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The opening sentence is clearly connected with the end of chapter 81.

ἔθαπτον ... χωρὶς ἕκαστοι. Pausanias believed there were only three tombs in all (ix. 2. 5) τοῖς μὲν οὖν λοιποῖς ἐστὶν Ἕλλησι μνῆμα κοινόν: Λακεδαιμονίων δὲ καὶ Ἀθηναίων τοῖς πεσοῦσιν ἰδίᾳ τέ εἰσιν οἱ τάφοι, καὶ ἐλεγεῖά ἐστι Σιμωνίδου γεγραμμένα ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς. Presumably the other tombs had disappeared from neglect.

ἰρένας. Iren is the term for a young Spartan between twenty and thirty years of age. These youths had no part in the meetings of the assembly and no right to a household of their own, but they were free from the discipline of the boys, and were indeed expected to inspire them by precept and example. They were also largely employed on military service. But it is impossible that all the Spartiates who won the highest distinction at Plataea were irens, and in particular that Amompharetus, colonel of his regiment, with a voice in the council of war (ch. 53, 55), should be so young a man. (This has led Blakesley to suspect the clause ἔνθα μὲν . . . Καλλικράτης.) Again, the Lacedaemonians or Perioeci (ch. 11. 3) are left out in H.'s scheme. It seems more likely that the first tomb contained all the Spartiates (the majority of whom may have been irens; cf. ch. 12. 2), the second the Perioeci, and the third the Helots.


Ἀθηναῖοι: so too Pausanias (l. c.). Thucydides (ii. 34) says that those who fell in war, except at Marathon, were buried at Athens, but it is a mistake to regard this as a deliberate contradiction. Marathon was the only purely Athenian battle-field on which the victors were buried, but Plataea was a Pan-Hellenic triumph.


The particular fact that the Aeginetan tomb was erected ten years after the battle by Cleades, their proxenus (viii. 136. 1 n.) at Plataea, is no doubt true enough, but the inference drawn by H. is unfair. It is probable enough that there were many cenotaphs erected later. Only where the dead fell thick and fast in a single spot, as in the case of the states previously named (§ 2), could their bones be gathered for burial. Those who fell in the earlier fighting, or even in the skirmishing of the day just before (ch. 49, 52) the battle, would be scattered over a wide area. In such cases it was customary to set up a cenotaph in memory of the dead; there would be no attempt at deception.

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