Browse

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 the book documents, Alcibiades' 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. The book 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.

Niccolò Machiavelli's ambiguous treatment of religion has fueled a contentious and long-standing debate among scholars. Whereas some insist that Machiavelli is a Christian, others maintain he is a pagan. This book mediates between these divergent views by arguing that he is neither but that he utilizes elements of both understandings arrayed in a wholly new way. The book begins with an introduction that shows how Niccolò Machiavelli's account of a new Rome points to the tremendous impact that he believes Christianity has had and can have on politics. In order to overcome the politically deleterious consequences of Christianity and the pagan beliefs that engendered it, as well as to forestall the rise of another tyranny of its magnitude, Machiavelli appeals to certain Christian doctrines to support his vision of an earthly discipline that exercises the strength that he views as essential to sustain political life. In so doing, he creates a wholly temporal interpretation of Christianity. Machiavelli finds that Christianity exerts a type of tyrannical rule over human beings, one that deprives them of their honor, dignity, and power. It is this domination from which Machiavelli endeavors to liberate them. The book concludes Machiavelli intends to allow human beings what they have been denied for so long: honor and glory for their earthly exploits. He endeavors to replace the divine and natural realms with the human one. The book shows Machiavelli's thought to be a highly original response to what he understood to be the crisis of his times.