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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
The Life of Alcibiades by Plutarch with Alex from Cost of Glory
01:45:49
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on the Sin the Great Books podcast, we are continuing our study of Plato by diving into the life of Alcibiades by Plutarch with Alex from the Cost of Glory podcast. Alex is fantastic. I greatly appreciated my conversation with him and all of his expertise. We have a few preliminaries on why you should read about Alcibiades before studying Plato and why you should read Plutarch in general. If you are not familiar with the life of Alcibiades, you are in for a treat. This man is a real life Odysseus with all the twists and turns and unbelievable plots to merit that title, Alex will help us navigate Alcibiades life and pull out some of the most important lessons like the inherent dangers of democracy. Also, a big thank you to all of you for a successful launch into Plato. I really appreciate all the support. Go check out our Patreon page for our written guides on all of these great books and a new community chat for all those who are reading Plato with us. So join us today as we prepare for our Platonic studies by examining the life of Alcibiades by Plutarch. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband and father and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording tonight on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. You can check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. You can Visit us at thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have written guides to help you learn from the Great Books. And today we are discussing the life of Alcibiades by Plutarch. And we have a phenomenal guest. We have Dr. Alexander Petkiss. Is that how you pronounce your name?
- [01:55]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
That's it. Nailed it.
- [01:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Man. I forgot. I was gonna ask and then I forgot. Okay, good. Nailed it. I'll take it. He holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the founder of the Cost of Glory podcast. He left a successful career in academia in order to help people draw energy and practical insights from the great figures of the past. Outside his academic work, he's written for Compact American Mind, Man's World, and Antigone, a new and open forum on the classics where he is the founding editor. He's a Texan and he lives in Texas with his wife and kids. Welcome to the podcast.
- [02:32]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Great to be here. Deacon Harrison, It's a pleasure always. And it's a lovely evening in Houston, too.
- [02:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Texas and Oklahoma. Like working through the great books. I like this. I like this a lot.
- [02:43]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, yeah. We're starting from the periphery attack in the center. So classic, classic strategy.
- [02:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I appreciate that. The. So tell us about Cost of Glory.
- [02:55]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
So I was, I left academia, I had a tenure track job. I left in 2020 and I was working in private sector entrepreneurship and I, I was trying to figure out a way to share what I felt. Not just what I felt was really important and interesting, what I was really excited about from Classics, but kind of what I felt was missing from the academic presentation of classics. And I didn't have to impress my colleagues if they thought something that I was doing was sort of weird, but I had my logic for doing it, such as telling entertaining stories. Just sort of frowned upon actually in a lot of lectures, as I discovered, I could just do that. So the Cost of Glory is the podcast I started back in 2021 and I am doing a lot of things on it. The main thread of it is I am retelling long form in what I like to think of as the grand style, the biographies of Plutarch's lives of the 48 or so Greek and Roman figures. Most of them, you know, historical figures, some of them sort of a dubious existence, like Theseus, he's the main one. But these are the great, the greatest Greek and Roman heroes of essentially of the pre Christian era. Plutarch stops with Mark Antony and sort of draws a kind of polite veil over Augustus. He doesn't really do the biography of Augustus. It's a little too close. Plutarch's living in the first century A.D. so I'm just retelling these biographies and I'm trying to stay true to the spirit of Plutarch, which is great, great narration. You know, I, you know, hesitate to compare myself to him on that point, but I, I try to emulate that aspect. He's a great storyteller and a moral seriousness. Because Plutarch is a philosopher first and foremost. His. His mission in life is to improve the character of his readers and his fellow man. And he thinks that he decided the best way to do that at scale would be to retell these great stories of amazing people and catalog both their virtues, their successes, and also their vices and their failures. And he's just very honest about what he thinks about a lot of these guys. And, you know, there's no saints lives in Plutarch. It's not that, but they're all very admirable men of great proportions. Caesar and Alexander Sulla Lysander. We'll get into more of that as we go. Alcibiades, of course, is one of the best lives I think, that he wrote. Incredible man. Incredibly entertaining biography as well.
- [05:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, yeah, very good. I'm excited to talk about Plutarch. I want to dive into the life of Alcibiades. But before we do that, tell me about Antigone, this kind of journal, this open forum. I've seen it on Twitter X. Tell me a little bit about it.
- [05:58]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Everybody should check out Antigone Journal. It is a new classics forum that we. Well, it's an online journal that some friends of mine started, and I'm just one among the editors, and others these days are more active than me. But we all felt that classics is, as a discipline, is very. It's not very good at communicating what's cool about it to the wider public. There's a kind of scholarization of the field ever since the 19th century, and it's sort of specialists talking to specialists. And there were some attempts to do that that kind of imploded in the late teens of this millennium. And so we thought, well, you know, this was a good idea to try to bring classics to regular people and try to communicate, you know, scholars sharing what with their. Their own expertise on various subjects. And we. So there's articles in there about Stoicism or Homer. I mean, anything really. And there's a lot of great stuff in there. Well, some of my favorite pieces that I learned the most from are from writers looking at the way that classical. The way that some famous people that you might know about loved classics and how it shaped them. Like, there's a great article on. In there about Stendhal. There's great articles in there about Poussin and the painter and a lot of the classical artists of the Renaissance in the early modern period and novelists. So I'm really proud of it. I can't take much credit for all the great things that have been going on, but I do send the occasional article there and publish the occasional piece there. And, yeah, we're picking up steam at Antigone, so check it out.
- [07:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's very good. Yeah, I appreciate that perspective from someone who maybe tumbled backwards into the classics from theology, if that makes sense. Like, that was my main set, was theology, and then kind of tumbling backwards into that. I appreciate, you know, Cost of Glory. Appreciate, you know, what I've seen on Antigone, because I've been somewhat surprised how many classic scholars I run into who don't seem to like the classics. Does that make sense? Like, it's kind of odd, right? Like, they don't like it. Like, the whole. The whole goal seems to be to like, deconstruct it and tell everyone why this text is actually terrible. And so I appreciate, though, because I like what you said, that I think there are tremendous stories to tell in classical literature, right. And there's a tremendous. You know, we. I mean, we've been very open here, you know, on a Sin, the Great Books podcast that, you know, one of the things that we look at is like a barometer, a standard, is that we think that Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith prepared, you know, under Roman order, prepared the world for Jesus Christ. And so there's like this deep resonation then of like, well, what were the classics actually thinking, right? What, what was the world like amongst the pagans before our Lord actually entered into history? And there's just like, phenomenal insights, right? If you read Plato, whether it's the life of Alcibiades or whether you're reading Homer, like, there's a lot of beauty here. And I think what surprises people is, is that humans are the same. You read, you read Homer and you realize, like, oh, yeah, like, I know people like this, right? Like, the human nature hasn't changed. Like, I'm not, you know, sometimes man thinks that he's atomized away from these people. Like, I'm. I'm better than them because I have an iPhone and I can Google things like, what would I ever read? What would I ever learn from Homer or Plutarch, right? What would I ever do there, really? When you read them, like, you realize, like, oh, like the best argument is just to read them. Because then you realize, like, oh, no, the humans are the same. And these guys are commenting on the human condition.
- [09:41]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah. And you learned so much about the. The Christian. I mean, it's hard to really appreciate the Bible for me without the classics. And that's kind of how I ended up there. I actually started learning Ancient Greek by accident in college because I wanted to learn modern Greek because I was thinking of doing. I was thinking of maybe going to seminary, maybe doing some youth ministry in the Greek Orthodox Church. I should probably learn some Greek, even though I have this Greek sounding last name, you know, it is Greek, but I knew pretty much no Greek. Like, I knew Kalimera. And that's about it. Because we had. My Greek family's been in the US for three or four generations. And so I had to learn ancient Greek because that's all we had if I undergraduate college. And so it was really the seeing from the first semester of Greek, you start to see, oh, wow. There's a deep history of the concepts that we use in theology. And the Bible uses, obviously the famous example of Logos, but there's nature and law and order. I mean, it's just the whole thought world is so explanatory. And I got really deep into classics and I ended up spending some time in the theology world, the patristics world, but decided that probably what I should do is help other people who are trying to understand the Bible to understand Homer first, to understand Plato and Plutarch first. I think Plutarch in particular has appealed to Christians throughout history for. For some interesting reasons. I have a piece on this in my substack, costofglory.substack.com on what, you know, why Christians dig Plutarch so much. And a lot of it has to do with. He had, I think, a similar insight that the creator of the universe had when he decided to become incarnate as the Son of Man. That humans learn how to be, how they ought to live and who they ought to be by primarily by example, by observation. Why did God need to take on flesh? Couldn't he have just given us some more laws? This is how he decided to do it. And there's obviously more to the redemption of man. But, you know, Plutarch is alongside the Bible. He was in the 18th century in America at a very pious time. He was the second most likely ancient book to be on your shelf after the Bible. And he's kind of gone out of fashion as classics has become more scientized, bureaucratized, and later wokeified. And that's a whole other conversation which I think is really sad. But he was for most gener, basically from Machiavelli, from the Renaissance, you know, the 1400s on up until maybe the mid 19th century. He was most people's gateway to the classics. You probably would read Plutarch before you read Herodotus, Thucydides, Caesar, even Homer. He's something, you know, he's. He's such an accessible author in so many ways to readers. He's a little bit hard to listen to. He's a little bit dense. I think other classics professors have told me the same because I'm kind of solving my problem with Plutarch by making an audio version of it, because I tried to listen to it, like some of the recordings they have on Audible or on Librivox, and I just, I couldn't I couldn't do it. You know, it's just too dense. I wanted to stop and look things up. And I like, who's that again? And so I'm trying to kind of solve that problem for people that I needed solved for myself in a lot of ways. But I think he's still a very accessible author. And you know, he really, he really. And I think you see this in the life of Alcibiades. He likes to put greatness on display, even if it's flawed and, and he realizes that he's a conduit for something bigger. Even though he might have his moral objections to an Alcibiades or a, or a Demetrius of Phalerum or a Marc Anthony, he still wants to kind of honor these men for what was honorable.
