An ancestral curse, political subterfuge, religious blasphemy, military invasion, a cuckolded king, and a heroic last stand—it’s truly astonishing that HBO hasn’t yet made a series about Alcibiades. I first met him, bellowing and drunk, while reading Symposium in undergrad. There, Plato ascribes to him a tongue-in-cheek biography of their shared mentor, Socrates. Indeed, Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades quite possibly motivated Socrates’ trial and execution in 399 bce for having “corrupted the youth.” As an individual and as a historical figure, I’ve found this man to be fascinatingly mercurial.
David Stuttard’s Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens twines the disparate (and often unreliable) ancient sources together into a compelling narrative. This is biography, not history, and Stuttard’s adroit exploitation of this distinction flushes the tale with color. I’d not call Nemesis a “sober” account of Alcibiades’s life. Sobriety would not have improved the book—merely made it bland.
As the title implies, this work focuses not just on the man but also his city. This is an account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Following the Greeks’ unexpected triumph over the Persian invasions, they proceeded to squander their hard-won unity and their supremacy over the eastern Mediterranean on squabbling with one another. This is the period during which many of our extant Classics were written (such as Sophocles’s Antigone), or during which their authors (like Plato) were growing up. These paradoxes are contained within Alcibiades as well; the tension between democracy and tyranny, between cultured beauty and ruthless cruelty. Nemesis adopts Alcibiades not just because of the events of his life are fascinating, but because his character seems to epitomize the character of Classical Athens.
This too, was felt by the ancients. It was felt so strongly, in fact, that this is why our sources for Alcibiades’ life remain challenging. Plutarch, for example, alludes similar comparisons throughout his Parallel Lives (including his Life of Alcibiades). Stuttard’s narrative is woven in large part from two primary sources: Thucydides and Xenophon. These Athenian authors lived during the war and certainly were at least acquainted with Alcibiades. Xenophon, like Plato, was a devotee of Socrates. Thucydides, meanwhile, is the author of The History of the Peloponnesian War itself—a work so highly regarded in antiquity that no extant history was dedicated exclusively to the section of the war told in Thucydides’s book. While less inclined than Plutarch & Co. to use Alcibiades as a symbol, the information we can derive from Thucydides and Xenophon often remains challenging. For Stuttard, much of the ambiguities are left for his biography’s endnotes. He crafts the story’s events from ancient sources—as close to the period of Alcibiades’s life as possible—and relies upon himself for psychological speculation into Alcibiades’s internal life.
Most ancient history geeks, I suspect, will be at least somewhat familiar with Alcibiades’s life. As I’ve mentioned, he’s a figure I knew quite a lot about prior to Nemesis. For me, the value of Nemesis was not in “learning facts.” Rather, I found a good deal of pleasure from reading the narrative, and enjoyed Stuttard’s speculation on Alcibiades’s internal motives and character.
Stuttard’s narrative engages the reader with a careful blend of drama and fact. Much of the action and emotion cannot possibly be verified. Yet precise and sober truth isn’t the work’s purpose. Dramatic retellings of various events in Alcibiades’s life are simply more fun than a paraphrase of Thucydides. This is as it ought to be when writing biography for a general audience. Stuttard breathes life into Alcibiades as a living person.
This is further enhanced by the additional context which Stuttard provides, much of which (according to my memory) is implicit or absent in the primary sources. For example, Alcibiades was a member of the infamous Alcmaeonid family. His “cursed” lineage encouraged gossip at the best of times, and strengthen Alcibiades’s enemies whenever political heat rose to a head. Drawing upon Herodotus, speeches, epigraphic evidence, and similar sources, Stuttard weaves the story of the Alcmaeonids into his biography. This expands to biographical information about the politician Pericles—a relative who, effectively, was responsible for raising and educating Alcibiades—and of course, a fuller description of the war.
In this regard, Nemesis reminds me of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. Much like Tuchman’s Sire de Coucy, Stuttard’s biography of Alcibiades allows him to meander widely across the wars, politics, and powers of the period. Unlike Tuchman’s work, Nemesis keeps its lens quite close to the focal figure. It’s simply that Alcibiades’s life saw him as a major figure in both Athens and Sparta, as well as in the wilds of Thrace to the courts of Persia’s satraps. What need is there for the author to be a dilettante, if your subject handles the task with aplomb?
Likewise, Stuttard does to some extent symbol-ize Alcibiades as an emblem of the historical period. His apt defense is a line from the contemporary comedian Aristophanes: “The city longs for him, but at the same time hates him, too. But on balance it must have him!” (Frogs 1465, in Nemesis 290). This somewhat elegiac mode encircles the facts. Stuttard carefully avoids conflating the man and the city too closely. This caution while speculating is why the “character study” aspect of Nemesis is so compelling. His objective lurks beneath the surface of both Plato and Xenophon. It is why Alcibiades has fascinated readers for over 2,000 years. Alcibiades eludes description and invigorates the imagination because his internal world—his motives, desires, his moral character—are lost to time.
At times Alcibiades seems too magnanimous to aspire toward tyranny; at other times, too superior to accept a democracy. The error of Plutarch & Co. is to elevate these questions such that they obscure telling “what really happened.” Stuttard’s balance makes clear the transition from description into narrative. This strengthens the biography’s character study by allowing more liberty for speculation. In the end, Alcibiades seemed brought down to earth in a way I didn’t expect. Not mundane, but believable; extraordinary, but real.
This is especially true as Stuttard guides us through the patches of Alcibiades’s life about which we just don’t know much. For example, we know that after his father’s death, Alcibiades was sent to live with Pericles. We know the facts. Stuttard breathes life into this through psychological speculation about how growing up half-neglected in the home of Athens’s leading politician impacted Alcibiades’s later character and choices. The 5,000-strong Assembly is enlivened through narrative description of the young man’s probable anxiety when speaking before it for the first time. These are moments for which we have no historical evidence, but which feel plausible. They fit well.
Nemesis is an excellent read for those with a general interest in history, or who enjoy biographies of outlandish individuals. I suspect fellow ancient history geeks would also enjoy the book, but I can’t recommend it as strongly. If the review made it sound interesting, you’ll probably enjoy the yarn. If you rolled your eyes when I blathered on about the character study element of biographies, you might want to skip Nemesis.
Until next week, then.
Akhelas 