Against Alcibiades (18-29)

It makes me angry to think that while you yourselves cannot place even malefactors under arrest without risk, because it is enacted that anyone who fails to gain one-fifth of the votes shall be liable to a fine of a thousand drachmae, Alcibiades, who imprisoned a man for so long and forced him to paint, went unpunished—nay, increased thereby the awe and the fear in which he is held. In our treaties with other states[*] we make it a condition that no free man shall be imprisoned or placed in durance, and a heavy fine is prescribed as the penalty for so doing. Yet when Alcibiades behaved as he did, no one sought satisfaction, whether for himself or for the state.

Obedience to the magistrates and the laws is to my mind the one safeguard of society; and anyone who sets them at nought is destroying at one blow the surest guarantee of security which the state possesses. It is hard enough to be made to suffer by those who have no conception of right and wrong; but it is far more serious when a man who knows what the public interest requires, acts in defiance of it. He shows clearly, as Alcibiades has done, that instead of holding that he ought himself to conform with the laws of the state, he expects you to conform with his own way of life.

Then again, remember Taureas[*] who competed against Alcibiades as Choregus of a chorus of boys.[*] The law allows the ejection of any member whatsoever of a competing chorus who is not of Athenian birth, and it is forbidden to resist any attempt at such ejection. Yet in your presence, in the presence of the other Greeks who were looking on, and before all the magistrates in Athens, Alcibiades drove off Taureas with his fists.[*] The spectators showed their sympathy with Taureas and their hatred of Alcibiades by applauding the one chorus and refusing to listen to the other at all. Yet Taureas was none the better off for that.

Partly from fear, partly from subservience, the judges pronounced Alcibiades the victor, treating him as more important than their oath. And it seems to me only natural that the judges should thus seek favour with Alcibiades, when they could see that Taureas, who had spent so vast a sum, was being subjected to insults, while his rival, who showed such contempt for the law, was all-powerful. The blame lies with you. You refuse to punish insolence; and while you chastise secret wrongdoing, you admire open effrontery.

That is why the young spend their days in the courts instead of in the gymnasia; that is why our old men fight our battles, while our young men make speeches— they take Alcibiades as their model, Alcibiades who carries his villainy to such unheard-of lengths that, after recommending that the people of Melos[*] be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the prisoners and has since had a son by her, a child whose birth was more unnatural than that of Aegis—thus,[*] since he is sprung from parents who are each other’s deadliest enemies, and of his nearest kin the one has committed and the other has suffered the most terrible of wrongs.

Indeed it would be well to make such shamelessness still plainer. He got himself a child by the very woman whom he had turned from a free citizen into a slave, whose father and kinsfolk he had put to death and whose city he had made a waste, that he might thereby make his son the deadly enemy of himself and of this city; so inevitably is the boy driven to hate both. When you are shown things of this kind on the tragic stage, you regard them with horror; but when you see them taking place in Athens, you remain unmoved—and yet you are uncertain whether the tales of tragedy are founded on the truth or spring merely from the imagination of the poets; whereas you well know that these other lawless outrages, which you accept with indifference, have occurred in fact.

In addition to all this, some dare to say that the like of Alcibiades has never been before. For my part, I believe that Athens will meet with terrible calamities at his hands, that he will be deemed responsible hereafter for disasters so awful that no one will remember his past misdeeds; for it is only to be expected that one who has begun his life in such a fashion will make its close no less portentous. Men of sense should beware of those of their fellows who grow too great, remembering that it is such as they who set up tyrannies.

I imagine that Alcibiades will make no reply to this, but will talk instead of his victory at Olympia,[*] and that he will seek to defend himself on any grounds rather than those on which he has been charged. But I will use the very facts upon which he relies to prove that he deserves death rather than acquittal. Let me explain.

Diomedes took a chariot-team to Olympia. He was a man of moderate means, but desired to win a garland for Athens and for his family with such resources as he had, since he held that the chariot-races were for the most part decided by chance. Diomedes was no casual competitor, but a citizen of Athens.[*] Yet thanks to his influence with the Masters of the Games[*] at Elis, Alcibiades deprived him of his team and competed with it himself. What would he have done, may we ask, had one of your allies arrived with a team?

I imagine he would have been all eagerness to let him compete against himself, considering that he had forcibly ousted an Athenian rival and then had the impudence to contest the race with another man’s horses—after he had, in fact, warned the Greeks in general that they must not be surprised at his offering violence to any of them, seeing that he does not treat his own fellow Athenians as his equals, but robs them, strikes them, throws them into prison, and extorts money from them, yes, shows the democracy to be nothing better than a sham, by talking like a champion of the people and acting like a tyrant, since he has found out that while the word tyranny fills you with concern, the thing for which leaves you undisturbed.

Indeed, so different is he from the Spartans that whereas the Spartans accept defeat even at the hands of their allies, when they compete against them, Alcibiades will not endure it even at the hands of his fellow-citizens; in fact, he has openly stated that he will brook no rivals. It is inevitable that such behaviour should cause the states within our confederacy to feel sympathy for our enemies and loathing for us.

In order to make it clear, however, that he was insulting Athens as a whole in addition to Diomedes, he asked the leaders of the Athenian deputation to lend him the processional vessels, alleging that he intended to use them for a celebration of his victory on the day before the sacrifice; he then abused the trust placed in him and refused to return them, as he wanted to use the golden basins and censers next day before Athens did so. Naturally, when those strangers who did not know that they belonged to us saw the state-procession taking place after that of Alcibiades, they imagined that we were using his vessels: while those who had either heard the truth from the Athenians present or else knew the ways of Alcibiades, laughed at us when they saw one man showing himself superior to our entire community.