war against the Athenians themselves; while his third and most terrible blow to Athens was his causing the Lacedaemonians to seize and fortify Dekeleia, which did more to ruin Athens than any other measure throughout the war.  With his great public reputation, Alkibiades was no less popular in private life, and he deluded the people by pretending to adopt the Laconian habits.  When they saw him closely shaved, bathing in cold water, eating dry bread and black broth, they wondered, and began to doubt whether this man ever had kept a professed cook, used perfumes, or endured to wear a Milesian mantle.  For Alkibiades, among his other extraordinary qualities, had this especial art of captivating men by assimilating his own manners and habits to theirs, being able to change, more quickly than the chameleon, from one mode of life to another.  The chameleon, indeed, cannot turn itself white; but Alkibiades never found anything, good or bad, which he could not imitate to the life.  Thus at Sparta he was fond of exercise, frugal and severe; in Ionia, luxurious, frivolous, and lazy; in Thrace, he drank deep; in Thessaly he proved himself a good horseman; while, when he was consorting with the satrap Tissaphernes, he outdid even the Persian splendour and pomp.  It was not his real character that he so often and so easily changed, but as he knew that if he appeared in his true colours, he would be universally disliked, he concealed his real self under an apparent adoption of the ways and fashions of whatever place he was in.  In Lacedaemon you would say, looking at his appearance,

     “‘Tis not Achilles’ son, ’tis he himself.”

He was just such a man as Lykurgus himself would have trained; but if you examined his habits and actions more closely, you would say: 

     “’Tis the same woman still.”

For while King Agis was away in the wars, Alkibiades seduced his wife Timaea, so that she became pregnant by him, and did not even deny the fact.  When her child was born it was called Leotychides in public, but in her own house she whispered to her friends and attendants that his name was Alkibiades, so greatly was she enamoured of him.  He himself used to say in jest that he had not acted thus out of wanton passion, but in order that his race might one day rule in Lacedaemon.  King Agis heard of all this from many informants, but was most convinced of its truth by a computation of the time before the birth of the child.  Terrified at an earthquake, he had once quitted his wife’s chamber, and for ten months afterwards had never conversed with her.  As it was at the end of this period that Leotychides was born, he declared that the child was not his; and for this reason he never succeeded to the throne.