The office of the strategi was a great and important one. It combined the functions of a Minister of War and of Foreign Affairs as well as those of a Minister of the Interior, besides including the active executive work of general and admiral, and the management of all the forces. Alkibiades discharged the arduous duties of his office with zeal and efficiency. But, his work over, there was a buoyancy about him which rebounded from restraint; then he threw off all cares, and, underneath a high ambition, he showed an eagerness for sport and love of amusement. After a day of toil, when it was his wisdom and advice which had determined the policy of Athens, he could not keep his boyish spirits down, or hide a sly contemptuousness of his fellow-men and their formalities. Thus this man of indomitable courage and energy, of infinite resources and ambition, the man to whom statesmen at home looked for guidance, because of his greater foresight of that which was to be, and foreign states for help because of his influence and power,—this man, the first in Athens, the man whom all men knew and most loved and admired,—might be seen, his serious day’s work done, running through the streets like any schoolboy on a holiday, crowned with violets and ivy, followed by a joyous band and the mad music of the oboe and the double flageolet. He was, indeed, and in spite of all, the best-loved man in Athens. There was good reason for it. Besides what he had done in public for the people against their natural enemies, ever on the look-out for opportunities to get the better of them, there were numberless poor folk whose pains and sufferings, wants and miseries, his generosity and kindness had solaced and relieved. Such pre-eminence above other men cannot exist in this world without engendering envious serpents. Given a man of more than ordinary parts, of luck or fortune, and we are sure to find detractors, and delators, too, as we are equally sure to find some evil mixed with good in almost everything. And by so much as the hero is the greater than other men, you are the more sure, if you look deep enough, to find some faults. If he has more of human nature in him than the common run of ordinary men, the greater will the certainty become that faults will be discovered, and anxiously laid hold of, too, by those who know not how to imitate his virtues. It was at the end of this year 416, on his return from Argos, that the snakes first raised their heads and hissed. His greater opponents could not help admiring him: they were too generous to attack him secretly. It was one of the democracy who struck the first blow at Alkibiades. A poor potter named Hyperbolos, a maker of earthen lamps, the butt of Aristophanes, who, on the death of Kleon, had thought he ought to be chosen leader of the people, was put forward as the tool of others.