The only reference to the Athenian general Lamachus in the Platonic corpus is at Laches 197c6 where Nicias compares Laches to him. In response to Laches' criticism that Nicias is embellishing himself with his words (κοσμεῖ τῷ λόγῳ, La. 197c3), and trying to deny that those agreed to be courageous are indeed courageous, Nicias says:

What is the meaning behind this comparison? It is merely an off-hand comment, or has it some deeper significance? Commentators on the Laches generally note two things about Lamachus. First, that he was a general who, along with Nicias and Alcibiades, was in charge of the Sicilian expedition of 415 b.c. Second, that he died a notably brave death the following year at Syracuse.Footnote ² On the basis of these notes, a reader of the Laches would assume that, by comparing Laches to the brave general Lamachus, Nicias is acknowledging Laches' own bravery.

However, Laches certainly does not interpret Nicias' words in this way. He replies:

Laches is saying that he has a retort worthy of the Aexonians who were renowned for their abusive wit. Whether he actually has such a retort to make or is bluffing lies outside of the dialogue. It is sufficient to see that Laches does not consider the comparison to Lamachus to be complimentary. Indeed, his reaction suggests that he sees it as highly insulting. Unless Laches has misunderstood Nicias here, which is hardly likely, his response is puzzling. To understand why Laches considers himself to have been insulted, it is necessary to know more about Lamachus than what is offered by the commentators. I suggest that Laches' retort can only be understood by considering the accounts of Lamachus offered by Plutarch, Thucydides and Aristophanes.

Relatively little is known about Lamachus prior to the Sicilian Expedition of 415 b.c. Plutarch writes that in around 436–5 b.c. Lamachus served in the successful campaign of Pericles the First against Timesilaus, the tyrant of Sinope (Per. 2.1). We have no information for Lamachus during the next eleven or twelve years, until 424 b.c. when Thucydides tells us that Lamachus lost ten ships in a flash flood while anchored at the river Calex (Thuc. 4.75). We know that in 421 b.c. Lamachus – along with Nicias and Laches – signed the Peace of Nicias and the Fifty-Year Alliance (Thuc. 5.19, 24). After this there is another lacuna in our information until 415 b.c. when Lamachus, again along with Nicias, and this time also with Alcibiades, was elected to command the Sicilian expedition (Thuc. 6.8), in which he was to die the following year (Thuc. 6.101; Plut. Nic. 18.1–3.). Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus were famously divided in their leadership, both concerning the advisability of the expedition in the first place, and regarding the specific strategies to undertake.Footnote ³ According to the accounts that have come down to us, Lamachus' most significant contribution to the expedition was his promotion of a strategy of immediate hostile action. Having arrived at Rhegium, the three generals held a council to decide what strategy to adopt. In opposition to Nicias' cautious and preserving plan, Thucydides tells us that:

To avoid an impasse, however, Lamachus eventually sided with Alcibiades, who argued that before they attack Syracuse and Selinus, they should seek allies and induce revolts in those cities subject to Syracuse, so that they might both ascertain who was friend and who was foe, and weaken Syracuse before battle (Thuc. 6.48).

Lamachus died in the summer of the following year, 414 b.c., when three hundred Athenians were attacked by what was almost the entire Syracusan cavalry. Our main sources for the death of Lamachus – Thucydides and Plutarch – offer somewhat different accounts of it. Both contend that Lamachus rushed to the aid of his soldiers when he discovered that they had been attacked, and that he subsequently became cut off from his army (Thuc. 6.101; Plut. Nic. 18.1–2.) However, their accounts differ regarding how Lamachus actually died. Thucydides claims that Lamachus was killed while fighting alongside five or six of his companions, while Plutarch claims that he was killed in Homeric-style single combat. Plutarch writes that in the battle:

