epithets and imagery comparing him to a lion.
On another occasion as a boy, Alcibiades was playing knucklebones, a children’s game in which a donkey’s knucklebones were tossed like dice, with friends in a narrow street. A heavily laden ox-cart came along just as he had made his throw, and he held up his hand for the driver to stop. The driver paid no attention and the cart rumbled forward. The other boys scattered out of danger, but Alcibiades stretched himself out on the road directly in the wagon’s path, forcing the furious and alarmed driver to bring the vehicle to a stop.
Alcibiades was intent on having his way and winning. In one anecdote, Socrates tells him that he used to watch him when he was a child, playing knucklebones and other games with his schoolmates. When Alcibiades caught another boy playing foul he was furious and indignantly branded him a ‘rotten cheat’.5 The story confirms the picture of Socrates as already part of the circle around Alcibiades when the latter was a young boy.
These and other accounts of Alcibiades’ youth point to the combination of charisma and self-confidence that complemented the boy’s good looks. He was said to have spoken with a kind of lisp which was mocked by comic poets, but his speech was said to be all the more charming and persuasive for it. Yet although many men were smitten by him, Plutarch notes, the only one he ever truly valued in return was Socrates, because it was evident to him that the latter’s intent was solely to protect and educate him. The contrast between the two, however, in character, appearance and purpose was striking to onlookers. ‘People were amazed,’ Plutarch writes, ‘when they saw Alcibiades having meals, taking exercise, and sharing a tent with Socrates.’
The relationship of Socrates with Alcibiades is so well rehearsed – much of the early part of Plutarch’s biography of Alcibiades is devoted to it – that few have given due weight to its likely biographical implications for Socrates’ association with Pericles himself. In the fifteen years that passed between the death of Cleinias in the autumn of 447 BC and the campaign of Potidaea in 432 BC, the intimate familiarity that developed between Socrates and Alcibiades will have required the consent, if not the explicit blessing, of Alcibiades’ powerful and highly-placed erstwhile guardian. Their association is also likely to have been cemented with the full knowledge and backing of Pericles’ influential partner Aspasia, who was related to Alcibiades through her sister’s marriage to his grandfather, also called Alcibiades.6
In Plato’s and Xenophon’s writings, Socrates is often made to speak with guarded respect of Pericles, who died of the plague shortly after Socrates and Alcibiades returned from Potidaea in 429 BC. Xenophon also depicts Socrates as well acquainted with the younger Pericles, the statesman’s son by Aspasia; in his Memoirs of Socrates he has the two men engage in friendly conversation. Neither Plato nor Xenophon, however, indicates that Pericles and Socrates were at any time in personal contact or well acquainted with one another. Yet the circumstances surrounding Alcibiades’ early years – his admission to Pericles’ guardianship at the age of four and his closeness to Socrates from boyhood – make it hard to imagine that anything else can have been the case. Such an association casts a significant light on the question of Socrates’ background, status, and early circumstances.
Alcibiades’ other tutor
There are a number of possible reasons for Plato’s and Xenophon’s reticence about Socrates’ acquaintance with Pericles, and their silence on other matters that relate to Socrates’ activities and relationships as a young man. For the moment, an anecdote told by the Roman statesman and orator Cicero may yield a fuller picture of Socrates’ association with Alcibiades as a boy.7
After the death of Cleinias, Pericles assigned his young ward Alcibiades to an elderly Thracian tutor called Zopyrus. Zopyrus was a metic, a resident non-Athenian. He may be identified with the Zopyrus active in Athens at the time who is known for having promulgated a theory, similar to the physiognomic doctrines that were to be popular in the eighteenth century, about how physical types reflect character.8
The details of Socrates’ appearance were evidently well known to Zopyrus. The Thracian was said to have commented in a public gathering about an intimate feature of Socrates’ physique: he observed that no hollows appeared in Socrates’ neck above his collar-bones – the indentation technically known as the supraclavicular fossa – but that the spaces there were filled in. According to Zopyrus’s idiosyncratic theory of physiognomy, this was a clear indication of Socrates’ character. People who displayed a ‘blockage’ in that area, he said, were found to be ‘stupid and slow-witted’.