- [14:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right? Yeah. I'm a first time reader of Plutarch, so maybe I should give a little bit of context of like we're kind of mainly going in chronological order here on Ascend. So why all of a sudden are we jumping to this Greek historian, right, that lived in the first century A.D. so with Plato, we typically start, or at least historically, for antiquity, right. We start with his dialogue first, Alcibiades, which, you know, in recent centuries, really the kind of. The last one has been attacked mainly through German scholarship and has been attacked as, you know, maybe spurious, like maybe he didn't write this. And these arguments I actually find spurious themselves because these are basically language games, right? And so what they do is they look at how Plato wrote certain dialogues that they find to be authentic and say, okay, well if he wrote like this, then he can't write this other dialogue because it's different. They also applied this to the Bible for those who are familiar, right. German higher criticism of JDP theories and whatever, which gives me a little bit of post traumatic stress as I think about it, because my undergrad delved into a lot of that. But it's really, I, I find it, I guess garbage is the word that comes to mind. Like, I just don't. I think it's, I think it's terrible. I think it's one, not really sound. Two. We read scripture in four layers. Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas talk about this and they pull from their literature fathers, right, that you have the literal and then you have the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical as you read scripture and all three of the spiritual senses, the last three are predicated upon the first one, the literal. And so it's not lost on me that a lot of these language games that attack the authorship are attacking the literal side. What ends up happening is that you just end up getting so tossed and turned by the literal that you never really make it into the allegorical or the moral. Right. You can't pull these lessons from Scripture. And so a similar thing actually happened to Plato that they attacked these and etc. And famously, I guess, you know, if the scripture is not a great reference point. Another famous example is that if you apply this, Tolkien, Tolkien didn't write the Hobbit, right? The same author can't write Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. There's too many differences in the syntax and the words chosen and the approach and the plot and et cetera. It's clearly two different authors. Right? And so again, it's kind of a junk science in my opinion. And so historically, in antiquity, people would read First Alcibiades as the first dialogue they would read in their Platonic studies. And really the birth of a philosophy. What does it mean to be a philosopher? What does it mean to live a philosophic life? Because for them, this is not an academic discipline. Right. This is a way of life. I'm dedicating myself to the truth, and that means I actually have the form myself soul in it, and it's going to change. And so the principle of First Alcibiades is know thyself. But the big question then is, who's Alcibiades? Like, who, who is this character in the dialogue? First Alcibiades gets into it a little bit, but his biography is amazing. Like, his biography is such a hilarious story. Like, I was trying to explain to my wife who, who's not terribly interested in hearing about a guy named Alcibiades. But, you know, we're in the kitchen doing stuff, and I'm like, no, you don't understand. Like, he's the one that started the coup in Athens and then led the army against his own coup. Like, I'm trying to explain, like, he did these, like, insane things. And so from my end, and why I appreciate you coming on today, is that I think before we carry on in this, this kind of studies into Plato that we've started here on Ascend, I think we need to take, like, a pause and just say, like, who is Alcibiades? And I think this will allow us to, to have a greater saturation in reading Plato and then understanding, like, first Alcibiades.
- [17:46]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, I think that approach makes a lot of sense. And I, I, I'm just going to echo you on the whole, spurious versus not spurious. I mean, there are spurious dialogues of Plato, but I really don't believe Alcibiades is one of them. First Alcibiades. Second Alcibiades, I, I do think is not. And I think that's why it was sort of tipped off for people. Maybe that's debatable. But I had a big ax to grind back when I was writing my dissertation on the letters of ancient philosophers. So we have a lot of letters from ancient philosophers that are not really written by them. You know, it's a great way to sell a book if you say it's written by whatever, Churchill. But there is. And so there's 13 letters of Plato that survive. And I think that all of them are spurious except number seven. And I think it's really important that everybody read Plato's seventh Letter because it kind of gives his autobiography and it. And I think it's also. So that's, that's worth checking out. I actually did a podcast with my friend Justin Murphy, which you can find on YouTube on Plato and on his sort of business model, if you want to go deep on this. But essentially Plato is every bit as much, to me a man of action as Alcibiades. I mean, maybe not quite. He's not exactly leading armies, but he's a risk taker. He's getting involved in Syracuse and Sicily. And Plutarch actually has another great biography that's worth reading in this context that you should probably check out is the Life of Dion, who is the brother. He's the brother in law of the famous tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse. And Dion is Plato's guy in Sicily. But Plutarch spends a lot of time talking about the life of Plato, talking about Plato coming to Syracuse and what his experience was like there. Fascinating reading. I just, I love to kind of flesh out these men and, you know, what is the world they're living in. And to me that helps me understand their ideas. But yeah, so if you'd like, we could kind of start to jump into Alcibiades.
- [19:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, let's go again. First time reader, I had heard all these things about Alcibiades and I was like, no, surely that can't be correct. Or like, no, this is just an exaggeration. And then now reading Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades, like, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Like, and I think that, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, I think Plutarch really likes drawing out the juxtapositions in Alcibiades. Yeah, like Alcibiades in a certain way is a man of contradiction. He's a man of like parallel paths. It's kind of hard to like pin him down. And Plutarch really seems to kind of like play this up.
- [20:27]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, yeah, certainly. And I'll preface this by saying I haven't really done a deep dive on Alcibiades on my show yet. So I haven't gone through all the sources. I did do this for Lysander, who is the man responsible for Alcibiades downfall more than anybody else. And that's the Spartan commander who wins the Peloponnesian War. If Alcibiades had been commanding on that day, probably the Athenians would have won the Peloponnesian War. In my opinion. They probably would have had a successful Sicilian expedition. But let's get into it.
- [21:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So yeah, I'm interested for you to play out that thesis that Lysander is most responsible for Alcibiades fall because I might posit that Alcibiades is most responsible for his own fall. But he's a hard man to keep up with. So where are we just on the timeline? So we're in ancient Athens. What's going on?
- [21:19]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
We're in ancient Athens. Athens, Classical Athens. Alcibiades is born maybe around 450 BC, which is the time between after the Persian wars, but 20 years before the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the great war between Athens and Sparta. He's some kind of a nephew or marriage. He's some kind of cousin of Pericles. I think he's like first cousin once removed of the great, great Athenian states. In Pericles, his dad dies when he's very young. And so he gets raised in the house of Pericles and Pericles. Like Alcibiades, they're from one of the mega families in Athens, the Alcmaeonids. They're from like cream of the crop family. He's a real aristocrat by birth. And so he, he grows up with this sense of himself. And Pericles is the top, top, top politician in Athens from before when Alcibiades can remember. And you know, so he, I mean maybe. Well, the war breaks out. Tensions are rising between Sparta and Athens ever since the Persian war when they were allies, you know, they were the two greatest cities, especially after that. You know, Sparta was always a great city. Athens was great after the Persian wars especially. And so they start to kind of butt up against each other and they eventually come to a conflict which is narrated in Thucydides's great work, the History of the Peloponnesian Wars. But so Alcibiades is living in this time of ferment and he's got an interesting education because he, that might be a good place to start. He, he falls in with Socrates somehow and has this very formative experience with Socrates. It is at the Battle of Potidaea, one of Socrates famous battle experiences in 432. This is actually a little bit before the Peloponnes war breaks out properly. I believe that they, they camp together in the same tent. I think Alcibiades gets wounded and Socrates picks him up and carries him off the battlefield. And this is an event that Plato narrates in some of his dialogues as well. Like in the Symposium, they talk about sharing a tent together. That would happen in 432 at the Battle of Potidia, when Alcibiades is a young man and Socrates is a little older. But this was you. I think this is a really interesting insight into Socrates. These are the kinds of people that Socrates attracted. You know, he had as his students the likes of Alcibiades. Plato is also from an extremely prominent family. Top, top, top family and a peer of Alcibiades, a little younger. Plato's, you know, probably about 15 or 20 years younger than Alcibiades. So is Xenophon, the great author of the Socratic Dialogues and the Anabasis. Very, very talented, ambitious young men just surrounding Socrates like bees. And so I think Alcibiades, probably the greatest one of them all in terms of his reputation among the Greeks, Right?
- [24:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think two things come to mind there. One is that we don't, we don't typically think about Socrates as a warrior, right? So Alcibiades is a young warrior. We typically don't think of Socrates. But yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a time Plutarch talks about it, right, that, that one, Socrates saves Alcibiades life, but then like defers to Alcibiades to get the, the like awards for heroism. Like, Socrates is trying to set up a young Alcibiades for a life of like, honor and victory and glory. But then in another battle, if I understand correctly, Socrates and other soldiers are retreating on foot and Alcibiades is on horseback and he like, won't leave them, right? So he's like, with them, fighting them, fighting off the enemy. So Socrates and his comrades can like, retreat back. So I think that, you know, sometimes like, when we read First Alcibiades, when we get there, you know, it's like, it's like Socrates is older and he's talking to Alcibiades and like, who are they? Whatever, but they actually have history, if you will. Actually, First Alcibiades is probably a little bit before that, I would assume, because I think that Socrates is. I think that Alcibiades is just not even sure if he's out of his teens yet. And Socrates is somewhere in his 40s. They forge like this relationship that goes beyond just simply, you know, philosophical relationships, but actually like they fought in wars together. And I think that's something that we typically don't think of. But can we please talk about the anecdotes of Alcibiades as a child? Like, these are hilarious. Like, these are like, like some of these things are like really funny because Plutarch talks about. By the way, I'm, I'm using, I'm sure you have recommendations. I'm using the Penguin classic Plutarch Rise and Fall of Athens, which I'm assuming is a. I'll show it up here. For those watching the video, this is an excerpt or a section of his overall parallel lives. Do you have a translation you would recommend to people?
- [26:20]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
I always recommend people go with the penguins if you want to go hardcore and ride or die. I have the Loeb that I use, which is the facing Greek and it's got a nice public domain translation. Actually you can find this at Lacus Curtius Uchicago hosts a website with all the Plutarchs lives public domain. They're the Loeb translations, which are very literal. They've got good notes. But the penguins are perfectly serviceable.
