The common phrase among the Greeks of that time
was that Perikles had begun the war, and Nikias had finished it; and the
peace was usually called the peace of Nikias. Alkibiades, irritated
beyond measure at his rival's success, began to meditate how he could
destroy the existing treaty. He perceived that the Argives, hating and
fearing Sparta, wished to break off from it, and he encouraged them by
secret assurances of an Athenian alliance, and also both by his agents
and in person he urged the leading men not to give way to the
Lacedaemonians, or yield any points to them, but to turn to Athens, and
await their co-operation, for the Athenians, he said, already began to
regret that they had made peace at all, and would soon break it.
[Footnote A: An office resembling that of a modern consul for a foreign
nation.]
When the Lacedaemonians made an alliance with the Boeotians, and
delivered up Panaktus to the Athenians in a dismantled condition, not
with its walls standing, as they ought to have done, Alkibiades
exasperated the rage of the Athenians by his speeches, and raised a
clamour against Nikias by the plausible accusation that he, when
general, had hung back from capturing the enemy's forces which were cut
off in the island of Sphakteria, and that when they had been captured by
another, he had released them and restored them to their homes, in order
to gain the favour of the Lacedaemonians.
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