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  Alcibiades’ great moment arrived when he persuaded the Athenian assembly of the need for attacking Sicily and annexing it to the island empire that Athens had already established through its powerful navy. Before he was to set sail with his expedition for Sicily, a number of religious statues, called herms, had been defaced, and witnesses came forth to blame it on a drunken Alcibiades and his friends, who were also said to have mocked the religious rites known as the Eleusinian mysteries. Alcibiades denied having anything to do with either charge, and demanded to stand trial before the Sicilian expedition, but was ordered to sail away first and await trial on his return. While he was gone, his enemies at Athens stirred up sufficient talk against him so that he was recalled from Sicily to stand trial. Sensing the game was up, even though he was probably innocent, Alcibiades escaped to Thurii on the Tarentine Gulf and thence to Argos.

  One of the great “What If’s?” of history asks what if Alcibiades had been allowed to pursue aggressively the campaign against Sicily, which, before his hurried departure, appeared to be on the brink of success? Would it have brought about victory and Athenian supremacy for decades to come? Instead his fellow general, Nicias, acting too cautiously, was routed, and at great cost to the Athenians. A debacle ensued in which Athens lost much the better part of its naval and land forces, and would never regain its former power.

  Meanwhile Alcibiades, always the self-starter, contacted the Spartans and offered them his services. These turned out to be considerable. He instructed them to send a force to Sicily to help defeat the Athenians there; he also advised them to continue the war against a now much weakened Athens, and to fortify the lands around Athens, in the hope of starving out the city. Sound advice—and all of it directed against his own people.

  While in Sparta, Alciabides Spartanized himself. Cutting his hair, eating coarse Spartan food, bathing in cold water, he went native. “At Sparta,” Plutarch writes, “he was devoted to athletic exercises, was frugal and reserved; in Ionia, luxurious, gay, and indolent; in Thrace, always drinking; in Thessaly, ever on horseback; and when he lived with Tissaphernes [the powerful Persian satrap] he exceeded the Persians themselves in magnificence and pomp.” He was, in other words, willing to do whatever the situation in which he found himself required. Like the chameleon, he was able, as Plutarch says, to turn himself into every color but white.

  Alcibiades might have gone on to become a great Spartan general, but for a little contretemps. He seems to have made pregnant the wife of the Spartan King Agis. He later claimed to have done this so that his would be the true line of Spartan kings. Since Agis had been away from home for ten months, that the child could not be his allowed of no doubt. When it was reported to Agis that his wife’s child was fathered by Alcibiades, the latter knew he had overstayed his welcome in Sparta. Agis and other leading figures in Sparta, who had become envious of his reputation for military victories, put out orders that Alcibiades be assassinated.

  This sent Alcibiades directly into the arms of the powerful Persian satrap Tissaphernes. He served as an influential adviser to the Persians, instructing them on how to gain dominance over the Athenians and Spartans both, by playing one off the other. Plutarch puts it neatly:

  For this barbarian, not being himself sincere, but a lover of guile and wickedness, admired his [Alcibiades’] address and wonderful subtlety. And, indeed, the charm of daily intercourse with him was more than any character could resist or any disposition escape. Even those who feared and envied him could not but take delight and have a sort of kindness for him, when they saw him and were in his company.

  Athenians, Spartans, Persians, Alcibiades charmed them all, and to the highest power.

  Even in the most enviable of situations, it was not in Alcibiades’ nature to rest content for long. Contentment is not in the armory of emotions or conditions of the charming rogue. To make a complex story simple, Alcibiades yearned to return to Athens, and devised a way to do so by pitting the Persians against the Spartans. Once returned to Athens, where a strong faction, so taken with his genius, wanted him to rule as tyrant, he helped the city-state recoup much of its lost empire. He made, however, too many enemies in Athens, in Sparta, among Persians. E. F. Benson notes: “His own beauty and charm were always his greatest enemies, for up to the end his most hideous transgressions of the codes of loyalty and honor were always forgiven him.” That end now had come.