- [26:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. So he. Some of these, some of these anecdotes of like a young Alcibiades I just love. So there's this one in Plutarch, he says once when he was hard pressed in wrestling, rather than allow himself to be thrown, he set his teeth and his opponent's arms as they gripped him and held on so hard he would have bitten through them. The other let go of his hold and cried out, alcibiades, you bite like a woman. Alcibiades answered, no, I bite like a lion, like this. So basically, like my understanding is this caricature of him as a younger man is that like he will win at all costs.
- [27:30]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Right?
- [27:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. He, he loves victory. He loves the glory and the fame that comes from it. And I think that, you know, maybe.
- [27:37]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
He'S always going to have a way of Explaining it, you know, why he broke the rules.
- [27:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I think break the rules is a really key phrase there. Right. Because he. He just. I guess not. Not to stress it, like, too much, but, like, the wrestling is. And there's also, like, another example where he's, like, playing knuckle bones, which is like a game, Right. But, like, he will stretch or break the rules for victory. And I think that these anecdotes that Plutarch gives us in a lot of ways are a microcosm of what we're going to see as Alcibiades as an adult, that when he enters the adult world of politics and treaties and, you know, for what is, for him, international relations, he's okay breaking the rules if it means that he wins.
- [28:21]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, very much so. And I also love. One of my favorite anecdotes is about his dog. So possessing a dog of wonderful size and beauty, which had cost him 70 minas, which is a ton of money, he had his tail cut off. And a beautiful tail it was, too. His comrades chided him for this and declared that everybody was furious about the dog and its. And abusive of its owner. But Alcibiades burst out laughing and said, that's just what I want. I want Athens to talk about this, that it may say nothing worse about me. And I think that there's so many of these anecdotes where something will happen. And Alcibiades. It's like, alcibiades, you're in trouble. And then he bursts out laughing. And then he twists it. You know, it's like it's all a fun joke for him. He just. And he. He knows how to get under people's skin. He knows how to get a message out that people will start talking. You know, he wants people to talk about them about him all the time. You know, that's. That's how you win at the game of democratic politics. Right? So I think, you know, it's just that kind of that flashy splendor and insouciance. Just. It's so kind of alluring to the ma. To the masses. Right. The mob is a woman. Who was it that said that? Oh, Mussolini. Yeah. So. And Alcibiades knows exactly how to get under her skin.
- [29:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He does. Because he's like. I mean, that's something. Like, they're really stressed. Like, he. He's tall, he's handsome, he comes from a good family. He's loved throughout all of the socioeconomic strata of Athens. He constantly has people talking about him, like, cutting the tail off the dog, right? Like, he does these things just to get people the chit chat. I love when it's like he wouldn't learn how to play the flute because it would contort his like, beautiful face. And so he just decided not to do it. And so. But that. The thing is like, he, he also had a lisp. But then people are like, oh, no, it's. It's fitting for him. It's like cute. So he like, he has this way, this like charm of like, even when he has defects. Because he probably couldn't learn the flute, right? He probably sucked at it. And so he has to come up with some kind of like, reason. No, I'm just like, I, I'm just so magnanimous, right? Like my face is so much more beautiful than everyone else's face that I can't play this like, vulgar instrument, right? And this like.
- [30:53]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
And he makes the flute uncool thereafter. It's like the flute was. Really, was really prized. And then like after Alcibiades, nobody wants to touch it. It's like, oh, that's for slaves. It makes you look like a.
- [31:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But he like. And he like, he like walks through town like a peacock, right? They talk. Plutarch will talk about like he's dressed in purple. And this is when he's in Athens, because there's. There's another, there's another aspect of him that I find fascinating that we'll see later on. But when he's in Athens, right, he walks in purple. He has like this golden shield that has Eros on it, which I found to be really fascinating for someone who loves Plato's Symposium. Like it was that. That passage just like jumped off the page. So he has this like golden shield with. They call it a. Not unorthodox, but a non traditional image, right? It's Eros with a lightning bolt. And like, who is that? Why? So he has like even these things again, stroke, intrigue. They get people's attention. He's just very flamboyant and everyone loves him.
- [31:50]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah. And he, and he makes the, you know, he makes the. The old men, as Plutarch calls him. He says, this is on that Eros passage, you know, they're looking at the shield. The reputable, reputable men of the city looked on all these things with loathing and indignation and feared his contemptuous and lawless spirit. They thought such conduct as his tyrant like and monstrous. And when they say tyrant like, they mean he. Everybody loves him. This is part of what, What a tyrant does is like he uses the popular credit like clout with the masses as a lever against the aristocracy. And so that combination of like part of why he's so appealing to the mob is because he's an aristocrat and yet he's just will just flout tradition and he doesn't feel like he has to be, you know, live up to their aesthetic standards or their kind of the rules of conduct that you would expect from such a man as that. And that's just, it's just endlessly appealing to the common man.
- [32:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think too we should probably note here that Plutarch really makes a deal of this juxtaposition between the Socratic influence upon Alcibiades and then the crowd, the flatterers. Right. And that really struck me because I'm familiar with First Alcibiades. Really kind of a first time reader of it though as a dialogue. It wasn't how my introduction, most introductions now to Plato are typically like the Euthyphro, you read the quote unquote, last four dialogues. Right. I'm kind of new to First Alcibiades as a first start initiation into the formation of Plato. But I was really surprised though in Plutarch that their relationship is a very historically commented on aspect. Right. And not only that, that it seems that Plutarch very much held in his history, held that in certain ways Socrates spending time with him and Socrates trying to get him to live the life of virtue is almost redeeming in history itself for how history views Alcibiades. That in other words, Alcibiades must have had redeeming qualities. He must have had potential to become a virtuous leader, dare I say even a philosopher king. Because Socrates is spending so much time with him in reality, or I guess not in reality, but on the other side then you have all these flatterers which tend to bring out the worst aspects in Alcibiades. And this is what I was saying earlier, that Plutarch seems to love bringing out this juxtaposition in Alcibiades. Right. That he has the Socratic side that could go towards something very honorable and noble and virtuous, you know, Arete. But on the other side he has, he has something that I, I think that, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, but like I think there are should, there should be concerns that Alcibiades becomes a tyrant.
- [34:49]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Oh yeah.
- [34:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He has something that's tyrannical about the way that he lives.
- [34:54]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Well, and if you read Plato's, Plato's Republic, book six he talks about the philosophical character. What, what is the kind of man that is most apt to become a philosopher and perhaps if he's lucky, a philosopher king. Well, Plato, like the description just is. It is a blend of the two men of this type that Plato knew the best. One of them is Alcibiades and the other one is Dionysius ii, the son of Dionysius I, who was a young talented man that Plato tried to kind of win over to philosophy and failed. And you know, he actually became a tyrant. Alcibiades had that kind of tyrannical quality of. And it's all about this war that goes on within somebody. Somebody has suggested that maybe even the Callius of Plato's Gorgias is, you know, maybe that's Alcibiades. And so, you know, this war that goes on between, with a man of that kind of talent, between, you know, true philosophy, which as a curious intellectually, you know, very active, imaginative, ambitious person, you're going to be attracted to philosophy. There's something about, you know, the truth and about the kind of idea of understanding everything that's really appealing to you and virtue is really appealing to you. But you know, you're at war that, that is at war with the mob essentially. And this is, you know, Alcibiades talks about this in the Symposium of Plato that, you know, whenever he's with Socrates he acts one way and then when leaves Socrates side, he's worsted by the honor of the mob, the timae of the. Of the masses. So yeah, it is. He is a tragic figure from the philosopher's perspective. And there is actually there's this ongoing fascination all in with this within Neoplatonism because Alcibiades is the person that so many of these later Platonists read his, you know, Alcibiades 1 to get into philosophy. And so if you read the life of Plotinus, the 3rd century AD philosopher that was so influential on Augustine and so many other church fathers, there's a feast that Plotinus used to have at the birthday of Socrates. He would have like a birthday party for Socrates. And at this feast it was customary that, you know, the men would give up and give speeches. And one of the philosophers gave a speech arguing on the basis of Plato's Symposium. He kind of twisted the words of Plato to argue that a beloved should give in to his lover, that you should basically kind of consummate your desires in a friendship like that seems to be resisted in the Symposium. And Plotinus was so outraged by this that, that, that He. He. He compelled Porphyry, who's writing the biography of Plotinus. He compels Porphyry to. To write a refutation of it. And. And it's this famous scene, you know, and, you know, whatever. And whenever Porphyry, you know, he's finally listening to it the following year, and Porphyry is, you know, making his points, and Plotinus is like, yeah, that's. That. Let him have it. That's it. Thusly strike quotes Homer. So, yeah, I think he. He continues to be this kind of dramatic, tragic figure for all the later Neoplatonists as well.
- [38:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like that a lot. And I think that, as both of us have already kind of alluded to, it should be noticed that first, Alcibiades, which is the dialogue that, you know, students of Plato would read first, right. To understand the Platonic philosophy is the beginning in certain ways of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. But then Plato's Symposium, in a lot of ways, captures the end of their relationship. Right. And how the relationship went. And we'll kind of talk about where Plato's Symposium, I think, falls into the life of Alcibiades. You know, one. One last anecdote before we kind of get into kind of the beginning of his. Of his political life is. I really loved the story of Alcibiades was like going to different teachers to figure out who to learn from. He goes to a school and ask them, like, where their copy of Homer is, and they don't have a copy of Homer at that school. And so he beats the school master and leaves. It's like, I like. I think, as a precedent in general. I like that.
- [39:23]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah. Every student should ask the same question, right? On the same terms.
- [39:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Is this a really good. Is this a really good little anecdote? So he. So my understanding is that his, as Plutarch presents it, like his foray, blossoming, kind of coming onto the stage, I might butcher. This is at this peace treaty, right? So there's this peace treaty. How do you pronounce this guy's name?
