Nicias

Nicias was an Athenian politician and general during the Peloponnesian War. He negotiated the Peace of Nicias but later became one of the commanders of the Sicilian Expedition, where hesitation, disease and military defeat ended in his capture and execution.

Nicias was wealthy, cautious and deeply religious, and his preference for negotiated settlement helped produce the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE. He nevertheless became one of the commanders of the Sicilian Expedition, which he had opposed. After the Athenian army and fleet were trapped at Syracuse in 413 BCE, Nicias surrendered and was executed, making his career inseparable from Athens’ greatest wartime disaster.

Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Athens gives Nicias a biographical treatment as the cautious Athenian statesman and general whose career culminated in the Sicilian catastrophe. Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Flowers of Adonis places him opposite the brilliance and volatility of Alcibiades, making Nicias one of the commanders left to manage the expedition after scandal removes his rival. Steven Pressfield’s Tides of War returns to the same campaign through recollections of Alcibiades’ generation, where Nicias’s caution, illness and eventual command of the doomed Athenian force become part of the tragedy of Syracuse.