In the end, Thucydides himself excised rumor from his own histories because he came to see its destructive force Alcibiades was exiled, and so was Thucydides. Thucydides was exiled for a campaign that went badly in northern Greece, a part of Greece where his family had economic interests in the mines. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. 5 Ibid., xxii. Frogs 1425). Alcibiades, therefore, about Athens, and about the politics of rumor. Thucydides writes of the discovery, saying, “concluding that there was nothing to be done, but they had been deceived by Alcibiades, [the Athenians] went away in a rage and proceeded to Samos.” (Thuc. The possibility that Alcibiades' shield may only have existed on the stage (Russell, D.A, ‘ Plutarch, “Alcibiades” 1–16, ’ PCPhS 12 [1966], 45; Littmann, R.J., ‘ The loves of Alcibiades,’ TAP A 101 [1970], 267 –8) is no drawback, since such an image would have expressed the essential public image of the man. 6.88-91), which he gives following his escape en route to Athens to stand trial. (Walter Crane / Public domain ) Around 407 BC, Alcibiades at last decided to return to Athens following a string of victories in the war, many of which were achieved under his leadership. 1 The Redetrias: Thucydides’ Treatment of Nicias and Alcibiades „Thucydides, the most authoritative of Greek historians‟ (Gell. antagonist Alcibiades, who was the main proponent of the expedition. Alcibiades' Oration before the Sicilian expedition as recorded by Thucydides, (VI, 18) d[›]; Thucydides disclaims verbal accuracy. A very drunk Alcibiades then entered the room, demanding to see Agathon.He praised Agathon as the smartest and best looking man in … Alcibiades, as it is supposed, was anciently descended from Eurysaces, the son of Ajax, by his father's side; and by his mother's side from Alcmaeon. * Forde, 1983 edition, in English Charles F. Smith. The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Heretofore little attention has been paid to the speech of the Alcibiades at Sparta (Thuc. Alcibiades began his political career in Athens in the 420s BCE, and became an important politician and general during the Peloponnesian War.His story survives in a rich record of literary, historical, rhetorical, and philosophical works by his contemporaries, including Aristophanes, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plato. 6 References to Thucydides will be included in parentheses in the text, citing book, Alcibiades is a dialogue between the notorious character after whom it is named and Socrates, set at a time when Alcibiades was still a young man, before his entry into his political and military career, and Socrates, about 17 years older, was already established in the city as a major philosophical practitioner. Thucydides wrote his book as the starting point for determining how to read it, in this article I examine Thucydides' presentation of the fateful events surrounding Alcibiades' recall to Athens from the Sicilian 4 Hobbes, Works, viii; my italics. Alcibiades As Tompkins has shown, while Thucydides presents a Nicias whose speeches are characterized by sentences exhibiting a high level of complexity, the style of his Alcibiades is notable for para-taxis. Syse, Henrik. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text. 8.56) And yet merely a year later, a desperate Athens recalls Alcibiades again to … Commentary on Thucydides Book 7. Philosopher Henrik P. Syse is an expert on just war theory. Alcibiades' Oration before the Sicilian expedition as recorded by Thucydides, (VI, 18) d[›]; Thucydides disclaims verbal accuracy. Introduction. It would be like owning two or three of the teams vying for the Super Bowl. For example, he single-handedly entered seven horses in the Olympic chariot races, placing first, second, and fourth; this was a very splashy thing to do. 62 P. A. BRUNT ding etc., and therefore with his conduct in Athens be- But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. The Athenian politician Alcibiades was held by Thucydides to be only person capable of saving Athens during the latter phases of the Peloponnesian War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Also at the party is the great philosopher Socrates, who was a tutor and mentor to Alcibiades. Thucydides should have denied that Alcibiades had even seemed to have rende-red any services to Athens before 411, and the reading of the majority of manuscripts should unquestionably be accepted. The interpretive slant taken is A. Today, we tend to think of Socrates in his later years, an … Thucydides' Alcibiades: a study of the place of Alcibiades in Thucydides' history by Steven Paul. NA., 1.11.1) composed his account of the launching of the Sicilian expedition predominantly through the content of the Redetrias1 and subsequent characterisation of the speakers: Nicias and Alcibiades. The very traits that made Alcibiades an effective public figure also made him vulnerable to rumor. Alcibiades’ triumphant return to Athens surrounded by his countless fans. Forde's book far outstrips any other current treatment of the career of Alkibiades in Thucydides' History. Rubio, Alexander G. Arhivat din original la 27 septembrie 2007 „Plato, Thucydides, and Alcibiades”. Instead of being exiled, they pushed men of good sense from the center of affairs. This language is also present in Thucydides’ discussion of the myth of … 1886. It is not, as seems now to be very commonly implied, I) a product of the last thirty years. Ginn and Company. Why is that? Whereas, there was one Alcibiades in his own day, there were now hundreds of the like: self-serving, cunning and profane; only they did not possess the skills, or the mental acuity, or beauty of Alcibiades. Boston. Throughout Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, erotic language is spoken by the war-time leaders Pericles, in his famous Funeral Oration, and Alcibiades, in his speeches to the Athenians and the Spartans. „Alcibiades and the Sicilian Expedition”. Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Alcibiades' Entrance. Alcibiades' speech is a remarkable construction, serving as a counter 's effect on the political context of the city-state, and a continuous stream of provocative insights reveal the depth of this effect. Alcibiades (ălsĭbī`ədēz), c.450–404 B.C., Athenian statesman and general. In a brief but important transition to Alcibiades’ rebuttal, Thucydides in his narrator’s voice expands on the sentiments he presented in Nicias’ assassination of Alcibiades’ character and suggests that these sentiments led … Arhivat din original la 5 iulie 2007 „Alcibiades, Athens, and the Human Condition in Thucydides' History”. Specifically, the frequency of initial καί in the speeches of Alcibiades is significantly higher than in the other speeches in When rumor set its claws into Alcibiades, it contributed not only to his own downfall, but to the downfall of Athens. He turned to politics after the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C. I begin with Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War: Alcibiades, the son of Clinias, made the most spirited case for the [Sicilian] expedition, partly because [1] he wanted to cross Nicias (with whom he had other political differences), and because Nicias had made It seems to be quite common for these Athenian generals to end up exiled. I then show how Thucydides attributes Athens’ decline from Pericles’ wartime leadership to the kind of erotic relationship Alcibiades cultivates with the Athenian people, or δῆμος. The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides. THE INFLUENCE OF ALCIBIADES ON THUCYDIDES, BOOK 8 BY H. D. WESTLAKE The well-known hypothesis that Thucydides based parts of his History, especially in the eighth book, upon information derived, directly or indirectly, from Alcibiades is, in its simplest form, not less than a century old. While we glean from Plato that Alcibiades is not particularly knowledgeable in political or military matters, in Thucydides' History, we find a different Alcibiades. Dinomache, his mother, was the daughter of Megacles. In the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades I, considered in antiquity one of Plato's most important works, Socrates leads Alcibiades to agree that there ought to be a close link between justice and decisions about war. Of the family of Alcmaeonidae, he was a ward of Pericles and was for many years a devoted attendant of Socrates. In fact, it may be the best scholastic treatment of Alkibiades, period. Home; Random; Nearby; Log in; Settings; Donate; About Wikipedia; Disclaimers Warren, Brian. As the historian Thucydides tells us, Alcibiades lived his private life in a very extravagant way. As Socrates’ speech received applause, a large number of drunken persons arrived loudly in the courtyard.