T H E M O R A L I T Y TEST 

An Ancient Perspective On Personal Virtue and 
Patriotism in Public Life 

T I M O T H Y M O O N E Y 

T H I S P A P E R F O L L O W S T H E L I F E O F A L C I B I A D E S O F A T H E N S , T H E B R I L L I A N T L Y 

S U C C E S S F U L G E N E R A L I N T H E P E L O P O N N E S I A N W A R , W H O S E D I S S O L U T E P R I V A T E L I F E 

A N D L A C K O F P A T R I O T I S M M A D E H I M A S I N I S T E R F I G U R E I N A T H E N S . H A V I N G 

N E I T H E R L I V E D A V I R T U O U S L I F E N O R M A D E I T C L E A R T H A T H E W O U L D S U B O R D I N A T E 

H I S I N T E R E S T T O T H E C I T Y , A L C I B I A D E S F A I L E D T O G A I N T H E T R U S T O F T H E 

D E M O C R A T I C P O P U L A C E O F A T H E N S . W H E N S U S P I C I O U S C I T I Z E N S R E C A L L E D H I M 

F R O M T H E B A T T L E F I E L D , A L C I B I A D E S T U R N E D T R A I T O R A N D F O U G H T F O R S P A R T A , 

E F F E C T I V E L Y R U I N I N G A T H E N S ' C H A N C E S F O R V I C T O R Y . G I V E N T H I S E X A M P L E , T H I S 

P A P E R A R G U E S T H A T T H E P R I V A T E L I V E S O F P U B L I C F I G U R E S A R E R E L E V A N T T O T H E I R 

P O S I T I O N S A S L E A D E R S O F T H E S T A T E . T H E A B I L I T Y F O R A C O M M U N I T Y T O T R U S T A N D 

R E S P E C T I T S L E A D E R S I S O F P A R A M O U N T I M P O R T A N C E A N D M U S T B E P R O T E C T E D B Y 

T H E A P P O I N T M E N T O F V I R T U O U S A N D P A T R I O T I C L E A D E R S T O P U B L I C P O S I T I O N S . 



In the sordid aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, 
Americans engaged in an intense debate over the private 
lives of their public figures. Republicans condemned pres-
idential philandering as unbefitting the integrity of the of-
fice while Democrats defended the president's right to pri-
vacy i n his personal life. I n the wake of the attacks on 
September n , 2001, scholars increasingly scrutinized the 
effects of President Clinton's infidelity, wondering i f the 
scandal distracted his attention from more important mat-
ters.1 A second political vignette sets Charles Wilson before 
the Senate as a nominee for Secretary of Defense. As the 
leader of General Motors, some senators questioned where 
his loyalties lay, leading to his now infamous response: 
"What is good for the country is good for General Motors 

I N T H E W A K E O F S C A N D A L , L E W I N S K Y A T T E M P T S T O 

E S C A P E T H E P U B L I C E Y E 

and vice versa"11 (it was the vice versa they were worried 
about). These stories raise the questions: Did President 
Clinton have a responsibility to be virtuous in his private 
life? Should the motives of a well-qualified candidate like 
Charles Wilson be an important factor i n appointment to 
public service? The implications of these questions have 
been debated for centuries. This essay looks to one of the 
great historical works of antiquity, Thucydides' History of 
the Pdoponnesian War, for guidance. By looking at the im-
pact of the personal conduct and private motivation on the 
public life of the great Athenian general Alcibiades, we can 
come to a fuller understanding of the importance of private 

virtue and an unmitigated patriotic spirit for public figures. 

