Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens

"This is a very readable introduction not just to one of the key players of the era that Thucydides is writing about, but to the era itself. One of the things that David Stuttard tends to do really carefully—again because we lack so much actual concrete, biographical information about Alcibiades—is lay out the cultural context that produced him in Athens during the mid-5th century. He also writes about Alcibiades’s family, because he was descended from this important aristocratic family. This all helps. The reader can then return to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War with a more fleshed-out picture of the cultural background of Athens at the time. Both of these books have been criticized for being overly dramatic, romanticized biographies. But they do a lot of good work in laying out context and then, especially when read together, they provide an interesting insight into the particular methodological problems of dealing with this time period that’s so much discussed, but for which we actually have very little evidence. He shows up at every critical juncture of Athenian history at this time. At one point, he defects to Sparta, but then has to leave because he was sleeping with the queen. He knows everyone and shows up everywhere, so if you follow his story, as Stuttard does, you wind up running into every major figure and place in the Greek world in this period. So actually, just because he got around so much, Alcibiades is a very effective way of tracing the bigger story of this historical period. No, I don’t think Alcibiades was responsible for the ‘fall’ of Athens. But I do think he made that supposed fall a lot more interesting. His behaviour—the addiction to celebrity, the lavish displays of expenditure (like at the Olympics), the partying and sleeping around but also the company-keeping with Socrates—all of this works quite nicely as a kind of allegory for what’s gone wrong with the city of Athens itself, for why the city allegedly ‘fell’. His over-the-top personality is very useful if you want to construct some sort of moralizing narrative about the fate of the city, the city that got too big for its britches and lost all sense of decency. But that, too, is a very tendentious reading of what ‘really’ happened in and to Athens. 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. And yes, it was quite common when a general ran an unsuccessful campaign for the people to get rid of him for a while. It even happened to Pericles. The amazing thing about Thucydides exile is that, had he not been exiled, he never would have had the time to write this work. It was really his exile that gave him the leisure to pursue writing his History of the Peloponnesian War . The exile in Thucydides’ case—and other cases too—was not so dramatic as we think of it today. He wasn’t completely cut off. When we think of Ovid’s exile for example, all he does is mourn being cut off from Rome. Thucydides actually makes the most of being physically removed from Athens and is able to talk to people on both sides of the war. He still has access to information."