Download or read book The Life of Alcibiades written by Jacqueline de Romilly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nemesis written by David Stuttard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Plato Alcibiades written by Plato and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first modern edition of Plato's Alcibiades, aimed at both students and scholars.
Download or read book Alcibiades written by P. J. Rhodes and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned classicist presents an authoritative biography of one of the most infamous and colorful characters of Ancient Greece. A charismatic Athenian and close associate of Socrates, Alcibiades came to prominence during the Peloponnesian War when he helped form an alliance against Sparta. Although his gambit led to defeat, his prestige remained high, and he was elected to lead the Sicilian Expedition of 415 BC. Shortly after arrival in Sicily, however, Alcibiades was recalled to face charges of sacrilege allegedly committed during his pre-expedition reveling. Jumping ship on the return journey, he defected to the Spartans. Alcibiades quickly ingratiated himself with the Spartans, helping them to victory against his former countrymen. But he soon overstepped the bounds of hospitality by sleeping with the Spartan queen. On the run again, he began to play a dangerous game of shifting loyalties. He had a hand in engineering the overthrow of democracy at Athens in favor of an oligarchy, which allowed him to return from exile, though he then opposed the extreme excesses of that regime. For a time, Alcibiades restored Athens' fortunes in the war, but was soon forced into exile once again. This time he took refuge with the Persians, but as they were now allied to the Spartans, the cuckolded King Agis was able to arrange his assassination by Persian agents.
Download or read book Socrates and Alcibiades written by Ariel Helfer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Socrates and Alcibiades, Ariel Helfer provides a new interpretation of Plato's account of the relationship between Socrates and the infamous Athenian general Alcibiades, in the process revealing a complex Platonic teaching on the nature and corruptibility of political ambition.
Download or read book Sophocles and Alcibiades written by Michael Vickers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael Vickers challenges this view and argues that Sophocles makes regular and extensive allusion to Athenian politics in his plays, especially to Alcibiades, one of the most controversial Athenian politicians of his day.Vickers shows that Sophocles was no closeted intellectual but a man deeply involved in politics and he reminds us that Athenian politics was intensely personal. He argues cogently that classical writers employed hidden meanings and that consciously or sub-consciously, Sophocles was projecting onto his plays hints of contemporary events or incidents, mostly of a political nature, hoping that his audience's passion for politics would enhance the popularity of his plays. Vickers strengthens his case about Sophocles by discussing other authors - Thucydides, Plato and Euripides - in whom he also demonstrates a body of allusions to Alcibiades and others.
Download or read book Alcibiades Routledge Revivals written by Walter M. Ellis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Ambition to Rule written by Steven Forde and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a fresh examination of Thucydides' treatment of Alcibiades in his History of the Peloponnesian War, Alcibiades' significance in the History, and his relation to Thucydides' political themes.
Download or read book Socrates and Alcibiades Four Texts written by Plato and published by Focus. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from Plato's 'Symposium', 'Alcibiades I', and 'Alcibiades II', with the complete fragments of the dialogue 'Alcibiades' by Aeschines of Sphettus. These translations and their accompanying notes and essay provide a rich discussion of how Athens' greatest philosopher loved and tried to teach his most ambitious young student, and why Athens turned on both of them.
Download or read book Alcibiades and Athens written by David Gribble and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status and ambition, this book looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual outside the city.
Download or read book Politics in Socrates Alcibiades written by Andre Archie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first full, political and philosophically rigorous account of Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades Major. The book argues that Alcibiades Major accomplishes its goal, which is to redirect Alcibiades’ political ambitions, not by arguing for specific propositions based on specific premises. The dialogue accomplishes its goal by generalizing the notion of argument to include appeals to Alcibiades’ doxastic attitudes toward his ability and knowledge to become a powerful ruler of the Greek people. One such doxastic attitude that Alcibiades holds about himself, and one that Socrates deftly disabuses him of, is that he does not have to cultivate himself to be competitive with the local, Athenian politicians. Socrates reminds Alcibiades that his true competitors are not Athenian politicians, but rather the Spartan and Persian kings. Consequently, the psychological momentum of the dialogue is motivated by Socrates’ aim to engender the right sort of beliefs in Alcibiades.
Download or read book The Life of Alcibiades The Idol of Athens written by E. F. Benson and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Tides of War written by Steven Pressfield and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation. Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic lover, Alcibiades was Athens’ favorite son and the city’s greatest general. A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory. But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies. For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. Praise for Tides of War “Pressfield’s battlefield scenes rank with the most convincing ever written.”—USA Today “Pressfield serves up not just hair-raising battle scenes . . . but many moments of valor and cowardice, lust and bawdy humor. . . . Even more impressively, he delivers a nuanced portrait of ancient athens.”—Esquire “Unabashedly brilliant, epic, intelligent, and moving.”—Kirkus Reviews “Pressfield’s attention to historic detail is exquisite. . . . This novel will remain with the reader long after the final chapter is finished.”—Library Journal “Astounding, historically accurate tale . . . Pressfield is a master storyteller, especially adept in his graphic and embracing descriptions of the land and naval battles, political intrigues and colorful personalities, which come together in an intense and credible portrait of war-torn Greece.”—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Platonic Alcibiades I written by François Renaud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it was influential for several hundred years after it first appeared, doubts about the authenticity of the Platonic Alcibiades I have unnecessarily impeded its interpretation ever since. It positions itself firmly within the Platonic and Socratic traditions, and should therefore be approached in the same way as most other Platonic dialogues. It paints a vivid portrait of a Socrates in his late thirties tackling the unrealistic ambitions of the youthful Alcibiades, urging him to come to know himself and to care for himself. François Renaud and Harold Tarrant re-examine the drama and philosophy of Alcibiades I with an eye on those interpreters who cherished it most. Modern scholars regularly play down one or more of the religious, erotic, philosophic or dramatic aspects of the dialogue, so ancient Platonist interpreters are given special consideration. This rich study will interest a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy.
Download or read book Charmides written by Plato and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literal translation, allowing the simplicity and vigor of the Greek diction to shine through.
Download or read book Stoicism and Emotion written by Margaret R. Graver and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. Stoicism and Emotion shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today's English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses the deepest respect for human potential.
Download or read book Alcibiades I Alcibiades II written by Plato and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-10-29 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original.
