ABSTRACT
There are in European history perhaps a dozen born heroes whom posterity will never reduce to common proportions. They turn the soberest heads in their own generation, infecting the most prosaic observers with poetry; and when the incorruptible evidence of monument and archive is wanting, they are put beyond the reach of criticism. When Socrates, at Agathon's banquet, has finished his encomium of Eros with the innermost revelation of Beauty, a sudden knocking is heard at the gate of courtyard, a noise of revellers, and a flute-girl's voice. A moment later, drunken, and crowned with a thick wreath of ivy and violets, Alcibiades stands in the doorway like an apparition. Plutarch's life of Alcibiades is a vivid and harmonious composition, because Plutarch saw the personality with an artist's intuition of its total effect, and knew that good anecdote is more illuminating than volume of criticism. His principal authorities for the early part of his hero's career were Plato and Thucydides.
