Plutarch closes his paired biography of the Athenian general Nicias and the Roman triumvir Crassus with a short formal synkrisis weighing their wealth, statesmanship, military judgment, and deaths against each other.
This is the comparative essay (synkrisis) that Plutarch appends to the paired Lives of Nicias and Crassus, part of the standard structure of his Parallel Lives in which a Greek and a Roman figure are set side by side and then explicitly judged against one another. Rather than narrating new events, it works through a series of paired categories: the origin and use of each man's wealth, their conduct in politics, their command decisions, their conduct in war (the Sicilian expedition against Syracuse for Nicias, the Parthian campaign for Crassus), and finally the manner of their deaths.
Plutarch moves point by point. He judges Nicias's fortune more blameless in origin than Crassus's mining and confiscation-derived wealth, but faults Nicias for a timidity that let the demagogue Cleon seize the Sicilian command, while crediting Crassus with a loftier, more contested political ambition even as he condemns his violence and his reckless, unprovoked invasion of Parthia. He weighs excuses on both sides -- Nicias's illness and the jealousy of his countrymen, Crassus's overconfidence and disregard of omens -- and ends by comparing their deaths, judging Crassus's less shameful because he was betrayed under a truce rather than surrendering out of fear as Nicias did.
Historically, this synkrisis matters because it shows Plutarch's biographical method at its most explicit: he is not merely chronicling lives but building moral argument through comparison, using Greek and Roman history as parallel case studies in character. The essay draws on real political history -- the Athenian assembly's votes, the Roman senate's debates over Pompey and Caesar, the slave war against Spartacus -- while subordinating all of it to ethical judgment, making this passage a compact statement of how ancient readers were meant to extract moral instruction from historical narrative.
“One could not otherwise approve of income from mines, most of which is carried out through criminals or barbarians, some of them kept in chains and wasting away in unhealthy, pestilential places; but compared with Sulla's confiscated properties and the tax-farming contracts around the fires, it will appear more decent.”
— Comparison Of Crassus With Nicias
“About this Lycurgus the orator later spoke frankly to the people, when he was accused of having bought off one of the sycophants: "I am glad," he said, "if, having been in public life among you for so long a time, I have been caught giving before being caught taking."”
— Comparison Of Crassus With Nicias
“For in the greatest affairs one must grasp not what is free of envy but what is brilliant in politics, dimming envy by the greatness of one's power.”
— Comparison Of Crassus With Nicias
“And this benefited the Romans nothing, being forced by his lust for command and ambition. For the Athenians sent Nicias out to war unwilling; but Crassus led the Romans out unwilling: and through the one the city, through the other he himself, met with misfortune.”
— Comparison Of Crassus With Nicias
“Crassus, through a multitude of errors, left fortune no chance to display anything good for him, so that one must marvel at his folly, which was overcome not by the power of the Parthians but by the good fortune of the Romans.”
— Comparison Of Crassus With Nicias
A synkrisis is the formal comparative essay Plutarch attaches to most paired biographies, in which he directly weighs the two subjects against each other on specific points such as wealth, political conduct, and manner of death. This Comparison of Crassus with Nicias is one surviving example, moving systematically through categories rather than narrating new events.
Plutarch distributes blame rather than favoring one man outright: he faults Nicias's timidity for letting Cleon seize command at Syracuse, but condemns Crassus's violence and his unprovoked invasion of Parthia even more strongly. On the manner of their deaths, he judges Crassus less shameful, since he was betrayed under a truce rather than surrendering from fear as Nicias did.
He calls Nicias's fortune more blameless in origin, since it was not built on the confiscated properties and tax-farming contracts that funded Crassus. He also contrasts how they spent their money, praising Nicias's spending on public dedications and choruses against Crassus's lavish feasting of tens of thousands of people.
Plutarch treats Nicias's decision to hand the Sicilian command to the demagogue Cleon, whom he calls 'nothing more in the city than shamelessness and shouting from the rostrum,' as Nicias's central political failure, arguing he sacrificed the common good to protect his own safety.
Both were the fatal foreign wars of each man's career -- Nicias's invasion of Sicily and Crassus's invasion of Parthia -- and Plutarch uses them to test how far ambition excuses military misjudgment, ultimately finding Crassus's error the more culpable because he treated the Parthian war 'as though it were the easiest task.'
He argues Crassus deserves less blame because he did not surrender himself but was betrayed by the enemy's violation of a truce, whereas Nicias fell into enemy hands through what Plutarch calls 'a shameful and inglorious hope of safety,' making his death more disgraceful.
Yes: he notes that Nicias 'despised nothing that came from divination' while Crassus 'looked down on everything alike,' and observes that both men still perished, using the point to argue that caution grounded in customary belief is more reasonable than lawless self-will, even if outcomes are hard to judge either way.
It is the closing comparison appended to the paired Life of Nicias and Life of Crassus within Plutarch's Parallel Lives, meant to be read after both biographies; it assumes familiarity with the events narrated in those two Lives.
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