Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea writing around the year 100, made Parallel Lives: paired biographies of Greeks and Romans, judged for character as much as for deeds. This is Alcibiades, from fifth-century Athens in the long war with Sparta in southern Greece. Plutarch sets him beside Coriolanus, another brilliant man who turned on his own city.

Alcibiades was Athens’s most gifted man in that war, and the least trustworthy. He talked the city into sailing for Sicily, the island off Italy, then was recalled on a charge of mocking the sacred Mysteries, secret religious rites. He deserted to Sparta and showed them how to fortify Decelea, a stronghold near Athens, against his own people. He served Persia, then the Athenian fleet, then no one. Men of Lysander, a Spartan commander, ran him down in a village in Phrygia, in western Turkey, and set the house on fire.