Alcibiades was brought up in the house of Pericles, to whom he was said to be step-son, and was instructed under the tuition of Socrates. He married the daughter of Hipponicus, the greatest orator then in Greece; so that, had he given free scope to his imagination, he could not have wished for, nor obtained greater favours than those fortune and nature had bestowed on him. According to the customs of the Greeks, he was beloved in his tender age by numbers, and especially by Socrates, as Plato observes in his banquet (symposio), where this philosopher represents Alcibiades as having spent the whole night with Socrates, and as having left him like a child who quits his father’s side. At a ripe age he conceived a fondness himself for several others, on whom he played many odious tricks, though with as much delicacy and humour as the possibility of the thing allowed of, and which I should not omit mentioning, were I not engrossed by the recital of others of a more important and dignified nature.

In the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians were led by the counsels and authority of Alcibiades to commence hostilities against the Syracusians. He was appointed general, and to conduct the war he was joined by two of his colleagues Nicias and Lamachus. While the preparations for this expedition were going on, before the fleet had sailed, all the effigies of Mercury throughout Athens happened to be pulled down except that which stood before the gate of Andocides, from whence it was styled the Mercury of Andocides. As this event was obviously the prelude of some grand plot, since it closely concerned the republic at large, and not the aims of any particular rank of persons, it excited the astonishment, and awoke the fears of the citizens, lest by some violent and sudden accident they should be deprived of their liberty. As Alcibiades, by his power and exaltation, was now above private persons, all suspicions turned naturally on him. His liberalities had gained him a number of friends, but his eloquence in pleading for them at the bar, many more; so that, whenever he appeared in public, he drew all eyes on himself; nor could he be found a match in the whole city. His presence thus became at once an object of deep fears and sanguine hopes; it being in his power to be productive of great good or evil. His character was, moreover, stigmatized on the report spread of having celebrated the misteries of Ceres in his own house, which was a crime among the Athenians, who regarded such meetings as acts of conspiracy rather than of religion.