Enviably well-connected, strikingly handsome, immensely rich, intensely charismatic, unashamedly louche, and, like the Homeric hero Achilles, motivated by the ambition ‘always to be best and to surpass all others.’” Is it any wonder that Alcibiades made so many enemies? Author David Stuttard’s description in his newest book, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, captures perfectly the allure of the Athenian general, a chameleonic character who, for all his qualities, will always be remembered as one of the slipperiest statesmen in history.1

Born around 450 B.C., Alcibiades had the mixed fortune of losing his father Cleinias as a boy and becoming the ward of Pericles, the most important figure of the period in political Athens. If he inherited something of his fighting spirit from his mother Deinomache (“Terrible in Battle”) and his ambition from his guardian, then Alcibiades owed his competitiveness to nature. By all accounts a born fighter, he is said to have boasted of squaring up to his peers and biting them “like a lion.” Tales of precocity and preternatural strength are commonplace in ancient biographies of politicians and rulers, but with Alcibiades you can well believe them. While vowing to write his own biography of the leonine leader with “a firm resolve to steer a course through the shoals and shifting sandbanks of contradictory evidence,” Stuttard is unafraid to draw on some of the more romantic stories. His book is all the livelier for it.

Alcibiades will always be remembered