The Peace of Nicias was a peace treaty signed between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta in March 421 BC that ended the first half of the Peloponnesian War. First, however, it is pertinent to ask whether the historian can have had any cogent reason for partisanship, and also to seek the source from which the commonly accepted view may have originated.The treaty is named for Athenian Statesmen and General Nicias.
Such charges appear to me to have little foundation, and I shall attempt to substantiate my opinion by examining Thucydides’ account of Nicias. This view has been reaffirmed with much greater emphasis by other scholars who have strenuously challenged the impartiality of Thucydides in this respect. On one point, however, West echoes a commonly accepted view, though he expresses it in very moderate terms: he believes that Thucydides treats Nicias too sympathetically and is inclined to be blind to his faults. West showed that he could be considered neither an oligarch nor a philo-Laconian pacifist. In an article which has had a deep influence upon subsequent accounts Allen B. A passage in Aristotle used to be accepted as evidence that he was an oligarch, and he was believed by many to have been a pacifist and a friend of Sparta. A figure about whom there have been fluctuations of opinion, as well as some misconceptions, is Nicias. Hence modern attempts to reconstruct their policies and assess their merits are liable to reach widely differing conclusions. This obscurity is naturally greatest in the case of ‘moderates’, whose activities consisted largely of opposition to extremist elements of the Left or Right.
The informal character of political parties at Athens and the consequent absence of clearly defined party programmes often obscures the principles and aims of Athenian politicians.
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