The life of Alcibiades (452-404 BC) understandably fascinated his contemporaries. He appears, for example, in Plato’s dialogues Gorgias, Protagoras, and Symposium (there are also two other dialogues, First andSecond Alcibiades, but Plato’s authorship is doubted); Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; Xenophon’s Hellenica and Memorabilia; and Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, The Birds, The Frogs, and The Banqueters. It continued to do so throughout antiquity, for example, in the work of Alcibiades’ younger contemporaries, Isocrates’ “On the Team of Horses” and Lysias’ Speeches (two of which are against Alcibiades), and subsequently in Diodorus’ Bibliotheca Historica and, of course, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans or Parallel Lives, where the biography of Alcibiades is compared to that of Coriolanus.
We today can’t help also being fascinated either, as evidenced by Ariel Helfer’s 2017 book Alcibiades and Socrates (reviewed at Law & Liberty by Avi Mintz), and now comes David Stuttard with Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens.
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