Who cares about Alcibiades? Reviewing Stuttard, D. (2018) Nemesis
Friday, 6 Jul 2018, 17:07
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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Friday, 6 Jul 2018, 17:08
Who cares about
Alcibiades? Stuttard, D. (2018) Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens Cambridge,
Mass, Harvard University Press.
I’m trying to work out why, in the middle of a MA in Art
History and as a teacher of psychology and mental health, I want to read about
Alcibiades? As a person who thinks (not very often) about what history means, I
couldn’t be further than seeing that discipline as the combined set of
narratives of great and important individual lives. I love Greek drama (mainly
in translation) but prefer the tragedies to the comedies of Aristophanes where
the dread and yet warm image of Alcibiades looms large.
But there is the Symposium
of Plato. Perhaps, that’s it – a disquisition on love in which Alcibiades praises
(and teases) Socrates’ behaviour as a lover: Perhaps that is where we start? That
is as important a theme to me as it was to E.M. Forster’s eponymous hero in Maurice, being told in his Cambridge
seminar – whilst reading Symposium,
to ‘omit the reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’.
At a party following Agathon’s victory in dramatic
competition, Agathon welcomes the drunken latecomer, Alcibiades and asks him to
sit between him and another on one couch. Agathon was a known masculine beauty
well as dramatist and is mocked in plays by Aristophanes as effeminate. Alcibiades
notices the other between whom he must squeeze to sit next to Agathon is Socrates.
Camp humour follows from Alcibiades:
By Heracles, he said, what is this?
here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming
out at all sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for
yourself, and why are you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to
find a place, not by a joker or lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the
fairest of the company?[1]
I remember reading that whilst in the sixth form in the late
1960s and being amazed at how men might joke with each other about finding one
of their number beautiful and, more challenging still to a heavily closeted underground-gay
working-class grammar school boy, attractive.
Stuttard argues that Plato recounts Alcibiades’ presence here
to bothy acknowledge the latter’s awareness of Socrates but to speak of the
distance between Socrates and Alcibiades highly controversial political life (136-9)
but nevertheless for me what was important in this discourse was Alcibiades
persona – an acknowledged beautiful and charismatic male who found someone to
love in another man, even though the latter was acknowledged as quite ugly.
This was a dream I wanted to believe in – because it discoursed about male love
as a meaning of ‘love’ not of sex, while in Alcibiades’ or Agathon’s person not
denying the power of the latter.
Thereafter, whilst studying a course (with the OU) on Greek
drama, I came across other random references to Alcibiades – as a destroyer of
religious icons (knocking the phalli off ‘herms’) or the restorer of the
practices of the Eleusinan mysteries, as an aristocratic denier of the value of
Greek democracy, as (paradoxically) the hero of Greek democracy against the
rule of the 30 despots – Sophocles being on the latter’s ‘side’, as a traitor
leading armies by Sparta against Athens and then of Syrians against both Sparta
and Athens, as a louche male tart – whom Aristophanes (never to mince words)
called ‘gape-arsed’ and a lover of (and beloved by) powerful women (being even
the imputed father of the legitimate heir to the throne of Sparta).
It is the multiplicity of the man that attracts me as a
reader and the sheer mass of contradictions he embodies: a mad, ‘bad’, arrogant
man one can’t help but feel attracted to (like a bisexual version of Heathcliff
or Rochester). But maybe there is something else – more worthy of intellectual
interest – in all this.
Maybe the truth of Alcibiades is not that he was or had the embodied
multiplicity of Proteus (as Stuttard muses (1)) but that he was in part the
product of various discourses in which he was made by various writers and
orators to stand variously as a positive or negative ideal (or perhaps both at
once). There is no doubt that the political, military, socio-cultural and
sexual-political life of classical Athens was highly complex – each domain
intermixed with each other and containing extremely dichotomous positions about
issues like the city-state (‘polis’), freedom, the family, love and the ‘people’
to name but a few. Alcibiades is the focus of quite a number of even the most
contradictory of this discourses, not least that of the ‘polis’: an ideal of
the diversity of Greek citizenship (always excluding slaves and most of the
time, women) he could also be an exemplum of the worst kind of aristocratic and
oligarchic elitism. We cannot get over the sheer success of the man though –
who even does the excessive ‘sensuous luxury’ of the Eastern potentate better (189)
than many others just as easily as he takes on ‘Spartan’ habits of self-denial
and bodily excellence (175). He may be of the horse – an exclusively
aristocratic trait, but is also able to excel in a trireme (even, it is
suggested) build from scratch – or at least partake therein – a Spartan navy in
a polis that was land-locked geographically and in mind-set.
And though Stuttard pours on the effect of his charm, it is
a charm of many different facets that makes social capital even out of a ‘speech
impediment’ (60) in speeches that were knowledgeable and pertinent (spoke to
the time and the varying hegemonic audiences thereof) of which we get even a
taste. These speeches may remind us of his contact with Gorgias – especially the
rhetorical figures and exempla in the Symposium
– but also recall Pericles as recorded by Thucydides. And to read of him is to
read of the wider political geography of the time (as he settles in in high
social positions (for a little time in some) in cultures as different as
Athens, Sparta, Sicily, Byzantium, Melissa and Thrace – there are excellent maps p. ixff.).
This book will not follow the line I hint at above (although
this line is that I stand upon) but it makes it available. For Stuttard,
telling history is nothing if you do not know or will not guess what it may
have felt like to welcome Alcibiades back to Athens as a citizen lining the long
walls from Piraeus to the city or walking with him to re-initiate the temple of
rebirth at Eleusis (267f.). Of course it’s the wildest kind of subjective
guess-work but isn’t it readable!
