Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
The name was a charm, and its workings, like all magical processes, were beyond reason. The man on whom the Athenians, in their extremity, pinned their hopes was one whom they had three times rejected, a traitor who had worked so effectively for their enemies that there were those who held him personally responsible for Athens’ downfall. Exiled from Athens for the second time, he was now living among the barbarians in Thrace. There, in a heavily fortified stronghold, with a private army at his command, he led the life of an independent warlord or bandit chief. There was no substantial reason to suppose that he could do anything for the Athenian democracy, and no certainty that he would wish to help even were it in his power to do so. And yet, as the first-century historian Cornelius Nepos noted, Alcibiades was a man from whom miracles, whether malign or beneficent, had always been expected: ‘The people thought there was nothing he could not accomplish.’
Plato, who knew Alcibiades, elaborates in the Republic what he calls a ‘noble lie’, a fable in which he suggests that all men are made from earth, but that in a few the earth has been mixed with gold, rendering them inherently superior to their fellow men, and fit to wield power. This lie, Plato suggests, is a politically useful one. In his ideal republic, he would like to ‘indoctrinate’ the mass of the people with a belief in it, in order that they might be the more easily governed. It would probably not be hard to do so. The belief that some people are innately different from and better than others pervades all pagan mythology and classical legend and surfaces as well in folk tales and fairy stories. The foundling whose white skin proclaims her noble birth, the favoured younger son who survives his ordeals assisted by the birds and beasts who recognize his privileged status, the emperor-to-be whose birth is attended by tremendous omens – all spring, as Plato’s men of gold do, from a profoundly anti-egalitarian collective belief in, and yearning for, the existence of a naturally occurring elite – exceptional beings capable of leading their subordinates to victory, averting evil and playing saviour, or simply providing by their prodigious feats a spectacle capable of exhilarating and inspiring the humdrum multitude. In Alcibiades the Athenians found their golden man.
That Alcibiades was indeed an extraordinary person is well attested. All his life he had a quality, which his contemporaries were at a loss to define or explain, that inspired admiration, fear, and vast irrational hopes. ‘No one ever exceeded Alcibiades’, wrote Nepos, ‘in his faults or in his virtues.’ His contemporaries recognized in him something demonic and excessive that both alarmed and excited them. Plutarch likened him to the fertile soil of Egypt, so rich that it brings forth wholesome drugs and poisons in equally phenomenal abundance. He was a beauty and a bully, an arrogant libertine and a shrewd diplomat, an orator as eloquent when urging on his troops as when he was lying to save his life, a traitor three or four times over with a rare and precious gift (essential to a military commander) for winning his men’s love. There was a time when his prodigious energy and talents terrified many Athenians, who feared that a man so exceptional must surely aim to make himself a tyrant; but in their despair they looked to him as a redeemer.
His adult life coincided almost exactly with the duration of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, when he was nineteen, and ended with the fall of Athens in 405, the year before his death. Throughout that period, with brief interludes, the Spartans and their allies (known collectively as the Peloponnesians) struggled against the Athenians, with their allies and colonies, for ascendancy while lesser powers repeatedly shifted allegiance, tilting the balance of power first one way, then another. Sparta was a rigidly conservative state with a curious and ancient constitution in which two hereditary kings ruled alongside, and were outranked by, a council of grandees, the ephors, selected from a handful of noble families. Spartan colonies had oligarchic governments imposed upon them. Athens was a democracy, and founded democracies in its colonies. The war had an ideological theme, but it was also a competition between two aggressively expansionist rival powers for political and economic dominance of the eastern Mediterranean world. From 412 onwards it was complicated by the intervention of the Persians, whose empire dwarfed both the Hellenic alliances. Athens’ successful colonization of the Aegean islands and the coastal regions of Asia Minor deprived the Persian Great King of revenue. His regional governors, the satraps, sided first with the Spartans, later with Athens, in an attempt to re-establish control of the area. Alcibiades, who had Odysseus’ cunning as well as Achilles’ brilliance, was a skilful actor in the complex, deadly theatre of the war. As a general he was swift, subtle and daring. As a diplomat he proved himself to be a confidence trickster of genius.
In his youth he was the golden boy of Athens’ golden age. His family were rich, aristocratic (they claimed descent from Homer’s Nestor), and well connected not only in Athens but all over the Greek world. In constitutional terms every free male citizen of Athens was equal to every other, but in practice the nobility still dominated the government as they did the city’s economic and social life. Homer’s characters take it for granted that a person’s best qualities are inherited. ‘No mean men could sire sons like you’, Menelaus tells two handsome young strangers (he’s right – their fathers are both kings). Most of Alcibiades’ contemporaries would have made the same assumption. ‘The splendour running in the blood has much weight,’ wrote Pindar. When Alcibiades was still a child his father was killed in battle and he was taken to live in the household of his guardian Pericles, who was for thirty years effective ruler of Athens. He could scarcely have been given a better start in life.
Nature was as kind to him as fortune had been. Like Achilles, he was dazzlingly beautiful. To Plutarch, writing five hundred years after his death, his loveliness was still so much of a byword that ‘we need say no more about it, than that it flowered at each season of his growth in turn’. In the homoerotic society of Athens such good looks made him an instant celebrity. As a boy, he was ‘surrounded and pursued by many admirers of high rank … captivated by the brilliance of his youthful beauty’. Whether he actually had sexual relations with any of them is unclear, but gossip maintained that he did. If so, few of his contemporaries would therefore have considered him either immoral or effete. Aeschylus, in the generation before Alcibiades, and Plato, his contemporary, both believed Achilles to be Patroclus’ lover (something Homer does not suggest), but neither of them thought any the less of him for it. On the contrary, Plato’s Phaedrus cites Achilles’ ‘heroic choice to go and rescue Patroclus’ as an example of the way in which love can ennoble a man, earning him ‘the extreme admiration of the gods’.
Among those smitten by Pericles’ ward was Socrates, who told a disciple that the two great loves of his life were philosophy and Alcibiades. The philosopher had gathered around himself a group of aristocratic young men, non-paying students of whom Alcibiades was certainly not the most serious but of whom he was the most highly favoured. Plato (another of them) testifies that the relationship between the ugly middle-aged philosopher and the radiantly beautiful teenager remained chaste, but it surely was, at least on Socrates’ part, physically motivated. When in Plato’s Protagoras, which is set at a time when Alcibiades was about fifteen, Socrates claims to have become so engrossed in a philosophical discussion as to have briefly forgotten Alcibiades altogether, his friend teases him by saying ‘Surely you did not find anyone else of greater beauty there. No! not in all our city.’ Alcibiades’ beauty marked him out, just as Achilles’ had done, as a superior being. In the second century ad the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a connoisseur and devotee of male beauty as ardent as any Athenian, set up an image of Alcibiades in Parian marble and commanded that an ox should be sacrificed to him every year. In his lifetime as well, his looks made him an object, not only of lust, but also of worship. And lovely as he was, his charm was as potent as his physical attractions. His personal magnetism, according to Plutarch, ‘was such that no disposition could