ents for
that city, to destroy the Athenian army in Sicily. Next, he brought them
to declare war against the Athenians themselves; while his third and
most terrible blow to Athens was his causing the Lacedaemonians to seize
and fortify Dekeleia, which did more to ruin Athens than any other
measure throughout the war. With his great public reputation, Alkibiades
was no less popular in private life, and he deluded the people by
pretending to adopt the Laconian habits. When they saw him closely
shaved, bathing in cold water, eating dry bread and black broth, they
wondered, and began to doubt whether this man ever had kept a professed
cook, used perfumes, or endured to wear a Milesian mantle. For
Alkibiades, among his other extraordinary qualities, had this especial
art of captivating men by assimilating his own manners and habits to
theirs, being able to change, more quickly than the chameleon, from one
mode of life to another. The chameleon, indeed, cannot turn itself
white; but Alkibiades never found anything, good or bad, which he could
not imitate to the life. Thus at Sparta he was fond of exercise, frugal
and severe; in Ionia, luxurious, frivolous, and lazy; in Thrace, he
drank deep; in Thessaly he proved himself a good horseman; while, when
he was consorting with the satrap Tissaphernes, he outdid even the
Persian splendour and pomp. It was not his real character that he so
often and so easily changed, but as he knew that if he appeared in his
true colours, he would be universally disliked, he concealed his real
self under an apparent adoption of the ways and fashions of whatever
place he was in. In Lacedaemon you would say, looking at his appearance,

"'Tis not Achilles' son, 'tis he himself."

He was just such a man as Lykurgus himself would have trained; but if
you examined his habits and actions more closely, you would say:

"'Tis the same woman still."

For while King Agis was away in the wars, Alkibiades seduced his wife
Timaea, so that she became pregnant by him, and did not even deny the
fact. When her child was born it was called Leotychides in public, but
in her own house she whispered to her friends and attendants that his
name was Alkibiades, so greatly was she enamoured of him. He himself
used to say in jest that he had not acted thus out of wanton passion,
but in order that his race might one day rule in Lacedaemon. King Agis
heard of all this from many informants, but was most convinced of