While Lamachus was undoubtedly an experienced general undaunted in the face of war, Plutarch's account of the general's death brings to the fore the tensions that exist in the sources between attributing bravery or reckless bellicosity to him. Plutarch describes Lamachus as ἀνδρώδης, that is, manly, brave or sturdy (Nic. 15.1; Alc. 21.9), and δίκαιος, just or honourable (Nic. 15.1). Plutarch also describes Lamachus as πολεμικός, a good soldier (Alc. 21.9), who ‘put forth his might without stint in battle’ (τῇ χειρὶ χρώμενος ἀφειδῶς κατὰ τὰς μάχας, Nic. 15.1).Footnote ⁶ However, in Alcibiades Plutarch contends that, despite Lamachus' advanced years, in battle he was no less διάπυρος (‘fiery’, Alc. 18.2) and no less φιλοκίνδυνοςFootnote ⁷ (‘danger-loving’, Alc. 18.2) than Alcibiades. While Alcibiades is said to have τόλμαν (‘daring’), Lamachus is ascribed τραχύτητα, that is, roughness, ruggedness, harshness or even savagery (Nic. 12.5).Footnote ⁸

Lamachus' strategy could be interpreted as fearlessness in the face of war, just as his death could be interpreted as the ultimate heroic act: death for one's country. However, both could also be interpreted as reckless, foolish, lacking in cautionFootnote ⁹ and bellicose. Had Lamachus been more cautious in rushing to the aid of his soldiers at Syracuse, and had he been less bellicose and refused Callicrates' challenge, Nicias would not have been left in sole commandFootnote ¹⁰ of the Athenian forces, and the course of the expedition might have been greatly altered.

How, then, are we to resolve the tension in the historians' accounts of Lamachus in our attempt to understand the Laches reference to him? Laches' angry response discounts the possibility that Nicias is comparing Laches to a brave Lamachus; so then is Nicias comparing Laches to a bellicose Lamachus? Or even, perhaps, to a Lamachus who is at times brave and at other times bellicose? To answer this question, we must turn our attention from history to comedy, and consider the significance of the dramatic date of the Laches. While there is little consensus regarding the exact year in which Plato sets the Laches, it is generally agreed that it must lie between 424 b.c., when the battle at Delium took place, and 418 b.c., when Laches fell at the battle of Mantinea.Footnote ¹¹

Within the dramatic context of the dialogue, then, Lamachus was not to distinguish himself and die in battle for approximately another ten years. The question then becomes: how was Lamachus perceived around the dramatic date of the Laches? I suggest that this perception would have been largely informed by Aristophanes' Acharnians, victoriously performed at the Lenaea festival of 425 b.c., which definitely took place before the dramatic date of the Laches, and perhaps even just the year before. In this play, Aristophanes brutally lampoons Lamachus, representing him as the incarnation of bellicosity. This bellicosity is introduced when Lamachus is first mentioned in the play. Dicaeopolis declares that he has made peace for himself, ‘released from bothers and battles and Lamachuses’ (πραγμάτων τε καὶ μαχῶν καὶ Λαμάχων ἀπαλλαγείς, Αr. Ach. 269–70).Footnote ¹² Lamachus affirms Dicaeopolis' identification of him with ‘bothers and battles’ later in the play when he says: ‘I for one will ever make war on all the Peloponnesians, and everywhere harass them, with ships and foot soldiers, with all my might’ (ἀλλ᾽ οὖν ἐγὼ μὲν πᾶσι Πελοποννησίοις | ἀεὶ πολεμήσω καὶ ταράξω πανταχῇ, | καὶ ναυσὶ καὶ πεζοῖσι, κατὰ τὸ καρτερόν, 620–2).Footnote ¹³ Aristophanes even coins a word for Lamachus' bellicosity, πολεμολαμαχαϊκόν (1080), which A.H. Sommerstein nicely translates as ‘belli-Lamachose’.Footnote ¹⁴