The fact that this was such a staggeringly inappropriate judgement of Socrates suggests that the interpretation may have resulted less from Zopyrus’s bizarre doctrine than from his misunderstanding of Socrates’ manner, or even just from personal dislike or envy. Zopyrus diagnosed another unflattering character-trait of Socrates from his physiognomy: he declared that he was clearly a ‘sex-maniac’ or ‘womaniser’ (mulierosus). In the version of the story told by Cicero, when Alcibiades heard the comment he burst out laughing. He will have been amused to note that Zopyrus was accurate, at least in this respect, about his beloved tutor’s lustful inclinations–in this case evidently thought of as being directed at women rather than men.
Zopyrus’s evaluations of Socrates apparently have nothing to say about the philosopher’s facial features. The wide snub nose and bulging eyes, for instance, that were later considered characteristic aspects of Socrates’ appearance, do not feature in the Thracian’s assessment of his physiognomy. Since Zopyrus claimed that he could read a man’s character from his body, eyes, face, and brow, we would perhaps imagine that his supposition about Socrates’ sexual nature may have arisen from his observation of the way his eyes bulged, a classic symptom of a condition known as hyperthyroidism. All we are told, however, is about the shape of Socrates’ collar-bone.
The fact that Zopyrus was in a position to observe Socrates’ bare shoulders with such accuracy might speculatively be connected to circumstances that would have made them visible, such as when Socrates danced or wrestled unclothed with his and Zopyrus’s pupil, Alcibiades. Such evidence of intimacy with his well-born charge would have aroused resentment in a tutor who, unlike Socrates, was not a freeborn Athenian citizen or a soldier and did not command the respect of his arrogant and headstrong pupil.
In another anecdote deriving from the same source, a lost dialogue called Zopyrus written by a pupil of Socrates, Phaedo of Elis, the ill-disposed Zopyrus was said to have enumerated a catalogue of faults and vices for which Socrates, on the evidence of his appearance, was liable to censure. Those who were present ridiculed the Thracian’s analysis, since no such failings as those he listed could in fact be attributed to the Socrates they knew.
On this occasion, Socrates came to Zopyrus’s defence with a gallant and characteristically ironic gesture. He said Zopyrus was absolutely right, since those were the very flaws to which he was prone by nature. But, he added, the reason that they were now absent from his character was that he had managed to expel them by the exercise of reason. By this adroit response Socrates contrived to refute any findings Zopyrus’s theory might suggest in respect of his character, while reaffirming his philosophical insistence on the primacy of reason.
Socrates’ alter ego
The handsome young Alcibiades became notorious in Athens for his transgress
ions and escapades. On one occasion, angered by a teacher’s apparent indifference to the poetry of Homer, he punched him in the face. On another, he disrupted a Council meeting by setting a quail fluttering around the chamber. He scandalised his fellow-Athenians by buying a long-tailed mastiff and then parading it around town with its tail chopped off. When reproached for this, he claimed that his purpose was to draw attention from yet worse behaviour of his own.
The young man’s appetite for misconduct was met with stern anger from his guardian Pericles. Alcibiades’ great-aunt Aspasia, Pericles’ wife in effect if not in name, may have been more forgiving. One might imagine that, together with Socrates, she would have been inclined to intercede on the boy’s behalf on more than one occasion. In this indulgent attitude they were joined by the mass of Athenians, who seemed able to forgive Alcibiades any misdemeanour, seeing in him an outrageously handsome and clever young man with a commendable zeal for success and recognition.
