The gifted traitor
Alcibiades was the most gifted Athenian of his generation — ward of Pericles, companion of Socrates, beautiful, brilliant, eloquent and brave — and he used his gifts to serve, and then to betray, Athens, Sparta and Persia in turn. The platform reads Alcibiades and ambition as the Peloponnesian War's sharpest case study in what happens when extraordinary talent is joined to an ambition that owes loyalty to nothing but itself. He is the war's most dangerous man, and the danger lay precisely in his brilliance.
The career of betrayals
The platform reads the shape of his career as a sequence of betrayals, each serving his own advancement. He pressed Athens into the Sicilian Expedition, then — recalled to face a charge of sacrilege — defected to Sparta and gave the enemy the strategic counsel that crippled Athens. Falling out with the Spartans, he intrigued with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes; then he engineered his return to Athens, won victories for the city that had condemned him, and was driven out again when fortune turned. The platform reads this under character and power: a man with no fixed loyalty, whose genius for becoming whatever each setting required concealed the absence of any centre.
What Athens could not do with him
The platform reads the deepest lesson in Athens' inability either to use Alcibiades safely or to do without him. His talents were too great to waste and his character too unreliable to trust; the city that exiled him needed him, and the city that recalled him could not hold him. Thucydides reads his treatment as one of Athens' fatal mistakes — the democracy feared his ambition so much that it drove its ablest man into the enemy's arms, and so was injured twice over. The platform reads this as the permanent problem of the gifted and dangerous individual in a free state.
Why the platform reads him
Alcibiades is the platform's ancient archetype of ungoverned ambition in public life — the talent that destroys because it serves no master. The platform reads him alongside the Plutarchan study of the same theme in virtue and ambition, and as a central human cause of why Athens lost: the city's most brilliant son was also a principal agent of its ruin.