These men, fighting with the spear on foot and on board swift ships, lost their glorious youth at the Eurymedon, fighting the front rank of Persian archers, but with their death they left behind the noblest monument of their bravery.See D.L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 268-272.
οἵδε παρ᾿ Εὐρυμέδοντά ποτ᾿ ἀγλαὸν ὤλεσαν ἥβην
μαρνάμενοι Μήδων τοξοφόρων προμάχοις
αἰχμηταί, πεζοί τε καὶ ὠκυπόρων ἐπὶ νηῶν,
κάλλιστον δ᾿ ἀρετῆς μνῆμ᾿ ἔλιπον φθίμενοι.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, May 31, 2021
Memorial
Simonides (?), fragment 46 = Greek Anthology 7.258 (tr. David Sider):