Crassus vs Nicias

Crassus · Nicias

Why Plutarch paired them

Plutarch pairs Crassus of Rome with Nicias of Athens because both were among the richest men of their cities, both were drawn into great foreign expeditions, and both led their armies to annihilation — the one through over-reach, the other through over-caution. The platform reads the pairing as a study of how wealth and faulty judgement combine to wreck armies and the men who command them.

Where they converge

Both were enormously rich, both used their wealth in public life, and both met their ends in catastrophic campaigns far from home. Crassus led a Roman army into Parthia and was destroyed at Carrhae in 53 BCE; Nicias led the Athenian armament to Sicily and lost it utterly at Syracuse in 413 BCE. Each disaster removed the flower of its city's strength and altered the course of its history. The platform reads both under leadership and character: each man's fatal campaign exposed a flaw of judgement that his wealth and standing had long concealed.

Where they diverge

The flaws were opposite. Crassus' ruin came of over-reach — the ambition, late in life, to win the military glory he lacked, which drove him beyond his competence into a war he did not understand. Nicias' ruin came of over-caution — the timidity and superstition that made him delay the retreat from Sicily, on his seers' advice, after an eclipse, until escape became impossible. The platform reads the contrast under ambition and downfall: Crassus reached for what was not his and was destroyed by appetite; Nicias clung to caution past its season and was destroyed by fear. Each lacked the judgement to know what the moment required.

The lesson and the outcomes

The platform reads the pairing's lesson as one of the Lives' most practical: that wealth and standing are no substitute for judgement in command, and that the same fault — the want of measure — can take opposite forms, the reckless and the timid, each fatal in its own way. Carrhae and Syracuse stand together as Plutarch's twin monuments to the disasters that follow when rich and eminent men lead wars they are not fit to judge.

Plutarch

Greek biographer and essayist of the Roman imperial period — author of the Parallel Lives and the Moralia, and the main classical conduit for the European study of character through history.

book

Plutarch's Lives

Plutarch's Parallel Lives — paired Greek and Roman biographies, organised for comparison and for the study of character through what people did. The principal source through which later Europe learned to read the late Roman Republic.

theme

Ambition and Downfall

The Plutarchan pattern in which the love of honour drives a leader to greatness and then, uncontrolled, to ruin — the tragic arc that structures the Lives of Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Pompey, Caesar and the Republic itself.

theme

Leadership and Character

Plutarch's reading of leadership as an expression of character rather than technique — the qualities that make a leader followed, the discipline of self-command, and the example a leader sets as his most powerful instrument.

civilization

Athens

The Greek city-state in which the practice of political argument as public business — citizens facing one another in the assembly, the law-court and the theatre — reached its working extent. The case the European tradition has continued to read for two and a half millennia.

civilization

Roman Republic

The five centuries in which Rome governed itself through a constitution of no single author — magistracies, senate and assemblies in tension — and built the institutional vocabulary of self-government that Europe would read long after the Republic that produced it was gone.

philosopher

Crassus

The richest man of the late Roman Republic, whose wealth bought political power but not the military glory he craved — Plutarch's study of avarice and ambition, dead with his army at Carrhae against Parthia.

philosopher

Nicias

The cautious, wealthy and pious Athenian general whose prudence won a peace and whose hesitation lost an army — Plutarch's study of caution turned to weakness in the Sicilian disaster, paired with Crassus.