ATHENIAN EMPIRE. 285 lary incapacity, partly through the want of hearty concurrence in his political opponents, they concluded what is called the Peace of Nikias in the ensuing spring. In this, too, their calcu- lations are not less signally falsified than in the previous truce . they stipulate that Amphipolis shall be restored, but it is as far from being restored as ever. To make the error still graver and more irreparable, Nikias, with the concurrence of Alkibiades contracts the alliance with Sparta a few months after the peace, and gives up the captives, the possession of whom being the only hold which Athens as yet had upon the Spartans. "We thus have, during the four years succeeding the battle of Delium (424-420 B.C.), a series of departures from the conserva- tive policy of Perikles ; departures, not in the way of ambitious over-acquisition, but of languor and unwillingness to make efforts even for the recovery of capital losses. Those who see no defects in the foreign policy of the democracy except those of over-ambition and love of war, pursuant to the jest of Aristopha- aes, overlook altogether these opposite but serious blunders of Nikias and the peace party. Next comes the ascendency of Alkibiades, leading to the two years' campaign in Peloponnesus in conjunction with Elis, Argos, and Mantineia, and ending in the complete reestablish- ment of Lacedaemonian supremacy. Here was a diversion of Athenian force from its legitimate purpose of preserving or rees- tablishing the empire, for inland projects which Perikles could never have approved. The island of Melos undoubtedly fell within his general conceptions of tenable empire for Athens But we may regard it as certain that he would have recommend- ed no new projects, exposing Athens to the reproach of injustice, so long as the lost legitimate possessions in Thrace remained unconquered. We now come to the expedition against Syracuse. Down to that period, the empire of Athens, except the possessions in Thrace, remained undiminished, and her general power nearly as great as it had ever been since 445 B.C. That expedition was the one great and fatal departure from the Periklean policy, bringing upon Athens an amount of disaster from which she never recovered ; and it was doubtless an error of over-ambi- tion. Acquisitions in Sicily, even if made, lay out of the condi-
