Nicias

For this, Aristophanes again scoffs at him in his Birds, in words like these:—

1. And lo! by Zeus! we can no longer doze about,—
2. We have no time,—nor shilly-shally-niciasize;

1. I want to go a-farming.

1. Pray who hinders you?

1. You people do. Come! Let me give a thousand drachms
2. If you’ll release me from my offices.

1. ’Tis done!
2. Yours make two thousand, counting those that Nicias gave.

And besides, he wrought no little harm to the city in allowing Cleon to have such an access of reputation and influence that he launched out into offensive pride and ungovernable boldness and inflicted many mischiefs on the city, the bitter fruits of which he himself reaped most abundantly. Worst of all, Cleon stripped the bema of its decorum, setting the fashion of yelling when he harangued the people, of throwing back his robe, slapping his thigh, and running about while speaking. He thus imbued the managers of the city’s policies with that levity and contempt for propriety which soon after confounded the whole state.

Just about that time Alcibiades was beginning to be a power at Athens. For a popular leader he was not so unmixed an evil as Cleon. The soil of Egypt, it is said, by reason of its very excellence, produces alike

1. Drugs of which many are good, intermixed, but
2. many are deadly.

And so it came to pass that even after Nicias was rid of Cleon, he did not get opportunity to lull the city into perfect rest and calm, but, when he had actually set the state fairly in the path of safety, was hurled from it by an impetuous onset of Alcibiades’ ambition, and plunged again into war.

This was the way it came about. The men most hostile to the peace of Hellas were Cleon and Brasidas. Of these, war covered up the baseness of the one and adorned the excellence of the other; that is to say, it gave the one opportunities for great iniquities, the other for great achievements.

After these men had both fallen in one and the same battle before Amphipolis,[*](In the autumn of 422 B.C. Cf. Thuc. 5.8-11.) Nicias found at once that the Spartans had long been eager for peace, and that the Athenians were no longer in good heart for the war; that both were, so to speak, unstrung, and glad to let their arms drop to their sides. He therefore strove to unite the two cities in friendship, and to free the rest of the Hellenes from ills, as well as to give himself a season of rest, and so to make secure for all coming time the name which he had for success.

The men who were well-to-do, and the elderly men, and most of the farmers, he found inclined to peace from the first; and after he had talked privately with many of the rest, taught them his views, and blunted the edge of their desire for war, then he at once held out hopes to the Spartans and urgently invited them to seek for peace. They had confidence in him, not only because of his usual fairness towards them, but especially because he had shown kind attentions to those of their men who had been captured at Pylos and kept in prison at Athens, had treated them humanely, and so eased their misfortune.