350 HISTJRTT OF GREECE. mg on the other, the remark of Thucydides would be natural ana intelligible. But the general of a great expedition, upon whose conduct the lives of thousands of brave men as well as the most momentous interests of his country, depend, cannot be tried by any such standard. His private merit becomes a secondary point in the case, as compared with the discharge of his responsible public duties, by which he must stand or fall. Tried by this more appropriate standard, what are we to say of Nikias ? We are compelled to say, that if his personal suffer- ing could possibly be regarded in the light of an atonement, or set in an equation against the mischief brought by himself both on his army and his country, it would not be greater than his deserts. I shall not here repeat the separate points in his con- duct which justify this view, and which have been set forth as they have occurred, in the preceding pages. Admitting fully both the good intentions of Nikias, and his personal bravery, ris- ing even into heroism during the last few days in Sicily, it is not the less incontestable, that, first, the failure of the enterprise, next, the destruction of the armament, is to be traced distinctly to his lamentable misjudgment. Sometimes petty trifling, some- times apathy and inaction, sometimes presumptuous neglect, some- times obstinate blindness even to urgent and obvious necessities, one or other of these his sad mental defects, will be found opera- tive at every step, whereby this fated armament sinks down from exuberant efficiency into the last depth of aggregate ruin and in- dividual misery. His improvidence and incapacity stand pro- claimed, not merely in the narrative of the historian, but even in his own letter to the Athenians, and in his own speeches both be- fore the expedition and during its closing misfortunes, when con- trasted with the reality of his proceedings. The man whose flagrant incompetency brought such wholesale ruin upon two fine armaments intrusted to his command, upon the Athenian mari- time empire, and ultimately upon Athens herself, must appear on the tablets of history under the severest condemnation, even though his personal virtues had been loftier than those of Nikias. And yet our great historian, after devoting two immortal books to this expedition, after setting forth emphatically both the glory of its dawn and the wretchedness of its close, with a dramatic
genius parallel to the CEdipus Tyrannus of Sophokles. when he
