Étite Individual and Democratic City

The subject of this chapter is not the story of Alcibiades’ life, the details of which can be found in one of the many biographies of Alcibiades, but the way he lived his life (his bios, as it is often put in Greek) — or at least the way this lifestyle is presented in the surviving texts. This distinction is vital: the relationship between the discourses of rhetoric, comedy — even historiography — and lived reality is evidently exceedingly complex: to unravel these dis­courses is not the same as to discover the reality behind them, though it may be a first step to doing so. I will argue that the key to understanding the presentation of Alcibiades lies in civic dis­courses about the relationship between individual and city, discourses which portrayed him as the sort of figure who could not be incorporated in the city, as ‘outside’ the city. Unlike the following chapters, which concentrate on specific authors or genres of pre­sentation, this one will cover the full gamut of writings about Alcibiades in order to build up a general picture of how the texts present his relationship to the city.

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