As the man boasting the most remarkable deeds, the most 
versatile character, and the most compelling relationship to 
his city, Alcibiades and his actions dominate the second 
half of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. 
Irrepressible, he is a figure both of limitless ambition and 
eminent ability; he has youth, beauty, and eloquence on his 
side and is not afraid to use them. Yet, in the midst of all his 
gifts and abilities there are ominous rumblings about his 
character—his dissolute private life, shallow roots, and in-
satiable desire for greatness—that must give pause. He has 
all of the eloquence and charisma of his predecessor, 
Pericles, without the restraint that made Periclean Athens 
so stable. He has little respect for the laws of the city and 
feels no desire to submit his personal glory before that of 
Athens. Within the Athenian democracy, these qualities 
make h im a sinister figure. Through his words and deeds, 
in addition to the force of his character, Alcibiades bodes i l l 
for Athens, bringing to fruition Thucydides' initial warning 
that the great military expedition to Sicily "failed not so 
much through a miscalculation of the power of those 
against whom it was sent, as through the fault i n the 
senders in . . . choosing rather to occupy themselves with 
private squabbles."111 

This is not to say that the failure of the Sicilian expedition 
is the fault of Alcibiades. He called for the deployment of 
the vast majority of the Athenian military might to the con-
quest of a foreign territory largely irrelevant to the 
Peloponnesian War, and his final goals stretched through-
out most of the known world. Plutarch says of him: 

He possessed the people with great hopes, and he himself en-

tertained yet greater; and the conquest of Sicily, which was 

the utmost bound of their ambition, was but the mere out-

set of his expectation ... Alcibiades dreamed of nothing less 

than the conquest of Carthage and Libya, and by the acces-

sion of these conceiving himself at once made master of Italy 

and Peloponnesus, seemed to look on Sicily as nothing more 

than a magazine for war.w 

E L E M E N T S S P R I N G 08 



These ambitions, however, are not in and of themselves sin-
ister. According to Pericles, they are actually the foundation 
of Athenian greatness—"forcing every sea and land to be 
the highway of [Athens'] daring." v Thucydides implies that 
under the leadership of Alcibiades, this bold expedition 
would have succeeded.vl What is important to notice, how-
ever, is how Alcibiades fails to gain the trust of the people. 
Even as the head of a project the people "fell in love wi th , " v i i 

he failed to get the public to fall in love with h im because 
his character impeded his legitimacy as a public figure. 
Unable to gain the public's trust, his ambition roused sus-
picion i n the Athenian people. 

Alcibiades' ambitious project required his sharp mind and 
military ability, but his licentious private life prevented 
their full use. Athens recognized his ability but was loath to 
trust h im due to its disgust with his lifestyle and fear of his 
personal ambition. The liberality with which Alcibiades 
lived life was famous i n ancient times. Plutarch says of 
him: 

With all these words and deeds, and with all this sagacity 

and eloquence, he intermingled exorbitant luxury and wan-

tonness in his eating and drinking and dissolute living. . . 

The sight of all this made the people of good repute in the city 

feel disgust and abhorrence, and apprehension also, at his 

free living and contempt of law, as monstrous in themselves, 

and indicating designs of usurpation.™1 

Thucydides sums up Alcibiades' private life and its effect 
on public feeling saying, "his habits gave offense to every-
one and caused them to commit affairs to other hands and 
thus before long ruin the city." l x Instead of investing their 
trust in his leadership, the "people of good repute" whose 
sensibilities Alcibiades so offended allowed his enemies to 
recall h im from the Sicilian expedition, to answer trumped 
up charges of impiety and thereby deprive their armies of 
the dynamic leader the expedition so required. 

Alcibiades' private excess unnerved Athens, but it was the 
self-focused nature of his ambition that ultimately led them 

to reject h im. Unlike Pericles, who subordinated himself to 
the laws and the interest of Athens, Alcibiades holds him-
self above them. Strauss says of Pericles in relation to his 
contemporaries, "His superiority is obvious, unambigu-
ous, not like the ambiguous superiority of Themistocles 
and Alcibiades. Pericles justly occupies the center of the 
triptych the out figures of which (Themistocles and 
Alcibiades) are superior to h im only by nature but not by 
law."x Indeed, Alcibiades has a different vision of greatness 
than that of Pericles. Instead of "feeding his eyes upon [the 

A l C I B I A B E 8 . 

