Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/1202

Rh 1188 NICIAS. Macedonia. He seems to have been in command at Pella. When the fortunes of Perseus appeared desperate, in a moment of bewildeinient he gave directions to Nicias to throw his trea&ures into the sea, and to Andronicus to burn his Heet. The former executed the commands of the king, though a large part of the treasure was afterwards recovered. But Perseus, to get rid of the witnesses of such an act of folly, had both Nicias and Andronicus put to death, B. c. 169. (Liv. xliv. 10.) 10. A native of Cos, who made himself tyrant for a short time. He was a contemporary of Strabo. ( Strab. xiv. p. 658.) | C. P. M.] NI'CI AS (NiKfas), literary. 1. Of Eleia. To him some attributed the BaKXi^Kci, a poem generally ascribed to Orpheus. (Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. i. pp. 164, 172.) 2. A rhetorician of Syracuse, who, with Tisias, instructed Lycias, b. c. 443. (Suid. s.v. Avaias.) Westermann {Gesch. der Grkch. Bered. p. 38) suggests that the separate mention of a Syracusan ]S'icias may have arisen from the confusion of names. For though many writers mention him along with Tisias, they seem to have all drawn from one common source. 3. A slave of Epicurus, manumitted along with Mvs and Lycon, b. c. 278. (Diog. Laert. p. 272, ed-'Lond. 1664.) 4. Of Nicaea, repeatedly referred to by Athe- naeus, who names three works of his. These are, 1. Aia8ox«t', which seem to have been memoirs of the various schools of philosophy (vi. p. 273, d., xiii. p. 592, a.). 2. 'Ap/caSi/ca, which may have been an account of Arcadian usages, perhaps a por- tion of a larger work on Greek local usages (xiii. p. 609, e., where Athenaeus simply speaks of him as NjKtos). 3. A history Tlepi tuv (piKoaocpcou (iv. p. 162, e.). But by comparing this passage, Avherein he quotes Sotion, as the writer of the AtaSoxai, with another (xi. p. 505, b. c), where he mentions their names together, we think tliat we may justly conclude, that, through inadvertence, or an error in the text, the names of Nicias and Sotion have become interchanged, and that the history is to be transferred to Sotion. We have no means of ascertaining his age, except that he must have lived after Plato. (Athen. //. cc. ; Fabric. BM. Graec. vol. iii, p. 770.) 5. A Coan grammarian, who lived at Rome in the time of Cicero, with whom he was intimate. Suetonius {de Illustr. Gramm. 14) calls him, if the ordinary reading be correct, Curtius Nicia. He .ilso mentions (/.c.) that he originally belonged to the party of Pompey, but that, ha ing endeavoured to involve Pompey's wife in an intrigue with Alemmius, he was betrayed by her, and disgraced by his former patron. From the scattered notices of him found in Cicero, we may conclude that he was of an amiable disposition, but soft and effemi- nate. We nowhere read of his having any great reputation. In one passage (^ad Attic, vii. 3) Cicero does not seem to trust much to his authority as to the question, whether Piraeea was the name of a locus or of an oppidum. If we may trust a corrupt passage in Suetonius (/. c), he wrote a treatise on the writings of Lucilius. (Sueton. /. c; Cic. ad Fam. ix. 10, ad Alt. I.e. xii. 26, 53, xiii. 28 ; Clinton, F. H. vol. iii. p. 207.) Cicero's letters that mention him extend from B. c. 50 to 45. NICIAS. 1. Against the SmtTT/r?)? of Philnponus. 2. Against Severus, the Eutychian. 3, Against the Pagans. He is not to be confounded with Nicaeas. (Cave, Hid. Lit. Sc. Ec. vol. i. p. 695 ; Fabric. BihI. Grace, vol. x. p. 494.) His writings are not extant. [W. M. G.] NI'CIAS (Nihtas), the name of at lea«t two physicians. 1. The physician of Pyrrhus, king of Epeirus, who, durmg his master's war with the Romans, went to C. P'abricius Luscinus, the consul, b. c. 278, and offered for a certain reward to take off the king by poison. (Claud. Quadrigar. ap. Aul. Gell. Noet. Att. iii. 8 ; Zonaras, Anna!, vol. ii. p. 48, ed Basel, 1557.*) Fabricius not only rejected his base offer with indignation, but immediately sent him back to Pyrrhus with notice of his treachery, who, upon receiving the information, is said to have cried out, " This is that Fabricius whom it is harder to turn aside from justice and honour than to divert the sun from its course." (Eutrop. ii. 14.) Zonaras adds (Le. p. 50), that the traitor was put to death, and his skin used to cover the seat of a chair. 2. A native of Nicopolis, in the second century after Christ, introduced by Plutarch in his Si/m- posiaca (vii. 1. § 1), as one of the speakers in the discussion, whether what is drunk enters the lungs, Nicias rightly maintained that it did not. The writer on stones, Ilepl Aiduv, quoted bv Plutarch {Fara/l. § 13, De Fluv. c. 20. § 4) and Stobaeus {Floril. tit. 100. § 12. p. 541), is a different person, and does not appear to have been a physician, though so classed by Fabricius {Bibl. Gr. vol. xiii. p. 346, ed. vet.) [ W. A. G.] NFCIAS, a celebrated Athenian painter, was the son of Nicomedes, and the disciple of Antidotus(Plin. XXXV. U.S. 40. § 28). On this groiuid Sillig argiuis that since Antidotus was the pupil of Euphranor, who flourished about the 104th Olympiad, Nicias must have flourished about 01. 117 or about B. c. 310. And this agrees with the story of Plutarch about the unwillingness of Nicias to sell one of his pictures to Ptolemy, king of Egypt, if we suppose Ptolemy I. to be meant {Non poss. suav. viv. sec. Fpicureos, 11). On the other hand, Pliny tells us that Nicias assisted Praxiteles in statuis drcumli- nendis., that is, covering marble statues with a sort of encaustic varnish, by which a beautifully smooth and tinted surface was gtven to them (see Diet, of Antiq. Painting, § viii.). Now Praxiteles flou- rished in the 104th Olympiad, b. c. 364—360. We must therefore either suppose that Nicias thus painted the statues of Praxiteles a considerable time after they were made, which is not very pro- bable in itself, and is opposed to Pliny's statement ; or else that Pliny has confounded two different artists, indeed he himself suggests that there may have been two artists of the name. (See Sillig, Catal. Artif. s. v.) But, plausible as this argument is, it is not conclusive, for the division of a master and pupil by seven or eight Olympiads is an arbitrary assumption. A pupil may be, and Cineas ( Var. JJist. xii. 33) ; and Ammianus Mar- cellinus (xxx. 1), Valerius Antias (ap. Aul. GelL /. c), and Valerius Maxinms (vi. 5. § 1), tell the story of one of the friends of Pyrrhus, whom the first-named author calls Democharcs, and the two others Timochares,
 * Aelian calls the physician by the name of