Socrates himself may have seen the young tearaway as a kindred spirit. He himself had played truant in his youth, and had suffered punishment for it at the hands of his father Sophroniscus. Much of what we see of the older Socrates is playful and mischievous, so perhaps as a young man he too was inclined to perpetrate mischief. No less than Alcibiades, Socrates had an infuriatingly competitive nature, and is often pictured by Plato as determined not to yield to his opponents. Even in the overwhelmingly favourable portrayals of Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ encounters with elders and peers show him as unprepared to suffer ideas or statements that he thinks wrong or inconsequential, to the point where, as Plato depicts in the Meno, an angry interlocutor threatens him with physical violence.9
If the older Socrates comes across as an intellectual pugilist, often treating debates like wrestling matches to be won or lost, his purpose in doing so was to strip away false assumptions so as to get closer to the truth. The young Alcibiades cared less for truth than for the honour or rewards he could accrue in the eyes of others. An obsession with philotimia, the love of honour, was common to ambitious politicians, and the aspiration to success was applauded by Athenian society. Alcibiades’ unbounded appetite for glory shows itself in his accepting from the generals a decoration for valour at Potidaea, knowing that by rights it should have been given to Socrates, without whose intervention he would probably have been killed.
Socrates’ cultural background, no less than Alcibiades’, will have emphasised the aspiration to martial honour and glory; but this kind of recognition was evidently no longer Socrates’ goal, as it may once have been. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades’ portrayal of Socrates peels back the outer layers of his appearance to reveal the inner beauty beneath the ugly surface. We might in turn strip back the sanctified image of Socrates to reveal his inner Alcibiades. As a younger man Socrates too will have understood the desire for success fostered by the injunction found in Homer’s Iliad (later to become the motto of Alexander the Great), ‘Always excel and be superior to others’. Rather than disapproving of Alcibiades’ military and political ambitions, then, Socrates may have observed them with the eye of a man who, having once been inclined to follow that same path, had chosen expressly to renounce it.
From this perspective, Alcibiades may be viewed as an alter ego of the younger Socrates: the kind of dashing martial hero that the budding philosopher, along with other Athenian men of his age and status, might once have striven to become. But by his late thirties something had long changed in Socrates’ outlook and aspirations, so that his life was dedicated to achieving a different, if no less heroic, goal: to help his fellow-citizens to gain greater illumination about the purpose of their lives.
Alcibiades and Sicily
Alcibiades was ultimately to follow the path of individualistic honour and glory to the point of self-destruction. Ancient Athenian readers of Plato’s Symposium will have recalled how, only a year after Agathon’s celebration in 416 BC, Alcibiades proposed, and was placed in joint charge of, the greatest and most fateful military campaign ever launched by Athens: the calamitous expedition to conquer Sicily.
The coastline of Sicily was at the time largely settled by Greeks living in city-states of varied size and power. Syracuse was the largest and wealthiest of the city-states on the island, and vied with Athens in power and cultural prestige. Its rival cities such as Segesta and Leontini wooed Athens for its support, falsely seeking to give the impression that they were endowed with enormous resources that would assist Athens in a war against Syracuse. The people of Segesta even claimed that they were prepared to contribute to funding a fleet, and tricked the Athenian ambassadors by allowing them to see heaps of gold and silver objects lying around to suggest that there was a lot more at their disposal. The island was also rich in cornland, and many Athenians imagined that a conquest would be both easy and profitable.
In the spring of 415 the Athenian Assembly conducted a public debate on the merits of such a campaign. Alcibiades, who had first been elected general in 420 BC (the minimum age for the post was thirty), was enormously popular in Athens, and felt that his moment had come. Sensing that a successful expedition would elevate him to truly heroic status in the eyes of Athens, he argued strongly in its favour. Opposing him was the more experienced general Nicias, who urged restraint. Alcibiades’ charisma and persuasive speeches carried the day.
When Nicias realised the expedition was likely to go ahead, he tried a ploy to put off the Athenians: he argued that far greater expenditure on ships and troops would be required to combat the power of the Sicilian cities. His ruse backfired. The Athenian Assembly embraced his proposal with enthusiasm: they passed a motion for the generals to levy more than a hundred ships and five thousand hoplites, a force whose eventual loss was to be far more damaging than what might have been had a smaller expedition been ordered.