A P O R T R A I T O F A T H E N I A N G E N E R A L A L C I B I A D E S 

power of Athens] from day to day, t i l l love of her fills your 
hearts,"X1 as Pericles says, Alcibiades feasts his eyes on him-
self. He is only concerned in the glory of the city when it 
also corresponds to his own glory. In his speech to the 
Athenian assembly he brags of his Olympic victories, say-
ing, "This is no useless folly, when a man at his own private 
cost benefits not himself only but his city: nor is it unfair 



that he who prides himself on his position should refuse to 
be upon an equality with the rest." x u 

This refusal to be on equal terms is a crucial difference be-
tween Alcibiades and Pericles. Alcibiades's character 
would never allow h im to do as Pericles had at the begin-
ning of the war where: 

Finding that the invasion was to take place, [he] conceived 

the idea that Archidamus, who happened to be his guest-

friend, might possibly pass by his estate without ravaging it. 

This he might do either from a personal wish to oblige him, 

or acting under instructions from Sparta... Fie accordingly 

took the precaution of announcing to the Athenians in the 

assembly that, although Archidamus was his guest-friend, 

yet this friendship should not extend to the detriment of the 

state, and that in case the enemy should make his houses 

and lands an exception to the rest and not pillage them, he 

at once gave them up as public property, so that they should 

not bring him into suspicion.*111 

Here Pericles recognized that he must give up his own pri-
vate property in order to protect himself from possible pub-
lic backlash. In order to continue to offer his valuable lead-
ership to the city, he has to put its interests before his own. 
Alcibiades refuses to do this. What Athens does in recall-
ing h im is not fair, but it is a direct result of his failure to 
take precautions with his lifestyle so that he won't be taken 
into suspicion. Alcibiades is a poor leader not simply be-
cause of his sins of commission, but also for his sins of 
omission, namely his inability to qualify his personal great-
ness with any sense of the common good or restraint. 
Strauss says of the situation, "The Sicilian expedition sur-
passes everything undertaken by Pericles; whereas Pericles 
stood for love of the beautiful qualified by thrift, the Sicilian 

expedition, being in the style of Alcibiades . . . was inspired 
by love of the beautiful on the level of lavishness."x l v 

Without the thrift in public or private life, Alcibiades be-
came a lightning rod for suspicion of the Athenians. 

Some might say Alcibiades is the archetypal Athenian with 
his incredibly quick mind and limitless ambition. This 
view, however, fails to take into account the fact that he 
cares first of all about himself. His megalomania foreshad-
ows a situation where Athenians, jealous of his renown, 
wi l l conspire against h im. Having not taken his precau-
tions or made it clear that he wi l l subordinate his interest to 
the city, he has failed to ensure that he would be in charge 
of a project so ambitious that it needs a man of exceptional 
ability at its head. This alone makes the Alcibiades a sinis-
ter figure for Athens. Even more ominous, however, is his 
shallow commitment to Athens as a city. When his honor 
and position are usurped by the intrigues he fails to guard 
against, he lashes back at his own city. In a fit of vengeful, 
defeated egoism, he fails to follow the examples of the de-
feated Nicias and Demosthenes who lay low in the face of 
an angry Athenian populace and instead betrays his friends 
and family to their bitter enemy the Spartans. His versatil-
ity allows h im to access power wherever he goes. This trait, 
which Plutarch describes as "peculiar talent and artifice for 
gaining men's affections, that he could at once comply with 
and really embrace and enter into their habits and ways of 
life and change faster than the chameleon, " x v marks the 
height of his danger to Athens. His exceptional abilities 
and silver tongue led democratic Athens to embark on proj-
ects that require his leadership at the same time as his out-
rageous lifestyle and selfish ambition prevented the citi-
zenry from fully trusting him. When slighted by these 
citizens, Alcibiades, incapable of passively bearing of-
fense,™ actively opposed his city. This demonstrates what 
Strauss characterizes as post-Periclean politics: "After 

"Alcibiades is a poor leader not simply because of his sins 
of commission, but also for his sins of omission ..." 



