Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/50

32 of character stands plainly marked and sufficiently established in all.

A dissolute life, and an immoderate love of pleasure in all ita forms, is what we might naturally expect from a young man sc circumstanced ; and it appears that with him these tastes were indulged with an offensive publicity which destroyed the comfort of his wife Hipparetê, daughter of Hipponikus who was slain at the battle of Delium. She had brought him a large dowry of ten talents : when she sought a divorce, as the law of Athens permitted, Alkibiadês violently interposed to prevent her from obtaining the benefit of the law, and brought her back by force to his house even from the presence of the magistrate. It is this violence of selfish passion, and reckless disregard of social obligation towards every one, which forms the peculiar characteristic of Alkibiadês. He strikes the schoolmaster whose house he happens to find unprovided with a copy of Homer; he strikes Taureas, a rival choregus, in the public theatre, while the representation is going on; he strikes Hipponikus, who afterwards became his father-in-law, out of a wager of mere wantonness, afterwards appeasing him by an ample apology; he protects the Thasian poet Hêgêmon, against whom an indictment had been formally lodged before the archon, by effacing it with his own hand from the published list in the public edifice, called Metrôn; defying both magistrate and accuser to press the cause on for trial. Nor does it appear that any injured person ever dared to bring Alki- biadês to trial before the dikastery, though we read with amazement the tissue of lawlessness which marked his private life;