Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigram
This is a single epigram transmitted in the Palatine Anthology (7.436) under the name of Hegemon, a poet about whom nothing certain is known; he is sometimes identified with the epic poet Hegemon of Alexandria Troas, but this is conjecture. In four lines it imagines a traveller at a tomb recalling the thousand Spartans who held back eight hundred thousand Persians and died without turning, in the Dorian way.
The poem belongs to a long tradition of commemorative epigrams on the Persian Wars and on Spartan courage, of which the lines on Thermopylae are the most famous. It shows how later poets kept that heroic memory alive in the inscriptional style.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anth. Pal. 7.436). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).