Nicias

Biography

Nicias was the wealthiest man in Athens and its most respected conventional politician — pious, careful, conservative, and spectacularly unsuited to the great military adventure of the age. He opposed the Sicilian Expedition with complete clarity and was then, by a bitter irony, appointed one of its commanders by citizens who felt his caution would balance Alcibiades' recklessness. Every error of the expedition was compounded by Nicias's hesitation. He refused to attack Syracuse immediately upon arrival. He delayed the retreat when it might still have succeeded. He delayed again — fearing to seem superstitious — when a lunar eclipse convinced the seers not to move for 27 days; it was the delay that sealed the army's fate. When the fleet was finally defeated in Syracuse harbour, he led the survivors in a desperate overland march toward the interior, where they were cut off, starved, and destroyed in detail. Nicias was captured and executed by the Syracusans, who had promised his life in exchange for surrender. Thucydides, who admired him, wrote that 'of all the Greeks in my time, he least deserved this fate, because he had lived his whole life in the practice of virtue.' The tragedy of Nicias is the tragedy of a decent, capable man given a task that required qualities he did not and could not possess.

Key Battles