- [39:51]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Is this Nikias?
- [39:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Nikias, right.
- [39:54]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Nikias is. Yeah, I say Nikias.
- [39:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, well, I'm gonna. I'm from rural Oklahoma, so I'm just gonna follow you.
- [40:00]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Right, okay.
- [40:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So Oklahoma follows Texas on the pronunciation of ancient Greek names. So we're doing well. So my. Okay, so I guess, like, the way the takeaway that I had from this was that Nikias becomes kind of like one of the major contrasts to Alcibiades. So Alcibiades is young and brash and like, yes, let's invade everyone. And I can pull it off and I'm. I can do these things. And Nikias is like, very, you know, he's more reserved. He's. He's cautioning the Athenians about, like, what they should do. And so he has brokered a peace treaty between the Athenians and the Spartans. Right. And again, we have. This is like, if I understand correctly, this demarcates, like, the first and second half of the. Of the Peloponnesian War, you know, roughly speaking. And so what I really took away from this because I want to like Alcibiades, right? Like, I want to really like him. I really do. And I want to make excuses for him on the expedition to Sicily and things like this that we'll see. But this, the way Plutarch presents this really caught my attention in which you have this treaty of Nicias, Right. So it's. That's how it's been. It's been contextualized. And Alcibiades sees him as his main kind of political competitor. And so Alcibiades then starts to go through these political machinations to undermine the treaty, not because it's good or bad for Athens, but because it's giving too much fame and glory to his political. Political competitor. And this to me is a little snapshot maybe of the worst of Alcibiades. Right. So, like, my personal gain has been mitigated here through the glory of one of my opponents, political opponents, fellow Athenian. Therefore, I'm going to undermine the treaty that he has brokered between the two world powers at this time, I guess with Persia in the distance, mainly because I need to become more famous than him.
- [42:04]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, it's not a very noble motive that Plutarch ascribes to him there. And I think that that was probably a factor if you wanted to defend Alcibiades. And I'm not sure Plutarch gives you any ammo on this. And this will be a question that I'll really think about a lot when I do his life properly. But if you wanted to defend him, you would say Alcibiades had much, much bigger ambitions for Athens. And he had this expansionist vision, you know, of, I think probably already has his eye on Sicily at that point. Athens has this great naval empire. Sicily, Syracuse is the greatest other Greek city state besides Sparta. And so I think that at the very least, I think it's fair to say whether or not Alcibiades had, I think, in a lot of ways, A man like that identifies his own destiny with the polity that he serves. So it's like Alexander, was he really trying to increase the glory of the Macedonians, or was he trying to increase the glory of Alexander? You know, how do you really pull those things apart? I think you probably look at Alcibiades from that perspective, and I think it'd be a fair way to look at it. But of course, we'll talk about how Athens betrays him and mutual later. But he certainly saw, nobody can question, he saw a lot more opportunity for himself to attain distinction in a war than in peace, than in a conflict where his military talents and his kind of cunning diplomacy skills could really be put into action. And so, yeah, what he does is, as Plutarch tells these Spartan ambassadors are there to negotiate some terms of phase two of the peace. I can't remember the context. And he's like the Spartan ambassador. He's like the Proxenos in Athens. He's like the diplomat in charge of the Spartans in Athens. And they come and visit him at his house. He's probably hosting them in his mansion. He's like, all right, guys, I'm on your side. Here's how you're going to persuade the assembly. Here's how we're going to do it. All right? When they ask you what powers you have to negotiate, you have to tell them. And the Spartans have given these ambassadors supreme negotiating authority. They're basically anything that they agree to. The Spartans agree, will agree to bind themselves by. But Alcibiades says, no, no, no. You see, if the demos, if the masses hear that, they're going to press their advantage and they're going to think that they can screw you around. Here's what you do. You tell them that you don't have full, plenty potentiary powers. And they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. Alcibiades, we like you. We can trust you. And so when they are questioned in the assembly before the masses, I think it's Alcibiades himself. He stands up and he says, what powers do you have, Spartan ambassadors? And they're like, oh, we don't have full plenipotentiary powers as ambassadors. We're just here to kind of, you know, do some preliminary talks. And he's like, what? How dare you come to Athens? And he turns on them and he just whips up the mob against them. Like, the Spartans aren't even taking this piece seriously. They have contempt for you. And, you know, he tricks them, and they're livid and just completely taken off guard, of course. But he was that tricky, you know, and so he spins it against them and that, you know, this eventually kind of through a series of events that Thucydides narrates in full, you know, they end up at war again. The great battle of Mantinea, one of the greatest land battles ever fought. He gets Argos involved. And so, yeah, I mean, sure enough, war brought him the opportunity to be a general and to attain distinction as a leader. I mean, it kind of worked.
- [46:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And we. So, I mean, yeah, this is. This becomes somewhat ubiquitous with him. It's a pattern, Right. That he will lie and play against different parties for the sake of like whatever machinations that he has. And where. I mean, where do we have like a rough. He's young, right? Do we have a rough estimation of how old he is? I mean, he is. This is pretty early into his political career, right? I mean, he hits the ground running. I mean, he is a young man when he's first appointed.
- [46:36]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Probably at this point, when this happens.
- [46:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, right. He's appointed a general, correct?
- [46:40]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, yeah. Strategos, which is one of the few non elected offices, or. Sorry, it's one of the few, I believe they're elected. It's one of the few non chosen by lot offices. So, yeah, he's. I mean, he's leading an army pretty early on there. He's one of the commanders.
- [47:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I liked what Plutarch said, kind of hitting on this theme that we've been discussing. He says, this is at 16. I'm looking at the little numbers off on the side of the paragraph. He says, in the midst of this display of statesmanship, eloquence, exalted ambition and cleverness, Alcibiades lived a life of prodigious luxury, drunkenness, debauchery and insolence. I mean, he's just right. I mean, Alcibiades is this man of contradiction, right. In a certain way. And I'm not sure if it's a contradiction or it's just what you see is like, you know, he. I think. And we'll get into this because there's a wonderful line that Plutarch gives about him being a chameleon. But I think that Alcibiades, you know, he's noble. Like, I guess my question would be, is he noble for the sake of being noble? I don't think so. Right. I think he's noble when it has a utilitarian gain for him. Right. So if the masses and the assembly and the Aristocrats need him to be noble, then he becomes noble. Right? That's what works. If it doesn't work, then he's not noble. Like, I don't think. Right. This is the anti Socratic side of him. Right. He's not true to himself outside of like material gain of love, of victory and honor at all costs. It's not even really a virtuous love of honor. Right. It's not like we need to get you to love wisdom in addition to this. Like, he, he just seems to, to just love winning and like, like he was with a child. He'll bend the rules, he'll break the rules. So he wins.
- [48:33]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, he, he's, he's a trickster. And I think that, I mean, he does have that kind of archaic Greek. Like his main moral code is benefit your friends and harm your enemies, you know, and win as much glory as possible at all costs, because that's the only thing that's really worth winning. You know, he's looking to figures like Achilles and especially Odysseus. We'll get to Odysseus later on, I think, with the chameleon part. But no, that's why he's such a deeply problematic figure, because in a lot of ways he really, he sums up so much of what Plato was looking for in his ideal students. You know, the nobility, the curiosity, the brilliance, the charm, the restraint, if he needed to be restrained, if he could be restrained. But he didn't really do it for its own sake. You know, he's, as we'll see, he's able to be Spartan around the Spartans, Thracian around the Thracians, Dning around the Athenians. So he has this control over himself, but he doesn't exercise it because he doesn't. He's not convinced, or at least not convinced enough that it's what he needs to do to be the best version of himself or to get what he wants at least.
- [49:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I agree. And you can see too, in certain ways when we get the first Alcibiades, the dialogue, like, one of my main questions I have is why Alcibiades? So, you know, yes, Socrates had historic conversations, but Plato is selecting conversations to present as dialogues. And obviously when Plato presents them, they have an artistic veneer to them. Right? He's making poetic distinctions and intentional decisions on how he presents things. And so it's interesting that, like, Alcibiades is the one presented as the student that new students of Plato would read and become familiar with. Right. And so, like, what is it about him. That makes him a good picture for the new student of Plato. Like, what are his potentialities that Plato's trying to point out that then historically. Because obviously Plato's writing this all after the fact. You know, maybe we can talk about where Alcibiades failed. Right. Where. Where was his potential not actualized? I really, like, I really enjoy that. Plutarch cites so many authors. Like, is this really rich? I appreciate that.
- [50:59]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah.
- [50:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And he cites Aristophanes and these. On these two quotes about Alcibiades. And they're really excellent. He says they long for him, they hate him, they wish to have him. Right. It just shows, like how. Because Al Sabadi is a man of contradiction in a certain way, and that seems to echo within the populace. I really enjoyed this one. He says, best not bring up a lion inside your city, but if you do, then minister to his moods.
- [51:28]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah. Well, that first Aristophanes quote is. It's like. It's like what a pickup artist would tell you how to treat a woman. Get them to yearn for you to kind of hate you, and that'll make them want you again. He just knows how to get under their skin. Right. But, yeah, Alcibiades is also that lion, which is also a metaphor, famously from Aeschylus. Agamemnon, Helen reared up in the house and she gets older. You know, the lions, if you have a lion in your house, you know, you can't act like they're going to be a cat, like a big cat. They're going to be who they are. And I think that the kind of wild animal that Athens creates with the democratic system is these people who are really talented at just manipulating the crowd. And he was so good at it that he just could not resist using that power. Because this is the ultimate power in a democracy. I think this is one of the reasons why Plato, if anything, he blames the democracy on ruining a man like Alcibiades. And, you know, if there's any kind of justification for Plato's other state ideas, it's. It's to perfect this kind of human in a better. In a better, like environment. It's like train them better so they don't have to turn into this tyrant, you know?
