Plutarch, Alcibiades, chapter 1, section 4

Home Collections/Texts Perseus Catalog Research Grants Open Source About Help

Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:

This text is part of:

Greek and Roman Materials

Search the Perseus Catalog for:

View text chunked by:

chapter : section

Table of Contents:

view as XML

[4] Even the lisp that he had became his speech, they say, and made his talk persuasive and full of charm. Aristophanes notices this lisp of his in the verses wherein he ridicules Theorus:— ‘

Sosias
Then Alcibiades said to me with a lisp, said he,
‘Cwemahk Theocwus? What a cwaven's head he has!’

Xanthias
That lisp of Alcibiades hit the mark for once!
’ ¹ And Archippus, ridiculing the son of Alcibiades, says:

He walks with utter wantonness, trailing his long robe behind him, that he may be thought the very picture of his father, yes, He slants his neck awry, and overworks the lisp.

²

1 Wasps, 44 ff. The ‘lisp’ of Alcibiades turned his r's into l's, and the play is on the Greek words κόραξ, ‘raven’, and κόλαξ, ‘flatterer’ or ‘craven’.

2 Kock, Com. Att. Frag., i. p. 688

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1916. 4.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

view as XML

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.