Alcibiades

He actually brought carpenters and masons from Athens, and displayed all manner of zeal, thus winning favour and power for himself no less than for his city. In like manner he persuaded the people of Patrae to attach their city to the sea by long walls.[*](419 B.C.) Thereupon some one said to the Patrensians: Athens will swallow you up! Perhaps so, said Alcibiades, but you will go slowly, and feet first; whereas Sparta will swallow you head first, and at one gulp.

However, he counselled the Athenians to assert dominion on land also, and to maintain in very deed the oath regularly propounded to their young warriors in the sanctuary of Agraulus. They take oath that they will regard wheat, barley, the vine, and the olive as the natural boundaries of Attica, and they are thus trained to consider as their own all the habitable and fruitful earth.

But all this statecraft and eloquence and lofty purpose and cleverness was attended with great luxuriousness of life, with wanton drunkenness and lewdness, with effeminacy in dress,—he would trail long purple robes through the market place,—and with prodigal expenditures. He would have the decks of his triremes cut away that he might sleep more softly, his bedding being slung on cords rather than spread on the hard planks. He had a golden shield made for himself, bearing no ancestral device,

but an Eros armed with a thunderbolt. The reputable men of the city looked on all these things with loathing and indignation, and feared his contemptuous and lawless spirit. They thought such conduct as his tyrant-like and monstrous. How the common folk felt towards him has been well set forth by Aristophanes[*](Frogs, 1425; 1431-1432.) in these words:—

1. It yearns for him, and hates him too, but wants him back;

1. A lion is not to be reared within the state;
2. But, once you’ve reared him up, consult his every mood.

And indeed, his voluntary contributions of money, his support of public exhibitions, his unsurpassed munificence towards the city, the glory of his ancestry, the power of his eloquence, the comeliness and vigor of his person, together with his experience and prowess in war, made the Athenians lenient and tolerant towards everything else; they were forever giving the mildest of names to his transgressions, calling them the product of youthful spirits and ambition.