- [52:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because there's something about the democracy, Right. That then tends to cultivate an appeal to our baser appetites, to our lower appetites. Right. It becomes the lowest common denominator. And so, you know, everyone has this vote now. They're not a. They're not a universal suffrage, you Know, democracy, but they have enough of democracy inside of Athens to. To have the quote, unquote crowd, right? That's what we're worried about is the crowd, the mob. Because traditionally, in almost every philosophy, the crowd is not good, right? That is not. That's not how that works. And so, no, I think that's a really interesting idea is because it is interesting, too, when Plato presents your first path, your first step on learning to be a good student of Plato, this Platonic philosophy that it's so intertwined with the political that you study someone like Alcibiades, right? And we'll see when we get the first Alcibiades. There's even warnings about the crowd. And it seems then like it's a. There's a mutual. There's a mutual defect that kicks in, right, where the crowd produces someone like Alcibiades, but then Alcibiades thrives off the crowd. And they tend. It's just a downward spiral in a certain ways. And I really liked it. There was one part here, I think we passed it already in Plutarch, that I thought was fascinating, that Plutarch just has this throwaway comment that, like, oh, yeah, by the way, when Athens sometimes would get someone who was overly powerful and everyone in the democracy started worrying about them, they would just have a vote of ostracism and we would just throw them out of the polis. And all of a sudden you went from being like a strong leader inside the polis and having all kinds of clout and strength to no, now you're in exile and we throw you out. And I mean, that really kind of struck with me of just like one of the problems of the democracy. Like, if you rise too high, right, if you actually leave the. The kind of lowest common denominator too much, then all of a sudden the mob can just vote you off. You just get voted off the island.
- [54:54]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, it's like the tyrant steam valve. They did that to Themistocles, they do it to Aristides. I mean, like, so many of their great statesmen get ostracized. So they almost did it to Alcibiades. Maybe he would have been better off if they had succeeded, right? But, well, so he ends up whipping up this war again and famously persuading the Athenians to attack Sicily on some pretexts. And that's one of the greatest passages of Greek prose literature, I think, is Thucydides's treatment of the Sicilian expedition book. I think it's 6 and 7 or 7 and 8 haven't looked at in a while, but it's this great arc kind of tragedy framed as a massive tragedy. There's all this irony as you feel reading it, and. And basically it happens because Alcibiades is voted to lead the expedition, the Athenians, because it was his idea. The Athenians also appoint Nicias, his sort of rival, his frenemy. Nicias, an older man, right, and another guy, Lamachus, another guy Demost. And these two, not the great Order, but another politician named Demosthenes and Alcibiades. Shortly before leaving, basically they, you know, they're trying to balance out Alcibiades with some. Some older gray hairs. And shortly before leaving, there's this big scandal right on the eve of his departure. As you. As there were statues of the God Hermes, the Herms were defaced. This was seen as a great sacrilege. And then there started to go come out allegations that there was a sort of Black Sabbath, you know, witches, Eucharist kind of celebration of the kind of profaning of the mysteries that they kind of aped the sacred rites of Demeter. And this was seen as not just. Not just a bad omen, not just a kind of sacrilege, a great excommunication worthy, so to speak, sacrilege, but also seditious, that it was some kind of a. A plot, some kind of plan to overthrow the state, which I never really kind of put together the logic of how that reasoning went. And so they're about to depart for the Sicilian expedition and this, this all happens and Alcibiades gets accused of. Of doing all this, of orchestrating all of this. There's, you know, witnesses are produced. Maybe he did it, maybe it was a drunken fleeing one night, but. Or maybe he didn't. But his enemies, of which he has many. Plutarch actually names them in a way that Thucydides doesn't name a lot of them, but Plutarch names a lot of these guys. We don't need to name them. Yeah, let's let their memory rest. They cook up these accusations and Alcibiades says, all right, if you're going to accuse me of this, let's have a trial before I go off to Sicily. And they realize that if they let him go on trial now, he will be acquitted because he's got a lot of popularity behind him. So they let him go. They actually order him to go against his will, even though he protests like, how can I lead an expedition with it? Accusations of this nature that really deserve the death penalty, hanging over My head. Sacrilege. Acebia and piety. Right? And so. And so they. They force him to leave, and then they eventually recall him shortly after he leaves. And eventually this. The Sicilian exposition goes on without Alcibiades. It's kind of engineer, its greatest personality leading at the greatest military talent they have, gets recalled to Athens to stand trial. And of course, the Sicilian expedition ends up in disaster. We don't need to get into that. But then Alcibiades decides he's not going back to Athens after they recall him to, you know, stand trial, when all of his friends have left the city and all of the jurors that would be on his side are gone, he knows they're just. He's. He's walking into certain death if he goes back home. And so he decides to defect to Sparta, famously, which is just such a crazy turn of events, I think. And just one of these other bricks in the wall of Plato and so many other people of this era, their hatred of democracy is like, it ruins its best men and it can't keep its best talent around, and it ends up self destructing.
- [59:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think that. Yeah, I think that comes out very clearly in that narrative. And I think then, you know, one of the questions that people always ask is like, you know, who betrayed who, right? When. Who. Who actually was the betrayer here, Right? Was Alcibiades framed? I noticed that Plutarch, when he talks about the people who brought forward the accusations, you know, they saw Alcibiades do this. He makes. He makes a few things really clear, right? He says, like, the main guy who brought forward things, you know, they were all slaves or aliens that he's kind of brought forward. Right? And Plutarch just kind of throws that out there. And I think there's also, like a side note of, like, well, how did you. How did you see it was Alcibiades and his friends that, like, deface the Herms? Oh, well, it was the moon. The moonlight. Well, it was a. It was a new moon, right. There was no moonlight that night. Right?
- [60:40]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah.
- [60:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So he, like, Plutarch really seems to present this as a framing. At least that was the. That was the inclination that I received, was that. And then, like, it's first the Herms, and then it kind of gets into the, you know, profanation of the mysteries as well. Like we're, if I understand correctly, like, like Zu mentioned, they're in like a house and they basically mock. It's like a, like you made an allusion, right, to like a, Like A black mass. Right. They, like, have a mockery of the sacred ritual. And so I think, yeah, it's really interesting. I think that, you know, we just read on a Sindh a lot of the tragedies. If you look at things like the Oresteia or you look at things like Antigone, you can see that piety actually presents a lot of political structure. Right. So how we interact with the gods has a direct effect on this lower level, the political level, and then that has an effect on the familial level and also the citizenry. And so it kind of makes sense to me that this piety would have, like, these strong political ramifications. And it should be mentioned too, that, I mean, we're way early, but in 399, Socrates is going to be put on trial and his main charge against him is basically impiety. Right. His impulse. Right. He creates new gods. Not only does he deny the gods, but then he creates new gods. And I guess we could probably throw out now that part of the creating new gods and denying the old gods is the effect thereof, is that you're corrupting the youth. In a lot of ways, Alcibiades is case study number one in Socrates, you know, screwing this up. So it's interesting to me, again, seeing how Plato's going to couple these two together and even Plutarch couples these two together, that then both of them end up being antagonistic towards the state. Because if I understood correctly, Alcibiades is actually condemned to death. Death twice. Once for the, you know, once for this impiety, the sacrilege. And then basically he goes to Sparta, as you mentioned, which, again, is an insane. It's hard for us to understand how this works. Like, this is like in the middle of World War II, our top general, like, defects and goes to Russia.
- [62:51]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah.
- [62:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Or the ussr. And then, by the way, when he's there, he sleeps with Stalin's wife. Yeah, right. Like, this is like an insane, like, turn of events. Like, it's hard for us to understand, but this is the World War. Like the Peloponnesian War is their world war for the Mediterranean. And Alcibiades is like, literally just jumping around to each side. So he goes to.
- [63:11]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah.
- [63:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I guess not to belabor it too much. Right. But he goes to Sparta and he becomes basically an advisor to Sparta against the Athenians, including advising against his own expedition against Sicily.
- [63:26]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, yeah. And on the whole piety thing, I mean. Yeah. Alcibiades is really, I think, you know, one of the first people they had in mind on the whole corrupting the youth thing. And Critias as well, one of the 30 tyrants. But yeah, so I love how Alcibiades is able to charm the Spartans. And this is just so, so illustrative of what, how powerful of a personality he had. And Plutarch talks about this over and over, how he was just had this irresistible charm and let's see if we can find a passage here. Yeah. At Sparta he was held in high repute publicly. Should we read this?
- [64:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, go for it.
- [64:12]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Privately he was no less admired. The multitude was brought under his influence and was actually bewitched by his assumption of the Spartan mode of life. When they saw him with his hair untrimmed, taking cold baths. The Spartans used to run their hair long, took cold baths on terms of intimacy with their coarse bread and supping on their black porridge. You know, they have this nasty food in the eyes of all the other Greeks that they're proud of it. They could scarcely trust their eyes. You know, they're kind of like eating haggis. So they could scarcely trust their eyes. And they doubted whether such a man as he now was, had ever had a cook in his own house, had even so much as looked upon a perfumer or endured the touch of Milesian wools, you know, all these luxuries that he of course was intimately familiar with. I mean, he was one of the most luxurious men of his day. Right. And now he's. And then he goes into this famous chameleon passage. I don't know, maybe you want to take that one.
- [65:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I'll just, I'll just read that real fast, he says, because it really stuck out to me as a first time reader, because I think that's the pivot, right, that Alcibiades, when you paint him as a young person, it's really easy to say like, oh, look, he's luxurious, he's flamboyant, etc. But the fact he goes to Sparta and immediately adopts all their customs and almost becomes the best at their customs to get the people to love him shows that we're on a whole nother level. And so Plutarch has. This is a famous passage because it really stood out when I read it. He says Alcibiades possessed, they say, one special gift which surpassed all the rest and served to attach men to him, namely that he could assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of others and submit himself to more startling transformations than a chameleon. I Mean it's, yeah, it's a wonderful passage, but I think that, that like particularly as a first time reader to watch Alcibiades step into a new social structure and immediately adapt their norms. I mean it just takes Alcibiades to a whole different level.
