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The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition

(The Peloponnesian War #3)

Donald Kagan

4.19 · Rating details · 108 ratings · 2 reviews

Why did the Peace of Nicias fail to reconcile Athens and Sparta? In the third volume of his landmark four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan examines the years between the signing of the peace treaty and the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 413 B.C. The principal figure in the narrative is the Athenian politician and general Nicias, wh ...more

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Paperback, 400 pages

Published May 14th 1991 by Cornell University Press (first published 1981)

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Aug 14, 2011 James Murphy rated it it was amazing

This is the 3d volume of Kagan's monumental tetralogy about the Peloponnesian War. A peace between Athens and Sparta was brokered in 421 BC by the Athenian politician and general Nicias. The peace ended the Archidamian phase of the war, a 10-year struggle which exhausted the 2 main powers and their allies. War-weariness and the need for the Athenians to restore their financial resources inspired the movement toward peace, as did the Spartan desire for the return of their men taken prisoner in 42 This is the 3d volume of Kagan's monumental tetralogy about the Peloponnesian War. A peace between Athens and Sparta was brokered in 421 BC by the Athenian politician and general Nicias. The peace ended the Archidamian phase of the war, a 10-year struggle which exhausted the 2 main powers and their allies. War-weariness and the need for the Athenians to restore their financial resources inspired the movement toward peace, as did the Spartan desire for the return of their men taken prisoner in 425. The story of that peace is the concern of the 1st half of this volume, though the reader might wonder if the violent competition carried on by Sparta as it tried to restore order and secure its hegemony over the Peloponnesus and by Athens as it tried to destabilize the region and interfere with Sparta's allies could be called peace.

The 2d half of the book relates the history of Athens' disastrous invasion of Sicily, the tragedy of their failire, and how, in 413, the general war resumed when Agis, attempting to take advantage of the Sicilian quagmire Athens found itself in, led a Spartan invasion of Attica to take control of the countryside around Athens.

I think one can look at the Peloponnesian War, particularly this phase of it, in those terms of hegemony, destabilization, and quagmire, a word instantly bringing to mind America's involvement in Vietnam. Kagan doesn't emphasize their parallels. After all, he's most interested in interpreting and expanding such primary source materials as Thucydides, Plutarch, poets such as Euripides, and other historians, modern as well as ancient. But his telling becomes epic. One could easily say war is always tragic, often best illustrated in catastrophic defeat and failure become turning points from which armies and nations can't recover. One thinks of Stalingrad or Gettysburg. But Kagan wonderfully explains and details how the destruction of the great Athenian hoplite army and fleet around Syracuse was a much earlier example of the same kind of military and national tragedy.

I'd call this history rather than military history. Not only is the book an account of Spartan-Athenian-Syracusan events between 421-413 BC, those aspects of ancient Greek life relevant to those events are related as well, including Greek drama which reported on those events, and also the religious aspects of Greek life affecting them. Kagan emphasises the importance of superstition and omens to the Greeks. His long explanation of the sacrileges and desecrations of the likenesses of Hermes just prior to the Sicilian expedition, their political and social impact and the discussion of the social forces behind them makes for rascinating reading.

You don't need a particular interest in classical Greece to enjoy Kagan's books on the war between Athens and Sparta. This is simply great history. He writes so well, too. One reason Kagan's books are such wonderfully reader friendly history is because he writes complex, loopy but elegant sentences that lap against the mind just as surely as the Aegean laps at the shores of all the islands populated by those people. They are sentences that bring to life a time long ago when short, sturdy men with beards sailed the Mediterranean and marched with purpose over Greece's hills and spoke forcefully in assemblies. Through histories such as this, they're still speaking to us today. ...more

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About Donald Kagan

Donald Kagan

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Professor Kagan, who received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1958, has written The Great Dialogue: A History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to Polybius (1965 and 1986); The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1969); The Archidamian War (1974); The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1981); The Fall of the Athenian Empire (1987); Pericles and the Birth of the Athenian Empire ( ...more