#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 15/
But when Lysander robbed them of their freedom, and handed the city over to thirty men, then, their cause being lost, their eyes were opened to the course they would not take when salvation was yet in their power.
They sorrowfully rehearsed all their mistakes and follies, the greatest of which they considered to be their outburst of wrath against Alcibiades.
[Section 38]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 14/
And it would seem that if ever a man was ruined by his own exalted reputation, that man was Alcibiades.
His continuous successes gave him such repute for unbounded daring and sagacity, that when he failed in anything, men suspected his inclination; they would not believe in his inability.
Were he only inclined to do a thing, they thought, naught could escape him.
[Section 35]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 13/
For now he had taken the city when she was almost banished from the sea, when on land she was hardly mistress of her own suburbs, and when factions raged within her walls, and had raised her up from this wretched and lowly plight, not only restoring her dominion over the sea, but actually rendering her victorious over her enemies everywhere on land.
[Section 32]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 12/
[Alcibiades plays double and trebble bluffs and manages to get himself installed as general of the Athenian army in Samos and external leader of the opposition group back home in Athens.]
An ordinary man, thus suddenly raised to great power by the favour of the multitude, would have been full of complaisance, thinking that he must at once gratify them in all things and oppose them in nothing, since they had made him, instead of a wandering exile, leader and general of such a fleet and of so large an armed force.
But Alcibiades, as became a great leader, felt that he must oppose them in their career of blind fury, and prevented them from making a fatal mistake.
For had they sailed off home, their enemies might at once have occupied all Ionia & the Hellespont without a battle, while Athenians were fighting Athenians and making their own city the seat of war. Such a war Alcibiades prevented.
[Section 26]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 11/
Alcibiades's versatility and surpassing cleverness were the admiration of the Barbarian [Tissaphernes], who was no straightforward man himself, but malicious and fond of evil company.
And indeed no disposition could resist and no nature escape Alcibiades, so full of grace was his daily life and conversation. Even those who feared and hated him felt a rare and winning charm in his society and presence. And thus it was that Tissaphernes, though otherwise the most ardent of the Persians in his hatred of the Hellenes, so completely surrendered to the flatteries of Alcibiades as to outdo him in reciprocal flatteries.
[Section 24]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 10/
[Alcibiades betrays, first his native Athens to Sparta, then Athens and Sparta to Persia.]
He had one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others, thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon.
In Sparta, he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for luxurious ease and pleasure; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness.
It was not that he could so easily pass entirely from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior which might in each case be suitable for them.
[Section 23] #TheWayOfTheTraitor
"Many were they who sat in the palaestras and lounging-places mapping out in the sand the shape of Sicily and the position of Libya and Carthage."
In one single image, Plutarch lays bare how an imperialist society goes into immediate war fever, once the prospect of expansion is in the air.
Armchair generals, sitting in their lounging-places, "... mapping out in the sand the shape of Sicily and the position of Libya and Carthage."
What an image! We know this exact same phenomenon from many modern episodes, for instance from the immediate pre-war period in 1914. (The final parts of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain give a precise depiction of the intellectual reflections of the 1914 craze.)
#Plutarch #Alcibiades #WarFever #Imperialism #ArmchairGenerals
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 9/
So while Nicias was trying to divert the people from the capture of Syracuse as an undertaking too difficult for them, Alcibiades was dreaming of Carthage and Libya, and, after winning these, of at once encompassing Italy and Peloponnesus. He almost regarded Sicily as the ways and means provided for his greater war.
The young men were at once carried away on the wings of such hopes, and their elders kept recounting in their ears many wonderful things about the projected expedition. Many were they who sat in the palaestras and lounging-places mapping out in the sand the shape of Sicily and the position of Libya and Carthage.
Socrates the philosopher, however, and Meton the astrologer, are said to have had no hopes that any good would come to the city from this expedition.
[Section 17]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 8/
On Sicily the Athenians had cast longing eyes even while Pericles was living; and after his death they actually tried to lay hands upon it.
The lesser expeditions which they sent thither from time to time, ostensibly for the aid and comfort of their allies on the island who were being wronged by the Syracusans, they regarded merely as stepping stones to the greater expedition of conquest.
But the man who finally fanned this desire of theirs into flame, and persuaded them not to attempt the island any more in part and little by little, but to sail thither with a great armament and subdue it utterly, was Alcibiades; he persuaded the people to have great hopes, and he himself had greater aspirations still.
Such were his hopes that he regarded Sicily as a mere beginning, and not, like the rest, as an end of the expedition.
[Section 17]
#Plutarch #ParallelLives
#Alcibiades 7/
But all this statecraft and eloquence and lofty purpose and cleverness was attended with great luxuriousness of life, with wanton drunkenness and lewdness, and with prodigal expenditures.
The reputable men of the city looked on all these things with loathing and indignation, and feared his contemptuous and lawless spirit. They thought such conduct as his tyrant-like and monstrous.
How the common folk felt towards him has been well set forth by Aristophanes in these words:—
"It yearns for him, and hates him too, but wants him back;"
and again, veiling a yet greater severity in his metaphor:–
"A lion is not to be reared within the state; But, once you've reared him up, consult his every mood."
[Section 16]
the roamer