Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/58

40 40 HIST01IY OF GREECE. power of adapting himself to new habits, new necessities, and new persons, whenever circumstances required. Like Themis- tokles, whom he resembled as well in ability and vigor as in want of public principle and in recklessness about means, Alkibiades was essentially a man of action. Eloquence was in him a secon- dary quality, subordinate to action ; and though he possessed enough of it for his purposes, his speeches were distinguished only for pertinence of matter, often imperfectly expressed, at leo&t according to the high standard of Athens. 1 But his career affords a memorable example of splendid qualities, both for ac- tion and command, ruined and turned into instruments of mis- el uef by the utter want of morality, public and private. A strong tide of individual hatred was thus roused against him, as well from middling citizens whom he had insulted, as from rich men whom his ruinous ostentation outshone. For his exorbitant vol- untary expenditure in the public festivals, transcending the 1 I follow the criticism which Plutarch cites from Thcophrastus, seemingly discriminating and measured : much more trustworthy than the vague eulogy of Nepos, or even of Demosthenes (of course not from his own knowledge), upon the eloquence of Alkibiades (Plutarch, Alkib. c. 10) ; Plutarch, Reipubl. Gerend. Prteccpt. c. 8, p. 804. Antisthenes, companion and pupil of Sokrates, and originator of what is called the Cynic philosophy, contemporary and personally acquainted wMi Alkibiades, was full of admiration for his extreme personal beauty, and pronounced him to be strong, manly, and audacious, but unschooled, inraiSevTov. His scandals about the lawless life of Alkibiades, how- ever, exceed what we can reasonably admit, even from a contemporary ( An- tisthcnes ap. Athenaeum, v, p. 220, xii, D. 534). Antistlienes had composed a dialogue called Alkibiades (Diog. Lae'rt. vi, 15). See the collection of the Fragmenta Antisthenis (by A. G. Winckelrnann, Zurich, 1842, pp. 17-19). The comic writers of the day Eupolis, Aristophanes, Pherekrates, and others seem to have been abundant in their jests and libels against the excesses of Alkibiades, real or supposed. There was a tale, untrue, but current in comic tradition, that Alkibiades, who was not a man to suffer himself to be insulted with impunity, had drowned Eupolis in the sea, in revenge, for his comedy of the Baptrc. See Meineke, Fragm. Com. Grst. Eupolidii Bu-ro and KoP.aKff (vol. ii, pp. 447-494), and Aristophanes Tpj<io/.r/i-, p. llfiG : also "Mcineke's first volume, Historia Critica Comicc. Graec. pp. 124-136 ; and th^ Disserts* xix, in Buttmann's MytJtologits, on th* Bapta? and the Cotvfia.