Research Catalog

Title

Nemesis : Alcibiades and the fall of Athens / David Stuttard.

Author

Stuttard, David

Publication

• Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

380 pages : illustrations, maps; 25 cm

Summary

Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades's celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again--this time to Greece's long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but--suffering a reversal--he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades's journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades's adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than 2,000 years.--

Subjects

• Greece > History > Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C
• Alcibiades
• Biographies

Genre/Form

Biographies.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Pinning down Proteus -- Prologue: A family divided -- Rearing the lion cub -- Coming of age -- Unbowed in battle -- Stirring the hornets' nest -- Courting the hydra -- SNAFU: between Scylla and Charybdis -- Sleeping with the enemy -- In a paradise garden -- Trading places -- Ruling the waves -- Dog days -- Nemesis -- Epilogue: The shadow of the dead.

Call Number

JFE 18-5799

ISBN

• 9780674660441
• 0674660447

LCCN

2017045399

OCLC

1011550769

Author

Stuttard, David, author.

Title

Nemesis : Alcibiades and the fall of Athens / David Stuttard.

Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

still image

cartographic image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JFE 18-5799