Aristophanes and Alcibiades

Aristophanes and Alcibiades PDF

Author: Michael Vickers

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-10-16

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 3110427958

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The conventional view of Aristophanes bristles with problems. Important testimony for Alcibiades’ paramount role in comedy is consistently disregarded, and the tradition that “masks were made to look like the komodoumenoi, so that before an actor spoke a word, the audience would recognize who was being attacked” is hardly ever invoked. If these testimonia are taken into account, a fascinating picture emerges, where the komodoumenoi are based on the Periclean household: older characters on Pericles himself, younger on Alcibiades. Aspasia, Pericles’ mistress, and Hipparete, Alcibiades’ wife, lie behind many female characters, and Alcibiades’ ambiguous sexuality also allows him to be shown on the stage as a woman, notably as Lysistrata. There is a substantial overlap between the anecdotal tradition relating to the historical figures and the plotting of Aristophanes’ plays. This extends to speech patterns, where Alcibiades’ speech defect is lampooned. Aristophanes is consistently critical of Alcibiades’ mercurial politics, and his works can also be seen to have served as an aide-mémoire for Thucydides and Xenophon. If the argument presented here is correct, then much current scholarship on Aristophanes can be set aside.

Nemesis

Nemesis PDF

Author: David Stuttard

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-04-16

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0674919661

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Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.

Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts

Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts PDF

Author: David Johnson

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1585104655

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Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts gathers together translations our four most important sources for the relationship between Socrates and the most controversial man of his day, the gifted and scandalous Alcibiades. In addition to Alcibiades’ famous speech from Plato’s Symposium, this text includes two dialogues, the Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II, attributed to Plato in antiquity but unjustly neglected today, and the complete fragments of the dialogue Alcibiades by Plato’s contemporary, Aeschines of Sphettus. These works are essential reading for anyone interested in Socrates’ improbable love affair with Athens’ most desirable youth, his attempt to woo Alcibiades from his ultimately disastrous worldly ambitions to the philosophical life, and the reasons for Socrates’ failure, which played a large role in his conviction by an Athenian court on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate audience.

Socrates and Alcibiades

Socrates and Alcibiades PDF

Author: Ariel Helfer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0812249135

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In Socrates and Alcibiades, Ariel Helfer provides a new interpretation of Plato's account of the relationship between Socrates and the infamous Athenian general Alcibiades, in the process revealing a complex Platonic teaching on the nature and corruptibility of political ambition.

The Symposium

The Symposium PDF

Author: Plato

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016-12-15

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 136561445X

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In his brilliant dialogue, Symposium, Plato presents an imaginary dinner-party set in Athens in 416 BC where the guests include Aristophanes, Socrates and the most popular Athenian of his day, golden boy Alcibiades. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness.

Pericles on Stage

Pericles on Stage PDF

Author: Michael Vickers

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-05-23

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0292746571

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Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds. In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades. According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

Symposium

Symposium PDF

Author: Plato

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13:

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DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Symposium" by Plato. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

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