Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/311

 NIKIAS AND KLEON. 289 this business were men of great ability and high pecuniary value.' Most of the wealth of Nikias was held in this form, and not in landed property. Judging by what remains to us of the comic authors, this must have been considered as a perfectly gentleman- like way of making money : for while they abound with derision of the leather-dresser Kleon, the lamp-maker Hyperbolus, and the vegetable-selling mother to whom Euripides owes his birth, we hear nothing from them in disparagement of the slave-letter Nikias. The degree to which the latter was thus occupied with the care of his private fortune, together with the general moder- ation of his temper, made him often wish to abstract himself from public duty : but such unambitious reluctance, rare among the public men of the day, rather made the Athenians more anxious to put him forward and retain his services. In the eyes of the Pentakosiomedimni and the Hippeis, the two richest classes in Athens, he was one of themselves, and on the whole, the best man, as being so little open to reproach or calumny, whom they could oppose to the leather-dressers and lamp-makers who often out-talked them in the public assembly. The hoplites, who de- spised Kleon, and did not much regard even the brave, hardy, and soldierlike Lamachus, because he happened to be poor, 9 respected in Nikias the union of wealth and family with honesty, courage, and carefulness in command. The maritime and trad- ing multitude esteemed him as a decorous, honest, religious gen- tleman, who gave splendid choregies, treated the poorest men with consideration, and never turned the public service into a job for his own profit, who, moreover, if he possessed no com- manding qualities, so as to give to his advice imperative and irresistible authority, was yet always worthy of being consulted, and a steady safeguard against public mischief. Before the fatal Sicilian expedition, he had never commanded on any very serious or difficult enterprise, but what he had done had been accom- plished successfully ; so that he enjoyed the reputation of a for- 1 Xctiophon, Memorab. ii, 5, 2 ; Xenophon, De Vectigalibus, iv, 14. To?,eftiKbf ical uvdputiijf, ugiufia 6' ov irooaqv ovd' 6y/cof airy 6iu ireviav jompare Plutarch, Nikias, c. 15. vor,. vi. 13 I9oc.
 * Thucyd. v, 7; Plutarch, Alkibiadfis, c. 21. 'O yup A//a^of rjv pet