Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Lysander's Victory Dedication
This is the verse inscription composed by Ion of Samos for a monument set up at Delphi by the Spartan commander Lysander after his naval victory over Athens, usually identified with Aegospotami in 405 BC. The poem, signed by Ion and preserved on the monument's stone base, records that Lysander set up his own statue to mark the deed when, victorious with his swift ships, he destroyed the power of the Athenians and crowned unsacked Sparta.
The inscription is a rare contemporary witness to the end of the Peloponnesian War, composed for one of the most famous victory monuments at Delphi. It shows how a victorious commander used verse and sacred space to present his triumph, and it reflects the new prominence of Lysander, who received unusual honours for a living Greek.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Syll.³ 115; Meiggs–Lewis 95; Page, FGE). 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).