Yes, Athens is to pour out her blood and treasure,
to provide young spendthrifts with the means of filling their racing-
stables! Against the mad counsels of these desperate men I invoke the
mature prudence of the elder members of this assembly, and call upon
them to show by a unanimous vote that neither flattery nor taunts can
induce them to sacrifice the true interests of Athens."
It must have been a severe ordeal for the young Alcibiades to sit and
listen to this keen and bitter invective, which set in a glaring light
the worst features in his character--his selfish ambition, his
shameless life, his total want of principle, his vulgar ostentation.
The last quality, so alien from the best traditions of Athenian
character, had been conspicuously displayed only a few weeks before at
the Olympic festival, where he had entered seven four-horsed cars for
the chariot-race, and won the first, second, and fourth prizes. Every
word of Nicias went home, galling him in his sorest point--his
outrageous vanity; and hardly had the elder statesman concluded his
speech, when he sprang to his feet, and burst without preface into a
wild harangue, which is a remarkable piece of self-revelation,
disclosing with perfect candour the inner motives of the man on whom,
more than on any other, the future of Athens depended.
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