Alcibiades and the Irrational

Abstract

A riposte to an adverse review of Vickers' Sophocles and Alcibiades (2008). Sophocles well expresses the irrational nature of the teenage Antigone and the crazy Ajax in the relevant plays. In both cases, the individuals in question are crypto-portraits of Alcibiades, who also lies behind Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae whose extravagant description of Asia was an imperial shopping list—one that in the event Alcibiades was unable to act upon, but which Alexander the Great was to accomplish nearly a century later.