  E. F. Benson set his epitaph: “Indeed, the dictum of Archestratus was true, that while Greece could not stand more than one Alcibiades, Athens would have lacked the complete incarnation of her splendor and her shame without him, there must needs have been one Alcibiades, and he Athenian.”

  In the end Alcibiades went off alone—in the company of a mistress, of course—to Bithynia, eventually to retire to a small village in Phrygia. The Spartans had put a hit order out on him, assigning it to the Persian satrap Pharnabazus. Those assigned to murder him, it is said, hadn’t the courage to face him, and so set afire the house in which he was living. Alcibiades was naked, clutching his clothes, departing the house, sword in hand, when they brought him down with arrows and darts. A conflicting story has him murdered in the same manner by the brothers of a lady of noble family whom he had seduced. I prefer this latter story, on the basis of no historical fact whatsoever, because death brought on as a result of heedless seduction seems a more appropriate way for a charming rogue to meet his end than at the hands of an enemy.

  The boy Giacomo Casanova did not at birth seem a strong candidate for a prominent place in the gallery of charming rogues. The grandson of a cobbler, the child of two traveling actors, he was a puny child, born with an unlabeled illness that caused him to hemorrhage from the nose from the age of ten years old or so. His father died young, his mother was inattentive; he was raised by a grandmother and educated by priests. Bright enough, he studied for the priesthood himself, and actually for a time became a friar, a strange occupational choice for a man who was to become one of the world’s most famous seducers of women.

  Casanova soon enough grew wary of the ecclesiastical life, though in his young manhood it gave him entrée, as a tutor, into the homes of the Italian nobility. With his learning, his theatrical manner of presenting himself, his sense of his own higher nobility—a nobility above that of mere family connection—he set out to seek pleasure by the novel method of bestowing it. His weapons here were beautiful manners, a display of learning, an ability to blend perfectly into his surroundings, sparkling conversation—in a word, charm. In Naples, Rome, Padua, Venice, the still-adolescent friar everywhere ingratiates, insinuating himself into the best society, where women especially seem to enjoy his boyish company.

  Peripeteia, reversal of fortune, came when Giacomo, after dinner one night at the home of his patron at the time, an elderly Venetian senator named Malipiero, as the old man is napping off, begins fondling Malipiero’s mistress. The older man wakes, discovers the two at play, begins beating on Giacomo with his cane, instructs him never to return to his palace again. Not long after, Casanova gives up his ecclesiastical career.

  He had earlier learned to play the violin, and now falls back on his skill as a violinist to earn his keep. One night, working in an orchestra hired to play at a wedding, he encounters another rich Venetian senator, whom he follows home, where the senator undergoes a stroke. Giacomo stays the night with him, nurses him, and when he returns to health, the senator, a man named Bragadin, all but adopts him. Peripeteia is almost a game with Casanova; he goes from out the frying pan into the beds of interesting women, back into the frying pan. He also begins to sense that the standard rules of life do not apply to him.

  Casanova will drift into and out of jobs—musician, soldier, actor—but his main work will be the seduction of women. His is seduction, however, with a difference. He allows women to join him in the act of seduction, making known only his availability. In his memoirs, as a boy learning Latin he notes the peculiarity that th
e word for vagina (cunnus) is masculine while the word for penis (mentula) is feminine. From this he deduces, a lifelong lesson, that the slave always takes the name of the master.

  A casanova has come to mean a charmer who is master of the art of seducing women. Yet Giacomo Casanova was the reverse of the conventional seducer. He was, for one, the least misogynist of men as seducers not infrequently are. “The professional seducer,” he writes in his memoirs, “. . . is an abominable man, essentially the enemy of the person on whom he has designs. He is a true criminal who, if he has the qualities required to seduce, makes himself unworthy of them by abusing them to make a woman unhappy.” Casanova’s own modus operandi was the direct opposite. He let women seduce him. He arranged this by making plain how deeply infatuated he was with any woman with whom he sought intimacy. He didn’t have to invent his infatuations; they were real. To him intimacy with a woman was truly ecstasy. He writes that, though he realizes he is a voluptuary, until the age of sixty “I continued to be the dupe of women.”

