The comic writers of the day—Eupolis, Aristophanês, Pherekratês, and others—seem to have been abundant in their jests and libels against the excesses of Alkibiadês, real or supposed. There was a tale, untrue, but current in comic tradition, that Alkibiadês, who was not a man to suffer himself to be insulted with impunity, had drowned Eupolis in the sea, in revenge, for his comedy of the Baptæ. See Meineke, Fragm. Com. Græ. Eupolidis Βάπται and Κόλακες (vol. ii, pp. 447-494), and Aristophanês Τριφαλῆς, p. 1166: also Meineke’s first volume, Historia Critica Comic. Græc. pp. 124-136; and the Dissertat. xix, in Buttmann’s _Mythologus_, on the Baptæ and the Cotyttia. [62] Thucyd. vi, 15. Compare Plutarch, Reip. Ger. Præc. c. 4, p. 800. The sketch which Plato draws in the first three chapters of the ninth Book of the Republic, of the citizen who erects himself into a despot and enslaves his fellow-citizens, exactly suits the character of Alkibiadês. See also the same treatise, vi, 6-8, pp. 491-494, and the preface of Schleiermacher to his translation of the Platonic dialogue called Alkibiadês the first. [63] Aristophan. Ranæ, 1445-1453; Plutarch, Alkibiadês, c. 16; Plutarch, Nikias, c. 9. Mentioning Alkibiadês now for the first time, I have somewhat anticipated on future chapters, in order to present a general idea of his character, hereafter to be illustrated. But at the moment which we have now reached (March, 420 B.C.) the lion’s whelp was yet young, and had neither acquired his entire strength nor disclosed his full-grown claws. He began to put himself forward as a party leader, seemingly not long before the Peace of Nikias. The political traditions hereditary in his family, as in that of his relation Periklês, were democratical: his grandfather Alkibiadês had been vehement in his opposition to the Peisistratids, and had even afterwards publicly renounced an established connection of hospitality with the Lacedæmonian government, from strong antipathy to them on political grounds. But Alkibiadês himself, in commencing political life, departed from this family tradition, and presented himself as a partisan of oligarchical and philo-Laconian sentiment, doubtless far more consonant to his natural temper than the democratical. He thus started in the same general party with Nikias and Thessalus son of Kimôn, who afterwards became his bitter opponents; and it was in part probably to put himself on a par with them, that he took the marked step of trying to revive the ancient family tie of hospitality with Sparta, which his grandfather had broken off.[64] [64] Thucyd. v, 43, vi, 90; Isokratês, De Bigis, Or. xvi, p. 352, sect. 27-30. Plutarch (Alkibiad. c. 14) carelessly represents Alkibiadês as being actually proxenus of Sparta at Athens.