Alcibiades

But this holds not always: for Augustus Caesar, Titus Vespasianus, Philip le Belle of France, Edward the Fourth of England, Alcibiades of Athens, Ismael the Sophy of Persia, were all high and great spirits; and yet the most beautiful men of their times.

The particular is--for example--what Alcibiades did or suffered.

The antient philosophers, such as Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, did not use to argue with their scholars.

The crimes of Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides, who had been his pupils, were still recent in the memory of the now restored democracy.

He is a Thessalian Alcibiades, rich and luxurious-- a spoilt child of fortune, and is described as the hereditary friend of the great king.

If the boy had replied like Alcibiades, "By the gods, Socrates, I cannot tell," his grandfather would not have been surprised, but when, after standing a moment on one leg, like a meditative young stork, he answered, in a tone of calm conviction, "In my little belly," the old gentleman could only join in Grandma's laugh, and dismiss the class in metaphysics.

It sounded odd to them to hear him compare Lord Beaconsfield with Alcibiades. He talked of Mr.

Fresh in the memory of the Athenians, and detestable as they deserved to be to the newly restored democracy, were the names of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides.

The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up.

This throws our actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

He was compared by obsequious flatterers to the Black Prince, to Alcibiades, to the young Caesar.

Christina Barlow, centre, with her birth mother Encarnacion, left, and father Alcibiades, right, in Colombia