Alcibiades and beauty

Alcibiades was an imposing but controversial figure who has provoked a lot of literature. There are many works entitled Alcibiades: two dialogues ascribed to Plato, one of Phaedo, and one of Aeschines. Antisthenes is also among these writers. We have some fragments of his Alcibiades that speak about the title character's beauty. According to one of the fragments, Antisthenes met Alcibiades in person and was impressed by his beauty, describing him as strong, manly, well educated, daring and in the bloom of youth (or beautiful), beloved by all Greece. Antisthenes – fond of Homer as he was – compared him to Achilles: ‘If Achilles was not such, he was not ripe (or beautiful) at all’. Thus, if Achilles was not as beautiful as Alcibiades he was not beautiful at all (the distance in beauty would be great), for Achilles was the most beautiful in his day. As a kind of proof Antisthenes alludes to Homer's comment about Nireus: ‘Nireus, the most beautiful man who came to Ilion, of all Danaoi after the excellent son of Pelias [i.e. Achilles]’. Conclusion: Achilles was the most beautiful man of his day, hence Alcibiades was, in his day, the Achilles of ancient times in terms of beauty.

Socrates also enters this work because, as Antisthenes tells us, he pleaded to give the prize for valour to Alcibiades at Delium (or Potidaea): the armour and the crown of victory. Thus, Alcibiades’ epithet ‘daring’ was deserved. It is interesting that there is a quotation in the form of a dialogue in which Socrates answers a stranger who said that he (Socrates) had received the prize of valour in Boeotia: ‘We heard that in the war against the Boiōtoi you received the prize of valour. – Silence stranger! It was the gift of honour given to Alcibiades, not me. – But you gave it, as we have heard’.

This little piece of dialogue confirms the history of the prize of valour, but what is perhaps more interesting, we have here a rare authentic piece of an Antisthenean dialogue where two persons are involved: Socrates himself, so that we know explicitly that Socrates figures in a dialogue of Antisthenes, and a stranger, who is unknown to us.