The Athenians set about preparing the unprecedented armada. In the weeks and days before it was due to sail crowds flocked to the Piraeus, Athens’ great harbour, to watch the triremes being fitted out and the artillery being constructed for what would surely be a glorious campaign. Socrates will have been among the onlookers. His own days of military service were past, but he would have continued to follow the career of Alcibiades with keen attention.
One morning shortly before the fleet was due to sail the Athenians awoke to the sight of a terrible act of sacrilege. Hundreds of stone images of the god Hermes which were to be found throughout Athens, most numerously in the Agora, had been damaged and defaced. The Herms, as they were called, were square blocks of stone surmounted by the solemn, bearded head of the god, depicting an erect phallus in relief on the front side of the block. They were placed at the entrances to sacred sites and private homes, to ensure good luck to visitors, travellers and city-dwellers alike. Athens was full of Herms; and on that fateful morning, it became clear that the Herms throughout the city had been deliberately vandalised, with both their faces and phalluses smashed.10
In the eyes of the superstitious Athenians, such irreligious behaviour was bound to cast a terrible pall on the expedition’s prospects. A political enemy of Alcibiades rapidly produced a false witness who claimed that Alcibiades and his friends were responsible for sacrilegious conduct in relation to the Mysteries. While the allegation did not relate to the mutilated Herms, it tarred him with impiety. Alcibiades immediately volunteered to be put on trial, under penalty of death, to prove his innocence; but his opponents calculated that his supporters would be outnumbered once the army had left Athens. They therefore waited for him to set sail, which he did the following day, before they brought the charges against him. It suited their purpose that he was discovered to have recently acted with his aristocratic friends in a private masque, proving his unconcern about committing sacrilege. He had allegedly made fun of the holy Mysteries of the goddess Demeter – perhaps, among other things, by dressing in women’s clothes – and had unforgivably flaunted these activities in front of slaves.
A few weeks after the army had lande
d in Sicily, an Athenian ship arrived to arrest Alcibiades on the charge of profaning the Mysteries. Alcibiades boarded his own ship to return, but after it had put in at Thurioi, an Athenian settlement that had been founded two decades earlier in southern Italy, he set sail again to seek refuge with the enemy Spartans. He had officially become a traitor to Athens. His flight was taken as proof of guilt, and he was condemned to death in absentia.
Alcibiades’ defection helped Athens’ enemies obtain critical intelligence and guidance for the conduct of the war, both in Sicily and on the mainland. Thucydides recounts the gradual collapse of the Athenian expedition in painful detail. Over the course of the next year, a series of hesitations and misjudgements by the cautious general Nicias in Sicily left the Athenian troops under his command in a precarious position. A final series of delays and misjudgements culminated in a massacre of thousands of Athenian soldiers by the Syracusans. Thousands more surrendered, only to die of hunger and thirst as prisoners in the cruelly unsheltered quarries of Syracuse. Nicias himself surrendered and was put to death.
The final death toll by land and sea was horrendous. Along with the loss of hundreds of ships, around ten thousand Athenian hoplites and thirty thousand experienced oarsmen perished. Athens’ democratic constitution was under threat as never before, and indeed it was shortly to be replaced in 411 BC, if only temporarily, by an oligarchy of four hundred leading citizens. Many in Athens pointed the finger for the calamity and its anti-democratic repercussions at Alcibiades. It did not escape their notice that he was one of Socrates’ closest friends and former pupils.
The end of Alcibiades
Having helped to ensure the Peloponnesians’ military successes against Athens in Sicily and elsewhere, the flamboyant Alcibiades soon fell out of favour with his Spartan hosts. While at Sparta, he embarked on an affair with Timaea, the wife of the Spartan king Agis, and she allegedly bore him a son. After receiving a warning that the order had been given to kill him, Alcibiades fled again, this time defecting to the Persians, who had been supporting the Spartans against Athens.
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