II.  His character, in the course of his varied and brilliant career, developed many strange inconsistencies and contradictions.  Emulation and love of distinction were the most prominent of his many violent passions, as is clear from the anecdotes of his childhood.  Once when hard pressed in wrestling, rather than fall, he began to bite his opponent’s hands.  The other let go his hold, and said, “You bite, Alkibiades, like a woman.”  “No,” said he, “like a lion.”  While yet a child, he was playing at knucklebones with other boys in a narrow street, and when his turn came to throw, a loaded waggon was passing.  He at first ordered the driver to stop his team because his throw was to take place directly in the path of the waggon.  Then as the boor who was driving would not stop, the other children made way; but Alkibiades flung himself down on his face directly in front of the horses, and bade him drive on at his peril.  The man, in alarm, now stopped his horses, and the others were terrified and ran up to him.

In learning he was fairly obedient to all his teachers, except in playing the flute, which he refused to do, declaring that it was unfit for a gentleman.  He said that playing on the harp or lyre did not disfigure the face, but that when a man was blowing at a flute, his own friends could scarcely recognise him.  Besides, the lyre accompanies the voice of the performer, while the flute takes all the breath of the player and prevents him even from speaking.  “Let the children of the Thebans,” he used to say, “learn to play the flute, for they know not how to speak; but we Athenians according to tradition have the goddess Athene (Minerva) for our patroness, and Apollo for our tutelary divinity; and of these the first threw away the flute in disgust, and the other actually flayed the flute player Marsyas.”  With such talk as this, between jest and earnest, Alkibiades gave up flute-playing himself, and induced his friends to do so, for all the youth of Athens soon heard and approved of Alkibiades’s derision of the flute and those who learned it.  In consequence of this the flute went entirely out of fashion, and was regarded with contempt.

III.  In Antiphon’s scandalous chronicle, we read that Alkibiades once ran away from home to the house of one of his admirers.

Ariphron, his other guardian, proposed to have him cried; but Perikles forbade it, saying that, if he was dead, he would only be found one day sooner because of it, while if he was safe, he would be disgraced for life.  Antiphon also tells us that he killed one of his servants by striking him with a club, at the gymnasium of Sibyrtus.  But perhaps we ought not to believe these stories, which were written by an enemy with the avowed purpose of defaming his character.