“Stranger, go unto Sparta, aye go and announce to our people
Here we their orders obeyed, here we are lying in death.”
In Lacedæmon also the names of the three hundred were inscribed upon a pillar, still existing in the time of Pausanias. On the hill at Thermopylæ, where the Spartans made their last stand, was set up a marble lion to honour the name of Leonidas. In an epigram, said to have been written for the monument by Simonides, the lion is represented as saying to the passers-by:—
“I am the strongest of beasts of the wild, but the strongest of mortals
He it is over whose tomb I as a sentinel stand.
Were he not Leo in courage, as even my name he possesses,
Never had I set foot here on the marble above.”
From the longer “encomium” by Simonides on the dead at Thermopylæ is handed down a fragment worthily translated by Sterling:—
“Of those who at Thermopylæ were slain,
Glorious the doom and beautiful the lot;