sepulchural verses show us more clearly how deep the grief was that
lay beneath the quiet lines of the marble and the smooth cadence of
the couplets. They cover and fill the whole range of emotion:
household grief, and pain for the dead baby or the drowned lover, and
the bitter parting of wife and husband, and the chill of distance and
the doubt of the unknown nether world; and the thoughts of the bright
and brief space of life, and the merciless continuity of nature, and
the resolution of body and soul into the elements from which they
came; and the uselessness of Death's impatience, and the bitter cry of
a life gone like spilt water; and again, comfort out of the grave,
perpetual placidity, "holy sleep," and earth's gratitude to her
children, and beyond all, dimly and lightly drawn, the flowery meadows
of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and
far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to
give the name of Heaven.

The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to
themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the
greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest
recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that
art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of
Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from
the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit,
the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so
perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired.
Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly
exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of
Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and
Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians
that we lie here obeying their orders"--the words have grown so famous