Alcibiades and Athens by David Gribble

Alcibiades and Athens by David Gribble

It is not the aim of this book to add to the extensive literature on Alcibiades' life and career. Instead the author focuses on the explosive mix of fear and fascination excited by Alcibiades in his contemporaries and in particular in key literary texts: Thucydides, the mysterious pseudo-Andocides 4, the encomium of Isocrates 16, the final scene of Plato's Symposium. The book is about the acute tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status, and ambition. It looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual 'outside' the city: the tyrant, the athletic victor, the ostracism victim, the scapegoat, the barbarian. Whereas modern discussions of ancient Athens and Athenian civic texts stress collective ideology, this study focuses on the opposing strand in tension with this dominant ideology: the fascination with the powerful individual. The book is thus at once a contribution to the study of civic ideology, and also to that of the individual and of the role of the individual in classical texts - rhetoric, the historiography of Thucydides, the Platonic dialogue. The book also considers the development of the post-classical depiction of Alcibiades, concluding with a study of Plutarch's reaction both to this tradition and to the classical texts.

The book is well written, the argument is clear and convincing, and the author has to be praised for his ability to combine successfully a contextualized approach to the texts with a subtle theoretical frameworkGribble offers a valuable case study of Athenian democratic ideology, and contributes decisively to the understanding of the conditions and limitations which governed the production of the texts discussed. * Journal of Hellenic Studies *
Scholarly study ... valuable for literary students and students of civic ideology. * Religious Studies Review *

David Gribble was Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford (1994); no academic affiliation at present

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780198152675
ISBN 10	0198152671
Title	Alcibiades and Athens
Author	David Gribble
Series	Oxford Classical Monographs
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1999-03-25
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.