Nicias

Wealthy politician and general, from Athens, prominent during the Peloponnesian War. A political moderate, he was opposed to the strident warmongering of Cleon and Alcibiades, and arranged the short-lived peace named after him (421 BC). Appointed commander in Sicily (416 BC), his lack of sympathy with his mission, along with bad luck, ill health, and sheer incompetence, led to the total destruction of the Athenian forces, and his own death at the hands of the Syracusans.

Nicias (470-413 BC), a soldier and statesman in ancient Athens, inherited from his father Niceratus a considerable fortune invested mainly in the silver mines of Laurium.

Evidence of his wealth is found in the fact that he had no fewer than 1000 slaves whom he hired out. Plutarch states that "Nicias declined all difficult and lengthy enterprises;

In 421 he took a prominent part in the arrangement of the "Peace of Nicias," which terminated the first decade of the Peloponnesian War. In 415 he was appointed with Alcibiades and Lamachus to command the Sicilian expedition, and, after the flight of Alcibiades and the death of Lamachus, was practically the sole commander, the much more capable Demosthenes (not the orator), who was sent to his aid, being apparently of comparatively little weight.

How far it is just to attribute to his excessive caution and his blind faith in omens the disastrous failure it is difficult to say. So many chances for Athenian success were lost, but as always, one always views hindsight events in 20/20 vision. His popularity with the aristocratic party in Athens is, however, strikingly shown by the lament of Thucydides over his death: "He assuredly, among all Greeks of my time, least deserved to come to so extreme a pitch of ill-fortune, considering his exact performance of established duties to the divinity" (vii.

Besides Thucydides see Plutarch's Nicias and Diod. xii.

Nicias appears as a character in Plato's dialogue Laches, in which Socrates and others discuss the nature of courage without reaching any firm conclusions.