previous next
[2]

The Greeks, taking a tenth part of the spoils, made a gold tripod1 and set it up in Delphi as a thank-offering to the God, inscribing on it the following couplet:“ This is the gift the saviours of far-flung Hellas upraised here,
Having delivered their states from loathsome slavery's bonds.
”2Inscriptions were also set up for the Lacedaemonians who died at Thermopylae; for the whole body of them as follows:“ Here on a time there strove with two hundred myriads of foemen
Soldiers in number but four thousand from Pelops' fair Isle;
”and for the Spartans alone as follows:“ To Lacedaemon's folk, O stranger, carry the message,
How we lie here in this place, faithful and true to their laws.
”3

1 The gold tripod proper was carried off by the Phocians in the Sacred War. But the bronze pillar, eighteen feet high, which supported it and was composed of three intertwined serpents, was removed by the emperor Constantine and is still to be seen in the Atmeidan (formerly Hippodrome) in Instanbul. It carries the names of thirty-one Greek states which took part in the Persian Wars, and the opening words of the inscription as well as the statement of Thuc. 1.132 show that it was a memorial for the entire war, and not for the battle of Plataea alone, as the context of Diodorus would suggest and as the geographer Pausanias (Paus. 5.23.1; Paus. 10.13.9） specifically states.

2 This inscription is found in Diodorus, and is dubiously attributed to Simonides (frag. 102 Diehl; 168 Edmonds).

3 Hdt. 7.228 states that these two inscriptions were set up at Thermopylae, as indeed they were. They are commonly ascribed to Simonides (frags. 91, 92 Diehl; 118, 119 Edmonds, both of whom prefer the text of Herodotus).

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Thermopylae (2)
Plataea (1)
Lacedaemon (Greece) (1)
Greece (Greece) (1)
Delphi (Greece) (1)
Constantine (Algeria) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: