that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their
greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the
monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all
Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her
freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the
Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for
Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory,
at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this
class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the
city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as
freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her
service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of
Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of
such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of
Simonides.[4]

Not less striking than these in their high simplicity are his epitaphs
on private persons: that which preserves the fame of the great lady
who was not lifted up to pride, Archedice daughter of Hippias; that on
Theognis of Sinope, so piercing and yet so consoling in its quiet
pathos, or that on Brotachus of Gortyn, the trader who came after
merchandise and found death; the dying words of Timomachus and the
eternal memory left to his father day by day of the goodness and
wisdom of his dead child; the noble apostrophe to mount Gerania, where
the drowned and nameless sailor met his doom, the first and one of the
most magnificent of the long roll of poems on seafarers lost at
sea.[5] In all of them the foremost quality is their simplicity of
statement. There are no superlatives. The emotion is kept strictly in
the background, neither expressed nor denied. Great minds of later
ages sought a justification of the ways of death in denying that it