On Justice Power and Human Nature

Beyond the pages of Thucydides’s History, Pericles is known as an Athenian political leader who promoted radical democracy and welcomed to the city “the new learning,” including training in rhetoric (19). Believed to have been born in 495 BC to an aristocratic family, he was a leading general during the Peloponnesian war, which began in 431, and died of the plague that broke out in the city in 429, the second year of the war. Within the History, Pericles gives three speeches, one before the war breaks out and two after. His most famous one is the Funeral Oration to honor the war’s first casualties.

Some scholars have noted similarities between Pericles’s observations in his speeches and Thucydides’s at the beginning of his History, notably that Pericles fears the Athenians’s mistakes more than Sparta’s power and that the people’s resolve flags when circumstances become more difficult. Consequently, some have argued that Pericles functions as the mouthpiece for Thucydides’s own beliefs. However, Woodruff cautions against making such one-to-one comparisons and recommends comparing across the work.

Thucydides writes in the style, intellectual and rhetorical, of his time. Across the work, Thucydides sets up noble figures for failure—not only Pericles but also Nicias and Melos, who did nothing to harm Athens yet was destroyed by them. Just leaders with good intentions routinely fail in the History, while unjust leaders succeed. Thucydides’s praise of Pericles’s character can be read as genuine since fortune can lead to disaster even when intentions are sound.

Born into an aristocratic family, Nicias was an Athenian political leader and general appointed to lead the Sicilian Expedition despite his attempt to discourage Athens from leading it. Known as moderate in relation to democracy, Nicias seems to have been wary of Athens’s imperialist inclinations and in favor of peace. He was responsible for the peace treaty with Sparta that was named for him and that followed the battle at Amphipolis, though it proved short lived. Despite his good character, Nicias met a tragic end.

In Woodruff’s curated collection, Nicias figures prominently in Chapter 7, when his speech recommended against Athens undertaking a mission to conquer Sicily. He notes the mission’s many disadvantages, notably leaving their forces in Greece underserved while facing revolts among their allies and Sparta’s eagerness to overthrow Athens. He accuses “someone here who is delighted at being put in command” though “he is rather young for such a command” (147)—meaning Alcibiades—of making hasty, ill-advised decisions and urges caution. He makes a point, illustrated throughout the collection and History, that “good leadership is shown by one who does his best to benefit his city” (147).

Nicias’s recommendation is rejected, and he travels to Sicily with his misgivings, which ultimately are proven sound. As circumstances become more dire, he wavers between wanting to leave and not wanting the entire expedition to have been a waste. His commitment to the soldiers serving under him never wavers, but he’s indecisive and timid, which results in tactical failure and capture. The Spartans held him in high regard for his behavior toward them during the peace negotiations years earlier, but their allies didn’t want him to be released lest he use his wealth to bribe his way to freedom. Nicias was executed in Sicily in 413. Thucydides remarks that “of all the Greeks in my time he was the one who least deserved such misfortune, since he had regulated his whole life in the cultivation of virtue” (181).