5. Alikibiades Charmed and Betrayed His Way Through Classical Greece
Ancient Athenian aristocrat Alkibiades (450 – 404 BC) was a brilliant politician and general who had no ethics, sense of loyalty, or a functioning moral compass. What he did have was natural charisma in abundance, which made people overlook and forgive his venality, time after time. He was the most dynamic, fascinating, and catastrophic Athenian leader of the Classical era.
During the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, Alkibiades gained a reputation for courage and military talent, and was elected a general. In 415, he convinced Athens to send a massive expedition to invade Sicily. On the eve of sailing, however, statues of the god Hermes were desecrated, and suspicion fell upon Alkibiades, whose dissolute clique had a reputation for drunken vandalism and impiety.
After the expedition sailed to Sicily, he was summoned to return to Athens and stand trial. Rather than obey the summons, he fled and defected to Sparta. He advised the Spartans to adopt the strategy that culminated in the annihilation of Athens’ Sicilian expedition. Of the tens of thousands of Athenians who took part, few ever saw home again: those who were not massacred in the fighting were enslaved, then worked to death in Sicilian quarries.
Alikbiades also convinced the Spartans to change their strategy of marching into Athenian territory each year to burn and loot, then repeat that the following year. Instead, he had the Spartans establish a permanent fortified base near Athens, which allowed them to exert direct pressure on that city year round. He also went to Ionia, and stirred Athens’ allies and subjects into revolting.
Alkibiades thus helped bring Athens to the brink of collapse, but then wore out his welcome in Sparta after he was caught in bed with the wife of the Spartan king Agis II. Fleeing again, this time to the Persians, Alkibiades convinced them to adopt a strategy that would prolong the war as long as possible, keeping the Athenians and Spartans too busy fighting each other to challenge Persia’s interests.
Then, incongruously, Alkibiades convinced the Athenian fleet to accept him as its commander. From 411 to 408 BC, he led the Athenian navy in a dramatic recovery, winning a series of stunning victories that turned the war around, and suddenly it was Sparta that was reeling and on the verge of collapse. He returned to Athens in 407 BC, where he received a rapturous welcome, his earlier treasons forgiven and temporarily forgotten, and was given supreme command in conducting the war.
However, Athens turned on Alkibiades a few months later, after a minor naval defeat when he was absent from the fleet. He fled again, and having burned bridges with all sides, holed up in a Thracian castle, before taking refuge in Phrygia. There, a Spartan delegation convinced Phrygia’s Persian governor to have Alkibiades murdered in 404 BC.