  “Giacomo cannot help being sincerely infatuated by each woman he desires,” writes Lydia Flem in Casanova, The Man Who Really Loved Women. “Malice is never involved. Love intrigues him; for him love is neither philandering nor vanity. It is a kind of madness, an incurable disease.” When the love between Casanova and his various women ends, the break is always clean; no hard feelings but gratitude on both sides.

  The only near contemporary of whom something similar seems to have been true is George Balanchine, the world’s last great choreographer, who married five times and had many love affairs with his dancers. Women who took up with Balanchine seemed to understand that he took up with them, as in some ways did Pablo Picasso with his wives and lovers, as muses, or stimulants to his art. As lovers, these women appeared to be glad to have been of service. Giacomo Casanova, though, had no specific art to offer, apart from that of giving and receiving pleasure, and this seems to have been more than sufficient.

  Over the span of his memoirs, Casanova recounts making love to, among many others, two sisters (simultaneously), a mother and daughter, noblewomen (both French and Italian), a nun, and a false castrato posing as a man with whom he later learns he has had an illegitimate son. He underwent several bouts of venereal disease, which he treated, successfully, with a six-week diet of nitrate water. Only orgies, with their indiscriminateness, put him off. “His life,” Lydia Flem writes, “is a race of desire, a conjuration, an obstinate way of rejecting anything that prevents enjoyment. He has a stubborn taste for happiness, and amusement and lightness are his favorite weapons.”

  Of what did Giacomo Casanova’s charm consist? He was a brilliant conversationalist, no doubt a superior sexual athlete, but neither an Adonis of handsomeness nor someone who held out the promise of marriage, security, or even fidelity in his relations with women. He lived most fully in the present—the only tense he knew. He also seems to have known when to quit, to get out of the game, lest he be judged a sad roué, a debauched old lecher. At the age of sixty-four he retired from the boudoir and began to write his memoirs—he would die at seventy-three—which allowed him to recount, to relive for himself and anyone else interested, the loves of his life, a work impressively free of the note of regret.

  Giacomo Casanova’s was the charm of freedom, holding out the promise to live, however briefly, outside the constraints of custom, proprieties, morality itself. His was the promise of living and loving wholly in accord with one’s true nature, in the honest delight of sensual pleasure. The promise was fullfilled for him and for the countless women on whom he expended his apparently inexhaustible charm.

  A different sort of charming rogue was Lord Byron, operating on a smaller canvas than Alcibiades and consequently of greatly lesser historical significance, even though his name is more widely known. Byron’s charm, like Casanova’s, was mostly in the realm of sexual conquest, though not there alone. Nearly everyone who met him was taken by him, including his many servants, a refutation of Hegel’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet. Part of his attraction had to do with his fame, which began with the publication of his poem Childe Harold (first published in 1812, when he was twenty-four), based on his travels to Turkey and other then exotic climes. His dashing good looks didn’t hurt. His reputation was summed up by one of his many lovers, Caroline Lamb, who called him “bad, mad, and dangerous to know.”

  For those who believe there is no such thing as a bad boy, only bad and sad circumstances, the saddest of all such circumstances being having wretched parents, George Gordon Byron qualifies nicely. His father was, in the old-fashioned phrase, a blackguard, his mother absurd. Captain Byron married her for her money, squandered it, and disappeared. Debt was a permanent condition for the family, as it would be for Byron throughout his extravagantly lived life. Not that he let financial problems much disturb him. Along with being born to hopeless parents, Byron came into the world with a deformed foot, owing to a withered calf muscle in his right leg. Achilles had his heel, but it didn’t render him lame, as did Byron’s foot. Byron took much abuse during his early school years because his deformed foot caused him noticeably to limp. The first girl he was attracted to, Mary Chaworth, when asked by her maid whether she returned his love, replied: “Why do you think I could feel anything for that lame boy?” Byron overheard the remark, and was devastated by it. In later years he would take revenge for it on several women, including a by-then-married Mary Chaworth, whom he subsequently seduced.

