Classical Athens (Peloponnesian War)

Nicias

The caution that lost an army

Lifespan · c. 470 – 413 BCE

Why Plutarch reads him

Plutarch reads Nicias as the study of caution carried to a fault — a wealthy, honest, religiously scrupulous Athenian whose prudence served his city well in moderation and destroyed it in excess. The platform reads him, with Plutarch, as the mirror-image of Alcibiades: where Alcibiades' ruin came of too much daring, Nicias' came of too little, and the Sicilian Expedition that both men shaped became the grave of Athenian power partly through the recklessness of the one and the hesitation of the other.

Character: prudence and its shadow

Plutarch's portrait is sympathetic and severe at once. Nicias was a good man — careful, conscientious, generous with his wealth, anxious to do right and to be seen to do right — and his caution gave Athens the breathing space of the peace that bears his name. But the same temperament shaded into timidity, indecision, and an excessive deference to omens and priests. The platform reads this under character and power: Nicias' virtues and his fatal flaw were the same disposition seen in two lights, and command exposed the flaw that private life had concealed.

The political significance

Nicias opposed the Sicilian Expedition, was appointed against his will to help lead it, and then — when retreat might still have saved the army — delayed the withdrawal because an eclipse of the moon frightened him into waiting, on his seers' advice, for a further cycle of days. The platform reads this as one of antiquity's most consequential failures of judgement: the hesitation born of his scrupulous piety doomed the expedition, and with it the flower of Athenian manpower and Athens' chance in the war. He died in the catastrophe, executed after the surrender. Prudence, untimely, had become the agent of disaster.

The lesson Plutarch draws

Plutarch pairs Nicias with Crassus — two wealthy men whose foreign expeditions ended in annihilation, the one through over-caution, the other through over-reach. The platform reads the lesson under leadership and character: that the virtues of a leader are situational, that caution and daring are each fatal out of season, and that judgement — the capacity to know which the moment requires — is the governing virtue that Nicias, for all his goodness, lacked at the decisive hour.

Related reading

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Plutarch's reading of leadership as an expression of character rather than technique — the qualities that make a leader followed, the discipline of self-command, and the example a leader sets as his most powerful instrument.
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Plutarch's central concern with how private character bears on public office — whether a good man makes a good statesman, what the public arena does to virtue, and how the leader's inner life governs his use of power.
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Plutarch's governing conviction that the exercise of power reveals and is shaped by character — that what a leader does with authority is finally a question of who he is, tested in the small act as much as the great one.
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Greek biographer and essayist of the Roman imperial period — author of the Parallel Lives and the Moralia, and the main classical conduit for the European study of character through history.
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Alcibiades
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Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and Sparta — the founding work of critical history and political realism, written by a participant as "a possession for all time" and never since superseded as an analysis of power and war.
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Athens
The Greek city-state in which the practice of political argument as public business — citizens facing one another in the assembly, the law-court and the theatre — reached its working extent. The case the European tradition has continued to read for two and a half millennia.
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How states lose wars they could have won — overreach, the abandonment of a sound strategy, the triumph of wishful thinking over hard calculation — read through the Athenian catastrophe in Sicily and the collapse of Periclean grand strategy.
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Plutarch's pairing of two wealthy men whose foreign expeditions ended in annihilation — the Roman destroyed by over-reach at Carrhae and the Athenian by over-caution at Syracuse — a study of how riches and bad judgement wreck armies.
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