NICIAS IN THUCYDIDES AND ARISTOPHANES PART I: NICIAS AND DIVINE JUSTICE IN THUCYDIDES Timothy W. Burns 1 Abstract: Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic play- wright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias — over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of ancestral, divine law. While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers’ works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Nei- ther thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a funda- mental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. No two writers appear to be more different in their fundamental concerns and teachings than the madcap comic poet Aristophanes and the austere historian Thucydides. When Aristophanes appears in his Peace, it is as a thinly dis- guised rustic who rides a giant dung beetle to heaven in order to confront Zeus and who returns to Athens with the goddess Peace. When Thucydides appears in his narrative, it is as a man who suffers from but survives the plague, and then as a general who unsuccessfully attempts to secure Amphipolis from Brasidas — a failure for which he is banished from Athens for twenty years. Aristophanes’ Birds concludes with the marriage of Peisthetairos to a being of ‘beauty beyond words’, while Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian expedition, an expedition begun by Alcibiades, concludes by recording ‘sufferings beyond tears’ (7.75.4). 2 The only references to a plague in Aristophanes are in harm- less curses by adherents to law; Thucydides describes the horrible deaths and lawlessness that came with an actual plague. Pheidippides’ loss of belief in the gods, in the Clouds, leads to a just father-beating, while as a consequence of loss of observance of divine law, in Thucydides’ account of the Corcyrean civil strife, ‘father slew son’. While Aristophanes’ characters, with the pos- sible exception of the old and cold husband of Praxagora, are interested in sex — not to say polymorphous perversity — Thucydides refrains from tell- ing us even of Alcibiades’ seduction of a Spartan queen. Aristophanes has his Trygaios show off the bodily assets of the naked heavenly prostitute Theoria to the Athenian Council, while Thucydides’ idea of a joke is to describe Cleon POLIS. Vol. 29. No. 2, 2012 1 Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. Email: tburns@skidmore.edu 2 References in the text of this paper are to Thucydides’ text and will be in the stan- dard form of Book, chapter, and paragraph. Translations are my own.