Histories

Herodotus

Herodotus. Godley, Alfred Denis, translator. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, Ltd., 1920-1925 (printing).

But the Greeks, when they had divided the spoils at Plataea [23.2667,38.2] (Perseus) Plataea, buried each contingent of their dead in a separate place. The Lacedaemonians made three tombs; there they buried their “irens,”[*](Spartan young men between the ages of twenty and thirty.) among whom were Posidonius, Amompharetus, Philocyon, and Callicrates.

In one of the tombs, then, were the “irens,” in the second the rest of the Spartans, and in the third the helots. This, then is how the Lacedaemonians buried their dead. The Tegeans, however, buried all theirs together in a place apart, and the Athenians did similarly with their own dead. So too did the Megarians and Phliasians with those who had been killed by the horsemen.

All the tombs of these peoples were filled with dead; but as for the rest of the states whose tombs are to be seen at +Plataea (inhabited place), Boeotia, Central Greece and Euboea, Greece, Europe Plataeae, their tombs are but empty barrows that they built for the sake of men that should come after, because they were ashamed to have been absent from the battle. There is one there called the tomb of the Aeginetans, which, as I learn by inquiry, was built as late as ten years after, at the Aeginetans' desire, by their patron and protector Cleades son of Autodicus, a Plataean.