how
firmness and true courage, he was pleasing to no party, but frequently
made use of by the people when they wished to have a scurrilous attack
made upon those in power. At this time he was about to resort to the
proceeding called ostracism, by which from time to time the Athenians
force into exile those citizens who are remarkable for influence and
power, rather because they envy them than because they fear them.

But as it was clear that one of the three, Nikias, Phaeax, and
Alkibiades, would be ostracised, Alkibiades combined their several
parties, arranged matters with Nikias, and turned the ostracism against
Hyperbolus himself. Some say that it was not Nikias but Phaeax with whom
Alkibiades joined interest, and that with the assistance of his
political party he managed to expel Hyperbolus, who never expected any
such treatment; for before that time this punishment had never been
extended to low persons of no reputation, as Plato, the comic dramatist,
says in the lines where he mentions Hyperbolus:

"Full worthy to be punished though he be,
Yet ostracism's not for such as he."

We have elsewhere given a fuller account of this affair.

XIV. Alkibiades was dissatisfied at the respect shown for Nikias, both
by enemies of the State and by the citizens of Athens. Alkibiades was
the proxenus[A] of the Lacedaemonians at Athens, and paid especial court
to those Spartans who had been captured at Pylos; yet, when the
Lacedaemonians discovered that it was chiefly by Nikias's means that
they obtained peace, and recovered their prisoners, they were lavish of
their attentions to him. 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 Lacedaemoni