Plutarch's life of the cautious, wealthy, superstitious Athenian general whose reluctant command of the Sicilian Expedition ended in the annihilation of the Athenian army and his own execution.
Plutarch's Nicias tells the story of an Athenian statesman who rose to prominence after the death of Pericles as a counterweight to the demagogue Cleon, winning the people's trust through cautious, risk-averse generalship and lavish public religious spending rather than oratory or personal charisma. Wealthy from silver mines at Laurium, devoutly and anxiously religious, and constitutionally timid, Nicias used his fortune to fund choruses and sacred processions at Delos while privately consulting diviners daily, even about the profits of his mines. His negotiated end to the Archidamian War, the so-called Peace of Nicias, marked the high point of his career and reputation as a man favored by the gods.
The life's second half follows Nicias's disastrous entanglement in the Sicilian Expedition, which he publicly opposed but could not avoid commanding once the Athenian assembly, swept up by Alcibiades's ambition, voted for war. Despite early tactical successes and a near-complete wall of circumvallation around Syracuse, Nicias's habitual hesitation, worsened by illness and by rivalries with his fellow generals Lamachus and Demosthenes, let the Syracusans recover under the Spartan commander Gylippus. A lunar eclipse, which Nicias's superstition led him to treat as a divine sign demanding a month's delay rather than immediate withdrawal, cost the Athenians their last chance to escape by sea. What followed was catastrophe: a ruinous naval defeat in the harbor, a harrowing retreat by land ending at the river Asinarus, and the deaths of Nicias and Demosthenes at Syracusan hands.
Plutarch pairs Nicias with the Roman general Crassus, both wealthy, cautious men undone by campaigns they knew were folly but could not refuse. The Life is a study in how personal timidity, popular religion, and the pressure of public reputation can combine to destroy both a man and an empire; Thucydides's own account of the Sicilian disaster stands behind Plutarch's narrative throughout, and Plutarch explicitly measures his effort against it, adding anecdotes, dedications, and comic-poet testimonia that Thucydides omitted.
“Being by nature timid and prone to despair, in matters of war he concealed his cowardice by good fortune: for he succeeded evenly as a general”
— Nicias
“For this reason they call that peace, even to this day, the Peace of Nicias.”
— Nicias
“Fortune is a thing not to be judged and not to be grasped by reasoning.”
— Nicias
“Let pity for you, Gylippus, be taken by the victors — not for me, who have won name and glory amid such great successes — but for the rest of the Athenians, remembering that war's outcomes fall on everyone alike”
— Nicias
“and there was the greatest and most savage slaughter, men drinking and being cut down in the river at the same time, until Nicias fell before Gylippus”
— Nicias
Nicias was a wealthy Athenian general and statesman active in the later fifth century BCE, who rose to prominence after Pericles's death as a cautious, religiously scrupulous rival to the demagogue Cleon. He negotiated the Peace of Nicias with Sparta in 421 BCE, and later commanded, reluctantly, the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily.
Plutarch says Nicias spoke against the expedition in the assembly, warning it was being launched at Alcibiades's urging for personal ambition and gain, but the Athenians, already won over by hopes of conquest, made him general anyway alongside Alcibiades and Lamachus. Unable to remove himself from the command, he was carried into a war he had judged reckless from the start.
With the army ready to withdraw by sea before the Syracusans could react, a lunar eclipse occurred the night before departure. Nicias, lacking his usual diviner Stilbides, who had recently died, insisted on waiting a full lunar cycle as the priests advised, a delay that let the Syracusans trap and destroy the fleet and army.
After the failed retreat by land ended in slaughter at the river Asinarus, Nicias surrendered to the Spartan commander Gylippus, asking for mercy toward his surviving soldiers. Sources disagree on the exact manner of his death: Philistus and Thucydides say the Syracusans executed him, while Timaeus reports that Hermocrates secretly let him take his own life before the corpse was displayed publicly.
It was the treaty of 421 BCE that ended the Archidamian War phase of the Peloponnesian War, negotiated largely through Nicias's efforts with the war-weary Spartans and Athenians. Plutarch reports the Athenians so credited Nicias with the peace, as they credited Pericles with the war, that they named it after him and continued to call it 'the Peace of Nicias' long afterward.
Plutarch pairs Nicias with the Roman general Crassus because both were wealthy, cautious men whose extreme risk-aversion could not save them from disastrous foreign campaigns, the Sicilian Expedition and the Parthian campaign respectively, that they privately doubted but publicly led anyway.
Plutarch lists it among the ominous signs that preceded the fleet's departure: the mutilation of nearly all the Herms in Athens in a single night, a man mutilating himself on the altar of the Twelve Gods, and crows damaging a golden dedication at Delphi, all read afterward as portents of the disaster to come.
Plutarch relates that some captured Athenian soldiers were freed or given food and water by Sicilians simply for reciting lines of Euripides's poetry, since Sicilians were said to love his verse above that of any other Greek poet, a detail Plutarch includes to show even a small mercy amid the catastrophe.
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