The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens, Hardcover

This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450-404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city--and his tumultuous age.

Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.

Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings is a freelance translator of texts in French, working since 1992. She has degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Iowa. Since 1995, she has translated independently, or with others, a number of books and articles, primarily in the field of Greek and Roman literature and history.

Jacqueline de Romilly (1913-2010) was a distinguished scholar of Greek history and culture. In 1973, she became Chair of Greek at the College de France, the first woman nominated to this prestigious institution. In 1988, she was elected to the Acad mie Fran aise as the second woman member, after Marguerite Yourcenar. Romilly was an A.D. White Professor at large at Cornell from 1974 to 1980.