Pericles there was no longer among the leading men that 
perfect harmony between private interest and public inter-
est . . . the concern with private honor and private gain pre-
vailed. " x v u Alcibiades acts first for private gain and glory, 
and then is a traitor to his own city to satisfy his jilted pri-
vate honor. He says that "love of country is what I do not 
feel when I am wronged, " X V 1 ] 1 fulfilling Pericles prophesy 
that "A man possessing [knowledge of the proper policy 
and the ability to expound it], but no love for his country, he 
would be but a cold advocate for her interests; while were 
his patriotism not proof against bribery, everything would 
go for a price."X 1 X For Alcibiades, this price is his personal 
greatness. 

The reaction of the Athenians to Alcibiades's raucous be-
havior demonstrates how private life, when lived immoder-
ately, can spill over into public policy. As Machiavelli says, 
a good leader must "guard against. . . being contemptible 
and hated," for against this leader it "is difficult to conspire, 
difficult to mount an attack. " x x Within a democratic system 
like Athens, this is particularly important because one's 
mandate comes from the people. If, as Plutarch says, 
Alcibiades' behavior inspires contempt in the good citizens 
of Athens, he cannot hope to continue living his debauched 
lifestyle with no repercussions. As we see, he fails to recog-
nize this and leaves himself open for conspiracy. His lack 
of patriotism compounds the problem. Not only does he 
destroy the Athenian military by failing to win the trust of 
his constituents, but he actually switches sides and opposes 
Athens i n armed military engagements. For these reasons, 
the story of Alcibiades provides a cautionary tale about the 
types of men we should look for to be our leaders. The de-
struction he brings upon himself and the catastrophic 
losses his project brings to Athens underscore the necessity 
of integrity i n public figures and the danger leaders with ul-
terior motives pose to their countries. 

E N D N O T E S 
i . This contention is implied by the 9/11 report which states: "At 
the time [when A l Qaeda was on the public agenda because of 
air strikes on terror camps], President Clinton was embroiled i n 
the Lewinsky scandal, which continued to consume public at-
tention for the rest of that year. 9/11 Report (117) 

i i . Charles Wilson. January 15.1953. Nominations. 
Confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Armed 
Services. Quoted in Piatt (1989) 
i i i . Thucydides (II.15.10-11) 
iv. Plutarch (270) 
v. Thucydides (II.41.4) 
v i . Strauss says of Thucydides, "He is quite sure that the 
success of the Sicilian expedition depended decisively on 
Alcibiades's participation i n i t ." Strauss (204) 
v i i . The word here is actually eros or erotic desire. The project 
became the object of Athenian desire; they lusted after it. 
Thucydides, Loeb Library (226) 
v i i i . Plutarch (269) 
ix. Thucydides (VI.15.4) 
x. Strauss (219) 
xi . Thucydides (II.43.1) 
x i i . Thucydides (VI.16.3-4) 
x i i i . Thucydides (II.13.1) 
xiv. Strauss (205) 
xv. Plutarch (275) 
xvi. A point borne out in the fact that Alcibiades opens o f each 
of his speeches wi th a complaint. 
xvii . Strauss (192) 
xvii i . Thucydides (VI.92.4) 
xix. Thucydides (II.60.6) 
xx. Machiavelli (65, 72) 

R E F E R E N C E S 
Machiavelli. 1998. The Prince. Trans. Harvey Mansfield. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United 
States. 2004. Cj/11 Commission Report. Thomas H . Kean 
(chair). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 

Piatt, Suzy, Ed. 1989. "Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of 
Quotations from the Congressional Research Service." 
Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Retrieved from 
www.bartleby.com/73/. 

Plutarch. 1992. Lives. Trans. John Dreyden. Ed. Arthur Hugh 
Clough. New York: The Modern Library. 

Strauss, Leo. 1964. The City and Man. Chicago: The 
University o f Chicago Press. 

Thucydides. 1996. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. 
Richard Crawley. Ed. Robert B. Strassler. New York: Simon & 
Schuster. 

Thucydides. 1964. History of the Peloponnesian War. Loeb 
Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

T H E M O R A L I T Y T E S T 

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