- [66:17]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, In Sparta he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life and severity of countenance in Ionia for luxurious ease and pleasure, in Thrace for drinking deep in Thessaly, for riding horses hard. And when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. And, and so this is why the Greeks have not just Achilles as their Ur like prime hero, but also Odysseus. You know, Odysseus, the man who is able to walk onto the island of Phaeacia with just completely naked and having nothing and talk his way into familiarity and friendship with the king. You know, like this is Alcibiades. Like there's no man who illustrates that better than Alcibiades. Maybe Themistocles. I mean Alcibiades is like on par in terms of his Odyssean trickiness with a guy like Themistocles, who's another story to get to. I'm for some other time Persian war hero. And Plutarch really admires this about him. And he says it's not real changes that he's undergoing. It's skin deep. Right. It's his chameleon like nature, which I think Polytropos, this is the Odyssean quality. He knows the cities and minds of men. He's just able to converse with these cultures that are genuinely different. You know, this is what Greek cosmopolitanism looks like. It's not just that we're all the same and we all, you know, there's not like this kind of base of common culture in the Greek world. Especially when you get to the people like the Thracians and the Persians, these are really, really different peoples. And the guy who can master them all and charm them and to, you know, to charm them in their own way, in their own language and not just with who he is as an Athenian, but who he can show you how to be. I mean this is just, it's just a brilliant quality of the Greeks, I think, in general. But Alcibiades really, really, really embodies that virtue of the whole civilization as a whole.
- [68:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I really appreciate the comparison between Alcibiades and Odysseus because the man of twists and turns certainly also applies to Alcibiades. I mean, in a certain way. Even more so because the things he's able to pull off are so historically recorded. Right. That he actually did these things. I wonder, too, how much Plutarch's trying to put that in our mind. Because one thing you know, to note is that Alcibiades escapes the accusations against him about the sacred mysteries and the mutilation of the Herms, but others don't. And so Plutarch has this, like, very short little passage where he talks about one of the men that was accused was said to. Yeah, was said to be a descendant of Odysseus, which I thought was just an interesting line. Like, why does he include that? Well, then he explains that this guy decides to turn in all his co conspirators that have been accused for immunity. And he even. I mean, it is, it's deep because not only does he, he turn in everyone else, that and the vibe here is that everyone's been falsely accused.
- [69:43]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Right?
- [69:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so he, at least that's, that's the kind of the, the inclination that I received here. And so he's willing to turn against them all and lie and say, you know what? Yes, we did this, we did it. I will tell you the truth. Give me immunity. The rest of them can die. And not only does he accuse his, you know, fellow co conspirators, if you want to call them that, it says he also included a number of his own servants just to make his testimony more convincing. Like, that is the most Odyssean. Because I'm not. I mean, those who have, you know, followed us on Ascend, the great Books podcast, know that I, I have a lot of hesitations when it comes to Odysseus. I think he's a very complicated character. And I tend to. I tend to focus more on his negatives, mainly because I think I get annoyed when people focus on, like, the coming home story. Like it's some just like, grand virtuous. Like the man loves his wife and wants to see his son again. But, you know, Agamemnon accuses Odysseus and the Iliad of basically using others as a meat shield, right? That, like, you're, you're the man of twists and turns and tactics, but for some reason, you're always in the back and other people in front, and you always have people between you and danger, like, what's going on here? And you see this over and over again in the Odyssey where, you know, he doesn't tell his men about things. He, you know, he's, he's very duplicitous and you know, he, yes, he's a survivor, but he does so often at the expense of his men. Right. And so this like Plutarch kind of just masterfully referencing Odysseus here seems to be packed with a lot more than just like a little statement about lineage.
- [71:12]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, I think that's, that's fair. And, and Docades is a very tricky guy himself. We have that speech on the mysteries. He was a, he was an orator. And so it was, it was a dirty business. Yeah, a lot of people lost their heads over this. So I think Alcibiades was kind of right to leave. So. And he's devastating, really. He's, he's.
- [71:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He.
- [71:41]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
So much havoc on the Athenians war plans. We don't need to go into all the details, but you know, he, he's the one who persuades Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap, to play Athens and Sparta against each other and gradually grind them down, you know.
- [72:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, wait, can we talk about why he had to leave later, can we talk about why he had to leave Sparta? Because this is like, like this was just like another. I mean, this is just like I am living life like, just like straight vitalist, like, you know, hey, things are good. You're living this kind of aesthetic life in Sparta. They've accepted you. Things great. And then it's like, you know what? I'm gonna sleep with the queen of Sparta. Like, I'm just gonna do this. And the thing is, it's like, what's funny is, I mean, funny in kind of a dark way. Neither one of them even try and hide it. Like Alcibiades wants people to know that he's bedded the queen. And then the queen. I couldn't believe this because I was just waiting for her to lose her head. I don't really understand this dynamic. Like the queen then openly is like, yeah, I slept with Alcibiades and I'm really proud of it because he's an amazing guy. And by the way, I'm gonna name my child Alcibiades.
- [72:51]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah.
- [72:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And she does. She gives birth to a boy. And I don't understand, like, I maybe don't understand the customs. Like, I don't know how Sparta didn't just like chunk her off a wall or something because that's kind of what you're used to in these histories. It just kind of says that like, well, the king was really mad at Alcibiades and said the kid can't be in the line of succession. I'm like, that's it?
- [73:09]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, right. Well it's funny the, in the life of Lycurgus, Plutarch talks about this how the Spartans had, they were sort of, they were kind of liberal when it came to the whole whose wife is whose thing. And like often they would, you know, an old man would, with a young wife would like allow his wife to sleep with a younger strapping man so as to have children and then he would claim them as his own. They were very like eugenic in a way, as long as it was like, you know, the right kind of man. So I think that there might be some of that dynamic going on that they have a kind of open mindedness about welcoming talented children into the Spartan fold. Sparta already has probably a problem with polyand like Oliganthropia, like they don't have a lot of talented Spartans actually. It's an oligarchy and shrinking. But no, it's incredible. And you know, Alcibiades even said I want my son to be among the kings of Sparta. You know, like he, it wasn't just a fling. It was like I want to impregnate this woman. That was the plan. And it, he really did it. And actually Laeticidus, this is a story from the life of Lysander Leotychidis aka Alcibiades Jr. Was, was in line for the throne of one of, you know, Sparta has this weird dual kingship. He was in line for one of the thrones and Lysander goes and he produces an oracle saying that Sparta is going to have all this misfortune if they let this, you know, bastard son, this half breed Athenian Spartan on the throne. And he ends up getting his buddy Agesilaus put in the, in line for the throne. And Agesilaus actually becomes one of the greatest kings of Sparta. But you know, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Like the, the gall of this man, you know, and, and of course that doesn't play well in Sparta for very long. I think everybody thinks it's funny and cool for a while, right? And then the Spartans start to think, wait a second, this guy is not necessarily working for all of our interests. And so they eventually I think he's advising the Spartan fleet. And then the Spartans send a message to the Spartan commander out in Ionia. Yeah, just get rid of him. You know, they put out a hit on him. So he, he, he, he makes himself scarce and runs off to the Persians at that point.
- [75:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, but again, like, we have to understand, like. Okay, so again, maybe. And maybe this. Correct me if this analogy doesn't track, but, like, we're in the middle of World War II. Our general. Our general, basically, you know, we. We like, bring charges against him in the middle of fighting world World War II. He defects the Russia or the USSR, sleeps with Stalin's wife while he's there, after advising against America, and then defects to Nazi Germany. Right? Like, this is like. This is like the. Like, who's the worst, Pete? Like, who. Who's worse than the USSR Here? We'll go to. We'll go to the Germans, right? Like, who's worse than Sparta? That's okay. I'll go to the Persians, like the enemies of all of the, like, Hellenic people. And then he does the same thing, right? He's a chameleon. So he becomes flamboyant. He's. What. What is this? What's. What's their governor called? Or this. What's. How do you pronounce this?
- [76:30]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Sat.
- [76:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Trap. Just like it looks. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, he's like, then advising. Or my understanding is, is that he's basically. Because then this becomes like, peak. Alcibiades. He's advising then against now Sparta and Athens. So he's like a traitor to, like, his entire race of, like, Greek Achaean people. Right. And. But then at the same time, he is trying to orchestrate a coup in Athens while advising the Persians because he thinks if they'll move from a democracy to an oligarchy, that will allow him, I guess, they'll lift the osterization. Is that what it's called? It's not excommunication.
- [77:10]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Well, the death sentence.
- [77:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, yeah. So they'll lift the death sentence. Maybe plural there. Because I think somewhere in there, I read. I can't remember if it's in Plutarch. I read somewhere that then when they found out that he was advising the Spartans, they, like, condemned him to death, like, all over again. Right.
- [77:27]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
I think that's right. Yeah. I can't remember the exact.
- [77:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I don't think Plutarch talked about that. Maybe I read that somewhere else. But. So anyway, he's. He's in Persia advising against them, but also talking, I guess, to friendly generals about how they can throw a coup in Athens.
- [77:45]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yes. So this is the famous. Well, maybe not so famous, but it's. This is the. The 400. There's oligarchic coup in Athens. And it's.
- [77:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's.
