Sunday, May 21, 2017

Fame, as it reaches the furthest limits of the sunlit earth, Shall learn the valor of these men

After the Battle of Marathon in which 192 Greeks died, the Athenian dead were interred in a great funerary mound at the edge of the Marathon plain. Ten white marble slabs, one for each of the ten Athenian tribes, were set up at the foot of the mound.

Of these, only one survives with the memorialization of the twenty-two members of the tribe Erechtheis.


The inscription reads:
Fame, as it reaches the furthest limits of the sunlit earth,
Shall learn the valor of these men: how they died
In battle with the Medes, and how they garlanded Athens,
The few who undertook the war of many.
There is a very faint echo of Churchill's August 20th 1940 speech in Parliament paying tribute to the pilots of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain:
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

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