  George Gordon Byron only became a lord because of the early death of a cousin ahead of him in line of succession for the title. He was to the manner, if not quite the manor, born, lordly in his spending, his style, above all his grandiose sense of himself. His family was very far from the first line of English aristocrats, but you could not tell it by him. Before his own careening career brought the word into being, he was never less than Byronic, with all that implies of heedless sexual conquest, contemptuous grandeur, and the inability to put anyone’s interest and feelings before his own.

  Rake, roué, the very model of the Regency buck, Lord Byron was, in the tradition of the charming rogue, quite without a conscience. (“I have a conscience,” he said, “although the world gives me no credit for it; I am now repenting, not the few sins I have committed, but of the many I have not committed.”) Freudians might say that this came about because he grew up without a father, the source, they like to think, of the super-ego. Byron would have had a good laugh at the notion of the superego, though he might have bought the Freudian emphasis on the centrality of sex in the human psychic economy. He may have had a premonition of his own early demise, for he lived, like most charming rogues, exclusively in and for the moment. In Venice, hearing a church bell, he told his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley that the ringing bell reminded him of the call of conscience. “We obey it like madmen,” he said, “without knowing why, then the sun sets. The bell stops. It is the night of death.”

  A highly sexual being, Lord Byron—nor, in the realm of sex, a highly discriminating one. He didn’t have to be. Once his fame was established, women came after him. In fashionable society, being bonked by Byron was up there with being painted by Gainsborough. He did whatever his fancy struck him to do—sodomy, incest, Roman rent boys, Piccadilly trollops—with whomever happened to be available, for free or for hire. Frederic Raphael, his most penetrating biographer, refers to Byron as “the most desired man in England, perhaps in the world . . . the catch of the century.”

  What did Byron, this most appealing of all men to women, look like? His contemporary, Edward John Trelawny, encountering Byron in Italy in 1822, wrote:

  In external appearance Byron realized that idealized standard with which imagination adorns genius. He was in the prime of life; thirty-four; of middle height, five feet eight and a half inches; regular features without a stain or furrow on his pallid skin, his shoulders broad, chest open, body and limbs finely proportioned. His small highly finished head and
curly hair had an airy and graceful appearance from the massiveness and length of his throat; you saw his genius in his eyes and lips. In short, Nature could have done little more than she had done for him, both in outward form and in the inward spirit she had given to animate it.

  Trelawny then goes on to mention Byron’s deformed foot: “But all these rare gifts to his jaundiced imagination only served to make his one personal defect [his lameness] the more apparent, as a flaw is magnified in a diamond when polished; and he brooded over that blemish, as sensitive minds will brood until they magnifiy a wart into wen.” This same flaw, Trelawny felt, “helped to make him skeptical, cynical, and savage.”

  No man seemed freer than Byron. He treated his creditors as if they were fortunate to hold his debts. His verbal cruelty was famous; whatever was on his lung was on his tongue. Contemning children, he claimed to approve Herod’s plan to massacre them. He had no remorse about hurting feelings; a clever jibe was worth the pain it caused. Heterodoxy was his orthodoxy. As with all charming rogues, boredom was always a problem for him. He was also visited by melancholy, which turned out to be an attraction for women, so many of whom thought they had the wherewithal that could relieve it for him.

  Women may have been stimulated by his hauteur, his impertinence, his disregard of all conventions while still enjoying his aristocratic social privileges. His good looks with the touch of vulnerability about him lent by his limp didn’t hurt. His contempt for women may have stimulated them even further. His reputation preceded him—in neon and with trumpet accompaniment. He once told Shelley that he believed women had neither souls nor rights. Because of this view, he felt not the least compunction about being utterly disloyal to them.