The Battle of Marathon took place on 12 September 490 BC, which makes this blog either four days late or 361 days early in marking the 2500th anniversary.Now best remembered for Pheidippides' fatal run to Athens with news of the victory, the battle has not been memorialised in art to such effect as its successor a decade later, Thermopylae. Simonides' famous epitaph for the fallen at Thermopylae far surpasses the (Simonidean?) epigram on the Athenians' tomb at Marathon:
Ελλήνων προμαχούντες Αθηναίοι Μαραθώνι
χρυσοφόρων Μήδων εστόρεσαν δύναμιν
Champions of the Hellenes, the Athenians at Marathon
scattered the might of gold-bearing Medes.
Too many proper nouns, I'm afraid.
Among the most renowned of the marathonomachos was Aeschylus, whose gravestone celebrates his prowess in battle and ignores his literary works altogether. He also served in the naval battle at Salamis, which is treated in his earliest surviving play, The Persians, first performed seven years later.
"Aeschylus, whose gravestone celebrates his prowess in battle and ignores his literary works altogether"
ReplyDeleteFor my whole life has been bred up to that, having been a courtier, a captain and soldier
- Sir Walter Ralegh on the scaffold, completely ignoring the fact that he was one of the greatest lyric poets in an age noted for them.