Laudator Temporis Acti

Peter Green (1924-2024), Armada from Athens (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), pp. 339-340:

A few years ago workmen digging in Peristéri, a northern suburb of Athens, found some ancient slabs of marble that had been used to construct an early Christian sarcophagus. These slabs dated from the fifth century B.C., and were covered with lists of names. As the Greek scholar Mastrokostas has conclusively shown, they were originally memorial plaques, and formed part of a cenotaph to the Athenian citizen-hoplites who died during the Sicilian Expedition.

We know too little of the anonymous, uncelebrated heroes of history, the men who passed through great events, whose sweat and blood helped to shape the world we inherit, yet who died and were forgotten as though they had never been, leaving no memorial to posterity. Throughout this story we have been concerned, inevitably, with the men who were not forgotten, the politicians and commanders who took the decisions that others carried out. But now, for one brief moment, the curtain is lifted. Here, passing in silent order, like the names on any war memorial in any age, are the heavy-armed infantrymen who toiled and fought and died on the heights of Epipolae or during the long agony of that final retreat. 2,950 Athenians of hoplite rank fought in Sicily. Between 700 and 1,200 of them died in action. Of these casualties, 169 names, from five tribal regiments, are preserved on the Peristéri stelae.

See Inscriptiones Graecae I³ 1186.