For those of you who were in Mr. Thomas' history class with me in eleventh grade, you might find this amusing.
Alcibiades - History for Kids!1... and by "student of Socrates" they mean "fucktoy." Talk about Socrates "corrupting the youth"....
Alcibiades was born in Athens around 450 BC. His mother was an Alcmaeonid. He was from one of the wealthiest families in Athens, and he grew up with the best of everything. After his father was killed in battle, Pericles, another Alcmaeonid, was Alcibiades' guardian. When he was a teenager, during the early years of the Peloponnesian War, he was a student1 of Socrates.
By the time Alcibiades grew up, Athens was beginning to lose the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades became a very good general. The Sicilian Expedition was his idea.
But when he got in trouble with the Athenians over the question of who smashed the good-luck statues2, he ended up running away from Athens to Sparta in the middle of the night.
When Alcibiades got to Sparta, he made a deal with the Spartans. If they would let him stay in Sparta, he would help them win the Peloponnesian War by giving them good advice. They agreed, and the first thing Alcibiades told the Spartans was that they should build a navy and use it to destroy the Sicilian Expedition.
When this plan worked, the Spartans thought Alcibiades was really smart. He also advised them to lay a permanent siege to Athens, instead of only in the summertime. That worked too. But after a while, Alcibiades got into trouble in Sparta, too. People said he had been kissing3 the wife of one of the Spartan kings. He had to leave Sparta quickly.
This time Alcibiades fled to Persia. The Persian satrap (ruler) of Anatolia (modern Turkey) let him stay there, and now Alcibiades gave the Persians good advice about how to manage the Peloponnesian War.
Near the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were so desperate that they let Alcibiades come back as their general. But in the end, they fired him again, and he went back to Persia, where he was killed4 in 404 BC, just as the war was ending.
2... and by "smashed the good-luck statues" they mean, "castrated various statues of Hermes which consisted solely of 1) a head and 2) an erect penis."
3... and by "kissing" they mean "conceiving illegitimate children with."
4... and by "killed" they mean "shot through by arrows as he was running completely naked from a burning house, after having had sex with his assassins' sister."
THE END.