All That I Have Done, I Have Done for Athens

“All that I have done, I have done for Athens”. With this declaration, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer gives voice to Athens’ controversial wonderboy of the 5th century BC in his latest work, Alcibiades.

Pfeijffer is no stranger to reinvention. In 2008, the Dutch novelist, poet, and classicist cycled from the Netherlands to Italy. He never left: Genova became his home. When he takes the stage at Festivaletteratura in Mantova, he does so in fluent Italian. Antonio De Sortis puts forward that the Mediterranean has long been central to Pfeijffer’s work and life. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Pfeijffer draws on both his fascination and his background as a classicist in his first historical novel.

Alcibiades makes for a dazzling subject. The Athenian statesman and general was at once admired and despised: a master strategist, a political opportunist, a man who claimed to live only for his city but whose loyalties shifted more than once. The wealth of historical material about Alcibiades allowed Pfeijffer to reconstruct the events with precision and factual accuracy. Yet where Alcibiades’ inner life was concerned, Pfeijffer used his imagination. Writing became, as Pfeijffer describes it, an “exercise of empathy”. Sometimes, he even jokes, Alcibiades seemed to dictate the words directly through him: “which means that it’s the truth.”

That truth, however, is never simple. The novel probes the tension between Alcibiades’ avowed devotion to Athens and the suspicion that his motives were self-serving. Pfeijffer avoids easy answers. Instead, he asks readers to confront the ambiguities of a man who thrived in, and perhaps also fell victim to, the populist climate of his time.

In this sense, the novel also speaks to contemporary issues. Pfeijffer sees in Alcibiades’ Athens echoes of our own moment: the decline and fragility of democracy, the rise of populism, the uncertain fate of political ideals. He recalls looking at a map of the war in Ukraine in 2022, with its marked strategic positions, and mistaking it for something out of Alcibiades’ world. We can hear the echoes of history in our present.

Alcibiades is more than a historical reconstruction. It is an invitation to look at all aspects of present-day politics, reminding us that history’s crises of democracy and power are never distant, never truly "past".