Is Nicias, then, attributing Lamachus' bellicosity to Laches? Not exactly. Nicias compares Laches to Lamachus immediately after criticizing the bravery tradition of courage. This was the dominant tradition of courage in ancient Greece, with the great Achilles as its exemplar. Courage according to the bravery tradition was associated with great physical strength and military prowess, and was thought to derive from the extreme passions of the thumos that Homeric man shared with wild beasts. Bravery was associated with boldness and daring, and was manifested primarily in epic deeds on the battlefield. In this way, bravery could appear to be on the way to bellicosity, especially to someone like Nicias who does not subscribe to the bravery tradition (as can be seen from the following quotation). In the Laches, Nicias rejects the view that bravery constitutes the whole of courage. He argues that courage is more than bravery, that it requires a cognitive element as well. He says:

Laches objects to Nicias' introduction of a cognitive element into his definition of courage. He accuses Nicias of embellishing himself with his words, and trying to deprive those whom everyone agrees to be courageous of that virtue (La. 197c2–5). It is in response to this accusation that Nicias compares Laches to Lamachus.

That is to say, to the claim that no cognitive element is required in a definition of courage, Nicias responds ironically, offering an example of someone who was perceived at the time to most severely lack such a cognitive element: Lamachus. Now that we have seen how Aristophanes represented Lamachus in the Acharnians, and the context in which Nicias refers to him in the Laches, we can understand why Laches sees his pairing with Lamachus as such an insult. The pairing was preceded by Nicias' objection to a conception of courage that the Aristophanic Lamachus embodied. Aristophanes' Lamachus is a gross caricature of the hero: he wears the grand armour of the hero – replete with a helmet extravagantly adorned with crests and feathers and a shield bearing a terrifying Gorgon headFootnote ¹⁵ – and he responds to insults with the hero's outrage.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the word ‘hero’ appears twice in the play, and both times it is used by Dicaeopolis mockingly of Lamachus (ὦ Λάμαχ᾽ ἥρως, 575, 579).

Aristophanes' coup de grâce comes at the end of the play when Lamachus, having been called away urgently to war, is forced to return immediately after wounding himself. In his recklessness, Lamachus dislocates his ankle by tripping over a stake when crossing an irrigation canal and fractures his head by falling upon a stone. But despite these injuries, Lamachus the hero rises from his ditch: ‘he stood up and faced his fleeing men, as he pressed and routed the brigands with his spear’ (ἀνίσταταί τε καὶ ξυναντᾷ δραπέταις λῃστὰς ἐλαύνων καὶ κατασπέρχων δορί, 1187–8). And, just like the hero who fears injury to his reputation over physical injury, it is not his wounds, but the prospect of being mocked (ἐγχάνοι, 1197) that most distresses Lamachus (1190–7). By referring to a character whose courage severely lacks a cognitive element, from a play that shows what can happen to such characters when their bravery is left unchecked, Nicias is restating his rejection of the bravery tradition.Footnote ¹⁷

Plato's reference to Lamachus fulfils both the tragic and the comic dramatic themes of the Laches. Footnote ¹⁸ The introduction of Aristophanes' foolish, ridiculous, unself-aware and war-mongering general Lamachus into a squabbleFootnote ¹⁹ between two distinguished generals, which itself is at times ridiculous and is characterized by lack of self-awareness (e.g. La. 200a4–c2), is a stroke of comic genius. The comedy of the Laches, however, is tempered by a sobering note of tragedy. All three generals – Nicias, Laches and Lamachus – were to die within five years of each other, in just over approximately ten years from the dramatic date of the dialogue. And all three were to die in battles in which Athens incurred devastating losses. First, Laches died in the Battle at Mantinea in 418 b.c., in which over a thousand Argives and two hundred Athenians fell (Thuc. 5.74). Lamachus was killed four years later outside Syracuse when three hundred Athenians were attacked by the Syracusan cavalry (Thuc. 6.101). And Nicias' death followed swiftly after that of Lamachus, when he was executed by the Syracusans after surrendering to them in 413 b.c. (Thuc. 7.86). After considering the accounts of Lamachus offered by Plutarch, Thucydides and Aristophanes, it is clear that a reader of the Laches would be sorely misled if she were to interpret Nicias' comparison of Laches to Lamachus as complimentary, as existing scholarship on the reference would lead her to believe.