The Life of Alcibiades

The Life of Alcibiades PDF Author: Edward Frederic Benson
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781456303334
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Promoted the Peloponnesian war against rival Sparta, who subsequently inspired Athens's failed Sicilian Expedition, and who later allied himself with two of Athens's biggest enemies: Sparta and Persia. His actions gravely affected the future of Athens and his motives and reasons for acting as he did are indeed the stuff of fascinating biography. Alcibiades's extraordinary beauty, great wealth, ostentatious vanity, male and female amours, debaucheries, and impious revels earned him notoriety not only in Athens but throughout the Hellenic world. In subsequent ages his name was used as a near by-word for all kinds of excess. But, as Benson argues, reappraising Alcibiades's reputation, great as were his vices, his virtues were even greater..."--Publisher description.

The Life of Alcibiades

The Life of Alcibiades PDF Author: Edward Frederic Benson
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781456303334
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Promoted the Peloponnesian war against rival Sparta, who subsequently inspired Athens's failed Sicilian Expedition, and who later allied himself with two of Athens's biggest enemies: Sparta and Persia. His actions gravely affected the future of Athens and his motives and reasons for acting as he did are indeed the stuff of fascinating biography. Alcibiades's extraordinary beauty, great wealth, ostentatious vanity, male and female amours, debaucheries, and impious revels earned him notoriety not only in Athens but throughout the Hellenic world. In subsequent ages his name was used as a near by-word for all kinds of excess. But, as Benson argues, reappraising Alcibiades's reputation, great as were his vices, his virtues were even greater..."--Publisher description.

The Life of Alcibiades: The Idol of Athens

The Life of Alcibiades: The Idol of Athens PDF Author: E. F. Benson
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1733537120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Alcibiades (ca. 450 BC-ca. 404 BC) was the charismatic and controversial Athenian general and politician who promoted the Peloponnesian war against rival Sparta, who subsequently inspired Athens's failed Sicilian Expedition, and who later allied himself with two of Athens's biggest enemies: Sparta and Persia. His actions gravely affected the future of Athens and his motives and reasons for acting as he did are indeed the stuff of fascinating biography. Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific and much-loved English novelist, biographer and short story writer. He was educated at Marlborough College and King's College, Cambridge. Benson is most famous for a series of comic novels he published during the 1920s and 1930s--""Mapp and Lucia"". Benson was awarded an OBE and was made an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Revised, with Introduction, by Dr Craig Paterson. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades

Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades PDF Author: Simon Verdegem
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058677605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
At the beginning of the second century C.E., Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote a series of pairs of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. Their purpose is moral: the reader is invited to reflect on important ethical issues and to use the example of these great men from the past to improve his or her own conduct. This book off ers the first full-scale commentary on the Life of Alcibiades. It examines how Plutarch's biography of one of classical Athens' most controversial politicians functions within the moral program of the Parallel Lives. Built upon the narratological distinction between story and text, Simon Verdegem's analysis, which involves detailed comparisons with other Plutarchan works (especially the Lives of Nicias and Lysander) and several key texts in the Alcibiades tradition (e.g., Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon), demonstrates how Plutarch carefully constructed his story and used a wide range of narrative techniques to create a complex Life that raises interesting questions about the relation between private morality and the common good.

Alcibiades

Alcibiades PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Nemesis

Nemesis PDF Author: David Stuttard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674919661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.

The Life of Alcibiades

The Life of Alcibiades PDF Author: Jacqueline de Romilly
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739964
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450–404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city—and his tumultuous age. Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.

The Life of Alcibiades, the Idol of Athens

The Life of Alcibiades, the Idol of Athens PDF Author: Edward Frederic Benson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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The Life of Alcibiades

The Life of Alcibiades PDF Author: E. F. Benson
Publisher: White Press
ISBN: 9781473315587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Alcibiades and Athens

Alcibiades and Athens PDF Author: David Gribble
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019154146X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
It is not the aim of this book to add to the extensive literature on Alcibiades' life and career. Instead the author focuses on the explosive mix of fear and fascination excited by Alcibiades in his contemporaries and in particular in key literary texts: Thucydides, the mysterious pseudo-Andocides 4, the encomium of Isocrates 16, the final scene of Plato's Symposium. The book is about the acute tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status, and ambition. It looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual 'outside' the city: the tyrant, the athletic victor, the ostracism victim, the scapegoat, the barbarian. Whereas modern discussions of ancient Athens and Athenian civic texts stress collective ideology, this study focuses on the opposing strand in tension with this dominant ideology: the fascination with the powerful individual. The book is thus at once a contribution to the study of civic ideology, and also to that of the individual and of the role of the individual in classical texts - rhetoric, the historiography of Thucydides, the Platonic dialogue. The book also considers the development of the post-classical depiction of Alcibiades, concluding with a study of Plutarch's reaction both to this tradition and to the classical texts.

Alcibiades (Routledge Revivals)

Alcibiades (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Walter M. Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131774683X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In Alcibiades, first published in 1989, one of the most colourful and controversial figures of fifth-century Athens is presented in a sympathetic light. The author sets out to demonstrate how, in his manipulation of the Spartan representatives in 420 BC, in his successful formation of an Athenian-Argive alliance, and in his plan for the conquest of Syracuse, Alcibiades developed a style of leadership that was characterised by audacity, ingenuity and skilful diplomacy. Further, his outstanding generalship during the Hellespontine War prompts speculation on how the Sicilian expedition might have ended had he also been in command. In many respects the story of Alcibiades is the history of Athens in the twilight of its power; Alcibiades succeeds in constructing a continuous narrative of his political career without duplicating more conventional accounts, always focussing on his involvement in the course of the Peloponnesian War and his troubled relationship with his Athenian compatriots.