- [77:56]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
It's not only Alcibiades idea, but he's one of the engineers and he's, he's like, yeah, trying to reach out to the, to the generals. I believe they're on Samos, the Athenian fleet fighting the Spartans. And he kind of sends these secret messages over and so it's like he's telling the generals, oh, you guys are aristocrats. I don't really want to go back to Athens for the sake of the mob. I just want the aristocrats to be in charge because the mob is terrible and she's a fickle lover and so on. And they're open to this for a while, but then one of them isn't convinced. Phrynicus I think is his name. And so Alcibiades ends up kind of, they end up calling his bluff somehow. It's kind of complicated but you know, essentially he ends up. Not only do they have the coup back in Athens, but then. And Alcibiades still hasn't, you know, managed to get back reinstated to Athens. But then he convinces the generals who are leading the fleet now who actually are in opposition to the coup because the sailors of Athens are typically the mob. Like they're from the lower classes. It's low grunt work. And so you have a kind of democratic fleet with an oligarchic government back home. And Alcibiades convinces then the democratic fleet, the leaders of that fleet to, to take him on as a general and he will help them overthrow the coup that he has just expressed support for. But he also, I think really interestingly tells them we're not going back to Athens right away once he's in charge. Okay. The most important thing is to win this war against the Spartans. The most important thing is also to return to Athens not empty handed, but having won some victories, having something to prove will have a lot more clout for when we return home and try to restore the constitution. And I think that's where his real alliances were honestly is with the mob. Not as qua mob, not like he was a man of the people championing their interests. But he knew that the way that he was going to flourish in Athens. I mean he is an Athenian through and through. He is an Athenian aristocrat and the Athenian aristocrats of the populist type. I mean he's kind of like a Gracchus in a way or a Caesar. You know, there he's from. He's a blue blood family. But he knows that the securest route to power is to be a blue blood. But to be able to channel the passions of the mob. And that's what he does so well. And so, of course, he's going to end up supporting restoring the democracy, because that's how, you know, that's. That's the state in which he's going to flourish the most. And so he ends up finally being restored to Athens after this very complicated series of events. It's worth maybe reading this passage of his restoration, because I think it's just. It's such a great scene that Plutarch paints. Do you mind if I read this for us?
- [81:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Go for it.
- [81:14]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Let's see, when he landed, however. Wait, no, it starts a little earlier. Nay, he was in actual fear when he put into harbor. Another historian says something else, and Plutarch saying, no, he. He was actually very nervous coming into the. The harbor of Athens. Once in, he did not leave his trireme, his ship, until as he stood on the deck, he caught sight of his cousin Euryptolemus on the shore with many other friends and kinsmen and heard their cries of welcome. So he knew. He sees this great gathering of men. He doesn't know. Are they going to grab him and lynch him? No. Okay, they're on my side. When he landed, however, people did not deign so much as to look at the other generals whom they met, but ran in throngs to Alcibiades with shouts of welcome, escorting him on his way and putting wreaths on his head as they could get. As they could get to him. Excuse me. While those who could not come to him for the throng because of the throng, they gazed at him from afar. I love this part. The elderly men pointing him out to the young. You know, that's Alcibiades. Like, he's been away for the better part of a decade at this point. Much sorrow, too, was mingled with the city's joy, as men called to mind their former misfortunes and compared them with their great present good fortune, counting it, certain. I think this is really interesting that they had neither. They neither would have lost Sicily, nor had any other great expectation of theirs miscarried, if they'd only left Alcibiades at the head of that enterprise and the armament, therefore. So they're thinking, God, we would have won the Sicilian expedition if we had had some restraint and not persecuted our greatest man. It's just a great poignant scene there.
- [82:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like the. On that same passage on paragraph 32, they kind of set like, what does it look like when he's coming home and how many victories he's had, right? Because that's something like, he had a lot of victories between taking over this fleet and coming back home. So it's like. It's like a military parade, right? It says, he set sail for home with the Athenian trimmers of the line, decorated from stem to stern with the shields and trophies of war. They towed in their wake the many prisoners that they had captured. And they carried even a larger number of figureheads taken from the triremes Alcibiades had defeated and sunk. There were no fewer than 200 of these all together, right? So he's like. My read of this is that he's like, you know, cut the prow off of these ships and say, look, look, here's all the ships that I've conquered. I mean, this is a pretty big spectacle as he comes in, I think, too. One thing I would note here, I'm going by memory, but I think this maps on pretty well, is if you remember Plato's Symposium at the beginning, it has, like, a really complicated opening. What I mean by that is, like, it's like, first Alcibiades starts off, it's like, you know, Socrates being like, hey, Alcibiades, how you doing? And then they, like, talk. The beginning of the poseum is like, one guy goes and talks to another guy about, like, hey, do you remember that talk that they gave that one night? Like, I. I heard it happen. Can you tell me? It's like, oh, yeah, I just told the other guy about it. I can tell you. And in Leo Strauss's commentary, when he's trying to explain, like, why. Why does Plato do these gymnastics at the beginning? Like, what's trying to happen? One of the things that he points out there is that one of the individuals asking for the story knows that Alcibiades was at the dinner. But the symposium actually happened basically 10 years ago, but no one's talked about it because Alcibiades was basically Persona non grata. But this guy thinks it just happened. And so Leo Strauss has this, I think, somewhat brilliant insight that that means the only reason that makes sense if the guy thinks it's just happened is that Alcibiades must be back in town. And so Alcibiades come back, he has, like, this, you know, big parade, etc. He's been welcomed. And people now start hearing, well, do you know that there was this dinner? Like, do you know that he had this conversation with Socrates? Do you know? And people are like, oh, what happened? Like, et cetera. But it's actually a conversation that happened 10 years prior, basically before the Sicily expedition. And so it's a really interesting mapping on of what Plato's kind of playing with there, because I think that, again, you have to ask, like, why do this? It's an artistic retelling, like, why have all these gymnastics? It doesn't matter. I think one of the things there that Plato is playing with, if I remember correctly, is, you know, the whole Symposium is a series of speeches about Eros, the gods, the God. And this kind of leads into these aristocratic Athenians giving different theological opinions, many of whom probably might not even actually believe in a pantheon. Right. Eros becomes more of a cosmic force. You know, Diotima tells Socrates that Eros is really this love that's inside you. Right. It moves from being a God to being basically this love that animates the soul. And so in a certain way, you can read it where the fact that Plato does all these gymnastics about Alcibiades and that everyone's quiet about it for 10 years is to show you the danger of having conversations like this. Right. Like, if the mob finds out that we had these conversations about the divine, we could very easily be accused of some type of, like, impiety or impropriety. Does that make sense? So it's a really interesting take there, and I'm going by memory, and so hopefully that maps on well. But this whole thing of, like, when does Alcibiades come back? And that's. That's the kind of crux linchpin at the beginning of that dialogue to understand the real dating and what Plato's playing around with.
- [86:56]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Well, you're. You're going to do the Symposium on this podcast very soon, I'm sure. Right. And so I want you to go into that and then send it to me because I want to listen to that, because that's. That sounds fascinating.
- [87:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, we'll get into it. I'm pretty sure Leo Strauss has. It's been published. Published now separately as a volume. Leo Strauss's Commentary, which is part of. I'm pretty sure it's one of the publications they originally had posted on the center that someone has a transcript from a class and they've taken it, and now it's been edited and kind of gone through. I think it's just called Leo Strauss on Plato's Symposium. It's been a couple years since I read it, but I found it to be very formative. But he spends a lot of time at the beginning, and how do we date this? And he thinks the gymnastics that they do at the beginning has to do with when is Alcibiades actually in town. And the misunderstanding that happens at the beginning about Alcibiades is about something that happened pre Sicily expedition and as opposed to him being back in town now. So you have to understand Alcibiades history to understand the game that's being played.
- [87:55]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, fascinating. I suppose that we should round this out and get to his downfall. Yeah, maybe it's time. So he's just won this great political coup being reintegrated in Athens. Before this he won a great, great battle at Cyzicus up in the Propontis Sea that separates Turkey from Thrace near Constantinople today. And Sparta sends in a new commander to try to save the situation because basically the Peloponnesian War has gone into basically a fight for the Ionian Islands and for control in particular of the Bosporus, which is the, the grain route from the Black Sea grain fields up in Ukraine today and Crimea to Athens, which Athens depends on because the way that they're fighting the war, Athens is basically under siege. Constant on Alcibiades advice. Spartans fortified Dekaleia, which is this fort in Attica by which they are ravaging all of the countryside and basically holding Athens under kind of low grade siege. And they're trying to choke off the Athenian grain supply from the Black Sea. So basically Alcibiades is now fighting the Spartans on this against the strategy that he sort of engineered for them. This is amazing. And so the Spartans send in this guy Lysander as a navarch admiral of the fleet. And Lysander scores this really crucial victory against Alcibiades at I believe it's the battle of notion where Alcibiades is actually not there with the fleet and he's got a subordinate commander in charge of most of the fleet. Alcibiades went off with some other ships and Lysander really one of the brilliant strategists of all antiquity. And so he tricks or sort of lures Alcibiades subordinate commander into an engagement on unfavorable. Like basically tricks him with a kind of decoy and the guy gives battle. Antiochus was his name. And Lysander just demolishes this fleet that Alcibiades has left behind. And I suppose that he knew Athenian politics very intimately, this crafty Spartan Lysander, because he chose that moment very well. And that defeat at sea becomes one of the key arguments that Alcibiades enemies at home in Athens use against him to undermine Him. I think Plutarch is really perceptive here because he says, and it would seem that if ever a man was ruined by his own exalted reputation, that man was Alcibiades. His continuous successes gave him such repute for unbounded daring and sagacity that when he failed in anything, men suspected his inclination, they would not believe in his inability. So in other words, they're not willing to take incompetence as an excuse. They think that if he ever fails, it's because he did it on purpose, because he's, you know, got some other trick up his sleeve. And I think that's, you know, in a way, Plutarch's right, that because he's so good, they just can't believe that he would have just screwed it up, even though it was, you know, his subordinate commander. But. And he's off, you know, looking for supplies, trying to raise money. He's really trying to do stuff for the war effort. But I think that they wouldn't have had that suspicion if Alcibiades hadn't, you know, gone over to the Spartans and gone over to the Persians, too. Right. Like his. His sort of. I hesitate to call it duplicity, but his, let's. His labile alliances, let's say, kind of put that. That grain of doubt in the mind of the people of Athens. And his enemies just use that as a wedge to get in there. And long story short, to oversimplify, they get him fired as commander.
- [92:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah, that's a good way to phrase it.
