Plutarch - Plutarchs Lives - Vol. III

First published in 1892

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Contents

LIFE OF NIKIAS.

As it appears to me that the life of Nikias forms a good parallel to that of Crassus, and that the misfortunes of the former in Sicily may be well compared with those of the latter in Parthia, I must beg of my readers to believe that in writing upon a subject which has been described by Thucydides with inimitable grace, clearness, and pathos, I have no ambition to imitate Timus, who, when writing his history, hoped to surpass Thucydides himself in eloquence, and to show that Philistius was but an ignorant bungler, and so plunges into an account of the speeches and battles of his heroes, proving himself no t merely one

"Who toils on foot afarBehind the Lydian car,"

as Pindar has it, but altogether unfit for the office of historian, and, in the words of Diphilus,

"Dull-witted, with Sicilian fat for brains."

He often seeks to shelter himself behind the opinions of Xenarchus, as when he tells us that the Athenians thought it a bad omen that the general whose name was Victory refused to command the expedition to Sicily; and when he says that by the mutilation of the Hennas the gods signified that the Athenians would suffer their chief disasters at the hands of Hermokrates the son of Hermon; or, again, when he observes that Herakles might be expected to take the side of the Syracusans because of Proserpine, the daughter of Demeter, who gave him the dog Kerberus, and to be angry with the Athenians because they protected the people of Egesta, who were descended from the Trojans, whereas he had been wronged by Laomedon, king of Troy, and had destroyed that city. Timus was probably led to write this sort of nonsense by the same critical literary spirit which led him to correct the style of Philistius, and to find fault with that of Aristotle and Plato. My own opinion is that to pay too much attention to mere style and to endeavour to surpass that of other writers, is both trifling and pedantic, while any attempt to reproduce that of the unapproachable masterpieces of antiquity springs from a want of power to appreciate their real value. With regard, then, to the actions of Nikias described by Thucydides and Philistius, more especially those which illustrate his true character, having been performed under the stress of terrible disasters, I shall briefly recapitulate them, lest I be thought a careless biographer, adding to them whatever scattered notices I have been able to collect from the writings of other historians and from public documents and inscriptions; and of these latter I shall quote only those which enable us to judge what manner of man he was.