His later political career makes Boris Johnson seem like a man of firm and unbending principle. The account of his childhood in Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades suggests a bad case of antisocial personality disorder: biting during wrestling, mutilating dogs, punching his future father-in-law in the face for a dare. Born in around 450 BC into one of the oldest and richest families of ancient Athens, Alcibiades was the only Old Etonian (as it were) to play a leading role in the late-fifth-century radical democracy. On the face of it, the man was utterly insufferable. This causes problems for a biographer of Alcibiades. We just have to trust his contemporaries that it felt like ‘the opening of the gate of heaven’. But as to what it was like to have Lord Byron turn the full force of his attention onto you – well, we have no conceivable way of knowing. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever we read scraps of Samuel Johnson’s conversation in Boswell’s biography and know at once that he was magnificent, lovable and desperately unhappy. O f all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand.
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