Nicias

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. III. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.

He, confidently hoping to excel Thucydides in skill, and to make Philistus seem altogether tedious and clumsy, pushes his history along through the conflicts and sea-fights and harangues which those writers had already handled with the greatest success, showing himself, in rivalry with them, not even so much as

  1. By Lydian car a footman slowly plodding,
to use Pindar’s comparison,[*](One of the Fragmenta Incerta (Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graeci, i(4). p. 450).) nay rather a perfect example of senile learning and youthful conceit, and, in the words of Diphilus,
  1. Obese, stuffed to the full with Sicilian grease.
[*](Kock, Com. Att. Frag. ii. p. 576.)