He was prominent among radical politicians who were opposed to the peace with Sparta, and he worked hard to discredit it. Having spent his childhood in a political household, he was well connected and familiar with all the issues. He was also charming, highly intelligent, and a brilliant public speaker; he even turned a lisp to pleasing effect.
Alcibiades put forward to the people of Argos (or Argives) the idea of an alliance with Athens. They promptly jilted the Spartans and chose the better offer. A plenipotentiary deputation from Sparta hurried to Athens to try to ward off this new combination of foes. Alcibiades laid a trap; he told the envoys in private that if they made no mention of their full powers he would arrange for Pylos to be handed back to them. They were taken in and at a meeting of the ecclesia said in reply to a question they had come without full powers. The demos lost patience and was on the point of choosing the alliance with Argos when the session was interrupted by an earthquake. When it resumed the following day, wiser counsels prevailed. Nicias won the debate and was instructed to negotiate an agreement with Sparta.
Unluckily the discussions failed and, after all, Athens agreed to a pact with Argos and a number of smaller Peloponnesian states. It was not long before Sparta, feeling itself threatened on its home ground, marched with a strong force under its King Agis and met an allied army outside Mantinea, a polis in Arcadia. In 418, they won a great battle. The Athenian contingent extricated itself relatively unscathed, but its two generals were killed.
The encounter had two consequences. Argos’s uncertain bid to become the leading power in the Peloponnese was over and it had no option but to submit to the Spartans. It was a welcome victory, for it restored some of their battered prestige after the Pylos debacle.
As for Athens little harm had come of its Argive adventure, but little good either. Alcibiades had shown himself to be an opportunist rather than a statesman.
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The amusing and affable drunk at Agathon’s dinner party may have become a senior politician, but he was no more respectable than he ever had been. He spent the family fortune with abandon. He dressed extravagantly, scandalously trailing long purple robes in the dust of the marketplace. He was well known for financing theatrical productions. In 416, the same year that Plato had him gate-crash Agathon’s dinner party, he entered a record-breaking seven teams of horses in the Olympic Games, which took first, second, and fourth places in the chariot race. This extraordinary—and ridiculously expensive—achievement became a talking point throughout the Greek world. “Victory is a beautiful thing,” wrote Euripides obligingly in a celebratory ode and the winner thoroughly agreed.
Alcibiades claimed that he was more than a playboy with a talent to amuse, and that promoting his image was good for Athens as well as for him. According to Thucydides, he told the ecclesia:
The Hellenes expected to see our city ruined by the war, but they concluded that it is greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Games….It is a very useful type of folly when a man spends his money not just for himself but for his city too.
Alcibiades was reported to act greedily and arrogantly, and to get his way by threats. He was popular, but also feared as a bully. He married well—that is, wealthily. His wife, Hipparete, was the sister of Callias, one of the city’s richest men, and she brought with her a handsome dowry of ten talents.
Alcibiades treated her badly and apparently brought his pickups back to the house—whether free women or slaves. This was indeed unacceptable behavior, for a wife’s home was her protected domain. Alcibiades seems to have been addicted to sex. A third-century poet wittily remarked that as a boy he drew husbands away from their wives, and as a young man wives from their husbands.
Hipparete lost patience and left home to lodge with a relative. Almost certainly accompanied by a supportive male relative, she went in person to see the Chief Archon at his workplace, the City Hall or Prytaneum in the agora, and asked him for a divorce. Divorce seems to have been uncommon in ancient Athens, although little information has come down to us; when initiated by a woman, it was a public procedure presumably designed to safeguard her reputation.
Alcibiades was having none of this; the last thing he wanted to do was to repay the dowry, as a divorce would have required. Calling on some friends to help him, he carried off his wife from the agora by force and brought her back home. It was evidence of the fear he aroused that nobody in the square tried to stop him. We do not know whether he was acting within his rights or not, but his behavior was at the very least high-handed and brutal. Apparently Hipparete died soon afterwards. Relations with Hipparete’s brother went into a deep freeze and Callias accused Alcibiades of plotting his death.
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From time to time public affairs and his private life overlapped. Melos is a small volcanic island among the Cyclades, famous for the mining of obsidian (and some centuries later for the statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, whom we know as the Venus de Milo). The inhabitants claimed to be descended from Spartans, but remained carefully neutral in the war.
The Athenians had tried, without success, to force the island to join their maritime league. Now, also in the same year as Agathon’s symposium, they invaded Melos and laid siege to its main town. They promised a general pardon if Melos agreed to join the Athenian Empire. Once again, the islanders declined. Thucydides wrote (perhaps invented) a debate between spokesmen of the two sides. An Athenian justified imperialism with cold candor.
“It is a necessary law of nature to rule where one can,” he said. “We did not make this law, nor were we the first to act on it….All we do is make use of it.”
When winter came, the Melians surrendered. There was no forgiveness for the trouble they had caused. All adult males were put to death and the women and children sold into slavery. It was an atrocity that shocked the Greek world.
Alcibiades not only actively approved of the expedition and its cruel conclusion, he personally profited from it. He bought an attractive Melian woman as a slave and had a son by her.
A few months later at the Great Dionysia in the spring of 415 the playwright Euripides staged his tragedy The Trojan Women. He was a disenchanted rationalist and was noted for his strong women’s parts. Like Aeschylus and Sophocles he addressed the issues of the day, usually in mythical disguise. The play hardly has any plot, but it is a masterpiece of grief. Troy has just fallen and Euripides directs his attention to the sufferings of a group of women among the ruins of the plundered city. Headed by King Priam’s wife, Hecabe, they are waiting to be distributed among the victors and can look forward only to a life of slavery. One of the queen’s daughters is sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles and her darling little grandson, Astyanax, is also slaughtered by the Greeks. Hecabe wails over his dead body:
Dear, lifeless lips, do you remember your promises? You leant over my bed and vowed, When you die, Grandmother, I will cut a long curl of my hair for you, and I will bring all my friends to honor your grave with gifts and holy words. But you have broken your promise, young man.
Euripides was inflaming a sore spot. It is perhaps because his audience recognized echoes of Melos, but refused to admit its guilt for what had been done in its name, that that year the first prize for tragedy went to an execrable poet (in the opinion of Aristophanes, a good judge) called Xenocles.