Who cares about Alcibiades? Reviewing Stuttard, D. (2018) Nemesis
Who cares about Alcibiades? Stuttard, D. (2018) Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press.
I’m trying to work out why, in the middle of a MA in Art History and as a teacher of psychology and mental health, I want to read about Alcibiades? As a person who thinks (not very often) about what history means, I couldn’t be further than seeing that discipline as the combined set of narratives of great and important individual lives. I love Greek drama (mainly in translation) but prefer the tragedies to the comedies of Aristophanes where the dread and yet warm image of Alcibiades looms large.
But there is the Symposium of Plato. Perhaps, that’s it – a disquisition on love in which Alcibiades praises (and teases) Socrates’ behaviour as a lover: Perhaps that is where we start? That is as important a theme to me as it was to E.M. Forster’s eponymous hero in Maurice, being told in his Cambridge seminar – whilst reading Symposium, to ‘omit the reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’.
At a party following Agathon’s victory in dramatic competition, Agathon welcomes the drunken latecomer, Alcibiades and asks him to sit between him and another on one couch. Agathon was a known masculine beauty well as dramatist and is mocked in plays by Aristophanes as effeminate. Alcibiades notices the other between whom he must squeeze to sit next to Agathon is Socrates. Camp humour follows from Alcibiades:
By Heracles, he said, what is this? here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for yourself, and why are you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to find a place, not by a joker or lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the fairest of the company?[1]
I remember reading that whilst in the sixth form in the late 1960s and being amazed at how men might joke with each other about finding one of their number beautiful and, more challenging still to a heavily closeted underground-gay working-class grammar school boy, attractive.
Stuttard argues that Plato recounts Alcibiades’ presence here to bothy acknowledge the latter’s awareness of Socrates but to speak of the distance between Socrates and Alcibiades highly controversial political life (136-9) but nevertheless for me what was important in this discourse was Alcibiades persona – an acknowledged beautiful and charismatic male who found someone to love in another man, even though the latter was acknowledged as quite ugly. This was a dream I wanted to believe in – because it discoursed about male love as a meaning of ‘love’ not of sex, while in Alcibiades’ or Agathon’s person not denying the power of the latter.
Thereafter, whilst studying a course (with the OU) on Greek drama, I came across other random references to Alcibiades – as a destroyer of religious icons (knocking the phalli off ‘herms’) or the restorer of the practices of the Eleusinan mysteries, as an aristocratic denier of the value of Greek democracy, as (paradoxically) the hero of Greek democracy against the rule of the 30 despots – Sophocles being on the latter’s ‘side’, as a traitor leading armies by Sparta against Athens and then of Syrians against both Sparta and Athens, as a louche male tart – whom Aristophanes (never to mince words) called ‘gape-arsed’ and a lover of (and beloved by) powerful women (being even the imputed father of the legitimate heir to the throne of Sparta).
It is the multiplicity of the man that attracts me as a reader and the sheer mass of contradictions he embodies: a mad, ‘bad’, arrogant man one can’t help but feel attracted to (like a bisexual version of Heathcliff or Rochester). But maybe there is something else – more worthy of intellectual interest – in all this.
Maybe the truth of Alcibiades is not that he was or had the embodied multiplicity of Proteus (as Stuttard muses (1)) but that he was in part the product of various discourses in which he was made by various writers and orators to stand variously as a positive or negative ideal (or perhaps both at once). There is no doubt that the political, military, socio-cultural and sexual-political life of classical Athens was highly complex – each domain intermixed with each other and containing extremely dichotomous positions about issues like the city-state (‘polis’), freedom, the family, love and the ‘people’ to name but a few. Alcibiades is the focus of quite a number of even the most contradictory of this discourses, not least that of the ‘polis’: an ideal of the diversity of Greek citizenship (always excluding slaves and most of the time, women) he could also be an exemplum of the worst kind of aristocratic and oligarchic elitism. We cannot get over the sheer success of the man though – who even does the excessive ‘sensuous luxury’ of the Eastern potentate better (189) than many others just as easily as he takes on ‘Spartan’ habits of self-denial and bodily excellence (175). He may be of the horse – an exclusively aristocratic trait, but is also able to excel in a trireme (even, it is suggested) build from scratch – or at least partake therein – a Spartan navy in a polis that was land-locked geographically and in mind-set.
And though Stuttard pours on the effect of his charm, it is a charm of many different facets that makes social capital even out of a ‘speech impediment’ (60) in speeches that were knowledgeable and pertinent (spoke to the time and the varying hegemonic audiences thereof) of which we get even a taste. These speeches may remind us of his contact with Gorgias – especially the rhetorical figures and exempla in the Symposium – but also recall Pericles as recorded by Thucydides. And to read of him is to read of the wider political geography of the time (as he settles in in high social positions (for a little time in some) in cultures as different as Athens, Sparta, Sicily, Byzantium, Melissa and Thrace – there are excellent maps p. ixff.).
This book will not follow the line I hint at above (although this line is that I stand upon) but it makes it available. For Stuttard, telling history is nothing if you do not know or will not guess what it may have felt like to welcome Alcibiades back to Athens as a citizen lining the long walls from Piraeus to the city or walking with him to re-initiate the temple of rebirth at Eleusis (267f.). Of course it’s the wildest kind of subjective guess-work but isn’t it readable!
All the best
Steve
[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.1b.txt