Nicias

I think that Nicias is a suitable parallel to Crassus, and the Sicilian to the Parthian disaster. I must therefore at once, and in all modesty, entreat my readers not to imagine for an instant that in my narration of what Thucydides has inimitably set forth, surpassing even himself in pathos, vividness, and variety, I am so disposed as was Timaeus.

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 By Lydian car a footman slowly plodding, to use Pindar’s comparison, nay rather a perfect example of senile learning and youthful conceit, and, in the words of Diphilus,

Obese, stuffed to the full with Sicilian grease.

Indeed, he often lapses unawares into the manner of Xenarchus, as, for instance, when he says he thinks it was a bad omen for the Athenians that Nicias, whose name was derived from victory, declined at first to head their expedition; also that, by the mutilation of the “Hermae,” Heaven indicated to them in advance that by the hands of Hermocrates the son of Hermon they were to suffer most of their reverses during the war; and, further, that it was fitting that Heracles should aid the Syracusans, for the sake of their goddess Cora who delivered Cerberus into his hands, but should be angry with the Athenians because they were trying to succour the Egestaeans although they were descendants of the Trojans, whose city he had once destroyed because of the wrong done him by Laomedon their king.