Alcibiades · Coriolanus
Why Plutarch paired them
Plutarch pairs Alcibiades of Athens with Coriolanus of Rome because both were men of the highest gifts who turned those gifts against their own cities — each banished by the people he had served, each going over to the enemy to make war on his homeland. The platform reads the pairing as Plutarch's sharpest study of the danger a great nature poses when it lacks the one virtue that governs the rest: self-command.
Where they converge
Both were brilliant and both were ruinous. Alcibiades had genius, charm and courage; Coriolanus had valour and patriotism. Each fell out with his city, each defected to its enemies — Alcibiades to Sparta and Persia, Coriolanus to the Volscians — and each led foreign arms against the people who had formed him. The platform reads both under ambition and downfall: the same exceptional nature that made each man great made each, ungoverned, a mortal danger to his republic.
Where they diverge
Plutarch's synkrisis draws the contrast in their flaws. Alcibiades' failing was excess of appetite — pleasure, luxury, the craving to be first — and a chameleon faithlessness that let him betray everyone in turn. Coriolanus' failing was the opposite: excess of pride and rigidity, an austerity and inflexibility so complete he could not bend even to save himself, joined to a temper no education had softened. The platform reads the difference as two ways of lacking measure — the one too pliable in his desires, the other too stiff in his pride — and Plutarch judges the unyielding Coriolanus, who never stooped to pleasure, the more respectable and the harder to live with.
The lesson and the outcomes
Both ended in ruin and in death at the hands of the enemies they had joined. The platform reads the pairing's lesson under character versus institutions: no constitution can contain a great man who will not govern himself, and the formation of character is as much a part of a republic's safety as any law. Alcibiades and Coriolanus are Plutarch's twin warnings that a gift without virtue is a weapon a city forges against itself.