- [92:19]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
And rather than go home, he decides if I go home, my enemies are going to find some kind of nonsense to prosecute me on and ruin me. And he just leaves. He just goes off to Thrace and starts becoming a, you know, condottiere and whatever. He's. He's clobbering the Thracians, trying to kind of make war and have fun. Not just have fun. He's got. He's building up a new power base in Thrace. And it's then that Lysander, this brilliant Spartan naval commander, makes the final blow, which is the Battle of Aegospotami, which I cover in the first episode of the Life of Lysander. It's a great story. And Lysander basically lures the Athenian commanders into a false sense of security. They're camped on either opposite sides of the Strait of the Hellespont. And Alcibiades even rides up this really tragic scene where he comes up to the Athenian camp. They beach their ships on the north side of this strait. Lysander's across the strait, on the other side, you know, they're like a mile away from each other, maybe three miles. Alcibiades says, you guys are in a terrible position. Your men are wandering off into the hills. You have to go far away to get supplies. Don't. Don't keep. Don't keep camping out here. Lysander is a really talented guy. And the Athenian generals say, oh, I thought you got fired, Alcibiades. You know, see you later. We don't want your help. And I think Plutarch makes this point. You know, if he had. If they had taken on his help, not even made him a general, but talked to him, he had, by that point, amassed a lot of Thracian mercenaries. He had a lot of guys that were fighting under him as a kind of local warlord. He probably could have. He offered. I think. I think Plutarch says this, that he offered to help them out. I could get Lysander to give battle for you. He's out. Lysander's sort of refusing to engage, luring the Athenians into a false sense of security. He says, I could provoke Lysander to give battle whether he likes it or not. He probably could have crossed his. Alcibiades could have crossed his Thracian mercenaries over and. And raided Lysander's camp and ruined this whole plan. But instead, the Athenian generals just kind of keep getting more slack. And eventually Lysander just storms them late one afternoon and just annihilates the entire fleet. And with that, and he executes, like, 3,000 prisoners. It's really bloody. And with that, basically Athens has no fleet. Lysander controls the grain supply, and they just have no more cards to play. And that's the end of the war. They surrender. After that, Lysander famously installs the 30 tyrants, which is the regime that Socrates was associated with, that he mentions resisting and the apology of Plato. That's Lysander's doing. Another really fascinating story, I think. Very complicated, kind of politically, but it's because Lysander. Well, it's because basically the 30 tyrants, this new oligarchic regime that's a pro Sparta oligarchic regime that Lysander installs. The thirty tyrants, as Plutarch tells, were sure that they could. That Athens would never maintain peace with Sparta as long as it was a democracy. So we should keep this oligarchic regime. Spartans and the oligarchy will never be undisturbed as long as Alcibiades is Alive, he's always going to try to find a way to undermine us, to turn it back to a democracy. We can never rest assured, and therefore you Spartans can never rest assured until this guy is dead. And they persuade the Spartan authorities and Lysander, kind of against his inclination, as Plutarch says, gives the word. They basically find Alcibiades in his little fort in Thrace. They surround him. They set the place on fire, I imagine, with burning arrows. And then he charges out one night, you know, it's the middle of the night, and just dies fighting in a hail of arrows at his Thracian hideout. And maybe it's worth reading this last passage. The party sent to kill him did not dare to enter his house, but surrounded it and set it on fire. When Alcibiades was aware of this, he gathered together most of the garments and bedding in the house and cast them on the fire. Then, wrapping his cloak about his left arm and drawing his sword with his right, he dashed out unscathed by the fire, before the garments were in flames, and scattered the barbarians who ran at the mere sight of him. Not a man stood around as stood ground against him or came to close quarters with him, but all held aloof and shot him javelins and arrows. Thus he fell. And when the barbarians were gone, Timandra, that's his girlfriend, took up his dead body, covered it and wrapped it in her own garments and gave it such a brilliant and honorable burial as she could provide. Anyway, so he died fighting. I think that's really true to. True to his colors, you know.
- [98:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And these are, if I remember right, these are Persians. Right. So it's Persians at the behest of the Spartans that finally track him down.
- [98:14]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Right, yeah, that's. That's an important detail I forgot to add. The Persians, basically, everybody wants him dead at that point, you know.
- [98:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, you can only play the game. You can only play the game that he.
- [98:24]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Right, right. Yeah. It's got to be in somebody's interest to keep you alive. And then it just. There. There weren't any more of those people anymore, sadly.
- [98:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah, I just. I mean, it's just a fascinating life. I mean, it's. It's one. I really just enjoyed reading Plutarch because I haven't really read that much classical history. I. I have read the history of the Peloponnesian War. I read a good chunk of that, I think, before I. I lost some steam. But the Plutarch, like, the way he kind of structures these lives is really interesting. And that's One thing I just really appreciated about reading this for this particular podcast was just, I think Plutarch presents this in, like, in a really fascinating way. And I also think it just adds a lot of vitality to the text. Right. So when you read Plato, you're not reading something very flat, but you actually are aware of, like, who these characters are and, like, what their lives are and like. Because obviously Plato's audience is going to know these things. So when he's presenting for sale, people know who Alcibiades is and his history. And so I just think this is really fascinating and really worthwhile to dig into.
- [99:35]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah. And Plato, a lot of those dialogues are. I mean, they kind of amount to a who's who of the most interesting men of the generation that lived before him. And so he's got his characters. Nicias is in the. The Lakis. Actually, Plutarch wrote a biography of Nicias as well. It's worth reading. Plutarch or Plato talks about Pericles. You know, he talks. He has Socrates talks with Aspasia, who's Pericles girlfriend that Plutarch spends a lot of time on in the life of Pericles. That's the Menexenus of Plato. So Plutarch makes a great companion for Plato. I already mentioned the life of Dion. And so many of these characters, I think you don't realize how important they are. Plato's Menno, where he talks about the theory of recollection, is a character in Xenophon's Anabasis. Actually, Xenophon hated his guts. I mean, man, Xenophon hated this guy. So that's fascinating. You get a kind of more sympathetic picture in Plato, but I think it just adds so much more. A lot of times, I really do believe, and I think Strauss would agree with me here, the dialogue derives a lot of its meaning from who these guys are, their symbolic significance for the Athenians. So, yeah, more people need to do what you're doing before they dig into first Alcibiades or the rest of the Platonic corpus.
- [100:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, we're very much taking, I think, what Strauss would propose and the way I was taught too, which is the drama is part of the philosophical pedagogy. Right. So we're not reading Plato's dialogues to coldly abstract some type of political or philosophical principle and move on, but rather, I mean, if you want to read instruction manual, you can go read Aristotle. Right? I mean, that's what he's there for. But if you want to, you know, the Symposium first House of Bodies is Pretty straightforward. But, like, you know, if you want to read the Symposium, then, you know, who drinks wine and who doesn't matters where they sit at the table, matters why Socrates won't go inside the door matters. Right. The drama is part of it. And I think a big part of the drama are the interlocutors. Right? Who. Who has he elected to. And like I said, this is something that I'm currently. It's kind of captured my imagination that I'm still kind of churning about. Is, is why is it that Alcibiades is selected as the kind of student par excellence for new students to read? Why not Plato himself? Right. Why. Why is Plato not. I mean, Plato famously doesn't put himself in the dialogues, but Plato, in a lot of ways, seems to be a more successful story than Alcibiades is. Right. So what is it about Alcibiades and what is it about the political that is kind of tethered to the philosophical? So, no, I think this is incredibly helpful and I've deeply appreciated this conversation. Any. Any kind of last thoughts on Alcibiades? Anything you think we missed?
- [102:22]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
I, you know, I wonder if it's sort of like the reason you read Alcibiades one is because he's a cautionary tale of what could happen to you if you don't listen to philosophy, and yet sort of like what happened with the Facebook movie. I mean, you portray a character like that in enough color and everybody just wants to be him. Right. People walk away from the Facebook movie not feeling like, oh, this is a cautionary tale. But Mark Zuckerberg's awesome. And that's certainly the impression I get from the life of Alcibiades. Like him or hate him, he's kind of awesome. So it is puzzling, I think, still to me, why. Why did Plato pick him? But I think in Plato's day, it wasn't so obvious because Alcibiades was really a lot more morally problematic for the Athenians in particular. The Peloponnesian War did not go well for them. And, you know, he was responsible for. For continuing it, as we discussed earlier. So I just. He's an endlessly fascinating figure, isn't he? And I. I gave you more suggestions on other people that I think would bring up interesting conversations with Plato's dialogues. Lysias is another fascinating one. Read his against Eratosthenes before you read Plato's Republic. Yeah, just. You'll get chills. So, anyway, longer conversation. But yeah, everybody go read the life of Alcibiades and All of Plutarch's lives. They're great. You might enjoy the Life of Lysander as well, because that's really the story of the circumstances that brought about Socrates's execution, which I think is really important to keep in mind for Plato as well, and why Plato turned to philosophy.
- [104:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No. Very good. So remind us, where can people find more of your work?
- [104:17]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Yeah, costofglory.com is my website and I. If you go to search Cost of Glory on any of the podcast players or on YouTube. I'm also on YouTube. Cost of Glory at Cost of Glory on Twitter as well. And yeah, I also run a couple of public speaking retreats and courses and experiences, and you can find out more about that on my website. I have, like a. If you want an authoritative speaker's guide, I have a guide prepared for how to turn your appreciation of ancient history into, you know, competence in the art of oratory. It's free. Go to costofglory.com gift so that's another thing you can find if you're interested, but I'm pretty easy to find if you look for me.
- [105:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that's excellent. Well, Alex, I deeply appreciate your time and attention this evening. Thank you for walking us through Plutarch and his life of Alcibiades. I think this has been excellent. So thank you so much.
- [105:20]
Dr. Alexander Petkiss
Always a pleasure. Happy to come back if you get any more Plutarch bugs. Thanks a lot, Deacon Harrison.
- [105:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Good, no, Very good. Yeah. So next week we will continue our studies into Plato. We will be actually reading first Alcibiades with Alec Bianco of the Circe Institute and the Athenian Stranger off of Twitter. So stick with us and we'll see you next week.