The Psychological Price of Never Fully Belonging to Anyone: The Life of Alcibiades

Alcibiades managed, at some point in his life, to make Athens, Sparta, and Persia all want him close at the same time. He also managed, before he died, to make all three want him dead. Robert Greene tells the first part of that story as a model of personal power. He doesn’t tell the second part.

He recounts it in The 48 Laws of Power (1998), in the chapter devoted to the law of never committing to anyone, with Alcibiades as the original example of a tactic the book itself names after him.

Athens’ brilliant protégé

Alcibiades was born around 450 BC into one of the most influential families in Athens. He lost his father as a child and grew up under the guardianship of Pericles, the great statesman who led the city during its golden age.

He was also a disciple and, according to several ancient sources, a close friend of Socrates. The two fought together at the Battle of Potidaea, where Socrates protected him after he was wounded on the battlefield. Years later, in another battle, it was Alcibiades who saved Socrates’ life. Of all his adult relationships, it is, in the sources that describe it, almost the only one that didn’t end in mutual betrayal.

As a young man he was, according to the same sources, extraordinarily attractive, brilliant in public debate, and dangerously aware of both. Nothing about his youth foreshadowed what was to come, except perhaps that same combination of talent and vanity that so often precedes a long fall.

The night the sacred statues were mutilated

In 415 BC, Athens was preparing its most ambitious expedition yet: a massive fleet bound for Sicily, driven and inspired by Alcibiades himself. The night before it set sail, someone secretly mutilated dozens of sacred statues scattered across the city, an act of religious vandalism that sowed panic among Athenians.

Suspicion fell on Alcibiades, along with additional accusations of having profaned private religious rites. He demanded to be tried immediately, before setting sail. His enemies, calculating that an immediate trial might favor him, preferred to wait until the fleet was already underway.

The general who fled his own trial

With the fleet already in Sicily, Athens sent an official ship to bring him back to face the trial he himself had requested. Alcibiades understood that the verdict had already been decided in advance.

Instead of returning, he defected. He switched to the side of Sparta, Athens’ enemy in the war the two cities had been waging for years, and shared his intimate knowledge of Athenian weaknesses with the Spartans. Athens, furious, sentenced him to death in absentia.

A son who wasn’t the king’s

In Sparta, Alcibiades lived as an honored guest, close to King Agis II himself. According to the historian Plutarch, while Agis was away fighting, Alcibiades carried on a relationship with his wife, Timaea, who became pregnant.

The child was born and named Leotychidas, and for years suspicion circulated in the Spartan court that his real father wasn’t the king. When that suspicion reached Agis, Alcibiades’ position in Sparta became untenable overnight. Fearing for his life, he fled a second time.

The adviser who played both armies at once

This time he crossed over to Persia, where he became a trusted adviser to Tissaphernes, the local governor of the Persian empire.

His advice was as calculated as the rest of his life: he convinced Tissaphernes not to fully back either of the two Greek sides, neither Sparta nor Athens, but to let both wear each other down for as long as possible, so that Persia would end up with two exhausted enemies instead of one strengthened one. While openly advising the Persians to do this, he stayed in secret contact with Athenian officers, offering his return in exchange for Athens changing its form of government.

Athens, in need of his military talent, eventually forgave him. Alcibiades returned at the head of the Athenian fleet and strung together a series of naval victories, including Cyzicus, that restored to the city a position that had seemed lost only years earlier. He was welcomed back to Athens with something close to a hero’s honors, crowned and named supreme commander of all Athenian forces, the same city that years before had sentenced him to death in absentia.

What Greene celebrates as strategy

The book presents this whole arc, up to this point, as a lesson in positioning: whoever stays available to several sides at once accumulates more power than whoever commits early to just one. Greene goes as far as instructing the reader directly to “stay free of emotional entanglements” and to “see the people around you as pieces in your own rise to power.”

It’s a reading that only holds up if the story is cut off at the right moment, exactly when Alcibiades returns to Athens as a hero, crowned and in command of his entire fleet. That happens, not by coincidence, to be the same point where Greene chooses to close the chapter.

A corpse on a hillside in Phrygia

It doesn’t end there. A naval defeat suffered by one of his subordinates, while Alcibiades was away from the front, was enough for Athens to distrust him again. He was removed from command and went into exile a third time, now with no side willing to take him in safely.

He finally took refuge in Phrygia, under the protection of a local Persian governor. According to ancient sources, Sparta pressured that governor to have him eliminated. Around 404 BC, a group of armed men surrounded the house where he was staying and set it on fire. Alcibiades died, according to the most widely told account, while charging out armed against his attackers.

He had passed through Athens, Sparta, and Persia. He had been a general, a royal guest, an imperial adviser, and a crowned hero. In the end, none of the three was willing to protect him.

An anecdote Greene tells only half of

The underlying psychology the book describes is real: someone who makes himself available to several rival sides becomes, for a while, more sought after than someone who has already committed to one. That explains, without needing to read anything darker into it, why Athens, Sparta, and Persia courted Alcibiades in turn.

What the book doesn’t say is that the same strategy, sustained over an entire lifetime, leaves no side willing to defend you once you finally decide to stand still. Alcibiades died without a homeland, without an army of his own, and without a single real ally, surrounded by the same three powers he had briefly belonged to and never fully belonged to at all.

Of the three bonds he formed with Athens, Sparta, and Persia, none survived the other side discovering it had never been exclusive. The one that did survive, curiously, was the oldest and least strategic of all: the friendship with Socrates, which never depended on which side Alcibiades belonged to at any given moment.

Sources

• Greene, R. (1998). The 48 Laws of Power. Penguin Books.
• Plutarch. Parallel Lives: Alcibiades.