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Consider first the exploits of Alcibiades.For the career of the brilliant, unscrupulous Alcibiades see Grote, Hist. vi. pp. 301 ff., vii. 49 ff., and Plut. Alc. Although he was exiled from AthensHe was exiled on the charge of having profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries. and observed that the others who had before labored under this misfortune had been cowedFor example, Themistocles. because of the greatness of the city, yet he did not show the same submissive spirit as they; on the contrary, convinced that he must attempt to bring about his return by force, he deliberately chose to make war upon her.By stirring up and aiding, through his great personal influence and his sagacity, all the enemies of Athens in the Peloponnesian War.
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Now if one should attempt to speak in detail of the events of that time, he would find it impossible to recount them all exactly, and for the present occasion the recital would perhaps prove wearisome. But so great was the confusion into which he plunged not only Athens but Lacedaemon and all the rest of Hellas as well, that we, the Athenians, suffered what all the world knows;The defeat at Aegospotami, and after that the rule of the “thirty tyrants,” and later the “decarchy.”
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that the rest of the Hellenes fell upon such evil days that even now the calamities engendered in the several states by reason of that war are not yet forgotten;Under the rule of the decarchies described in Isoc. 4.111 ff. and that the Lacedaemonians, who then appeared to be at the height of their fortune, are reduced to their present state of misfortune,—all on account of Alcibiades.Isocrates does not much exaggerate the mischief he wrought in Greek affairs generally.
