This was in something I was reading the other day: "Plutarch tells of a temple dedicated to Diana in Artemisium. On one of its pillars was carved a verse commemorating the dead of the naval battle between Persian and Greek in the straits of Euboea: With numerous tribes from Asia’s regions brought/ The sons of Athens on these waters fought;/ Erecting, after they had quelled the Mede,/ To Artemis this record of the deed.
There is still a place still to be seen upon this shore, where, in the middle of a great heap of sand, they take out from the bottom a dark powder of ashes, or something that has passed the fire; and here, it is supposed, the shipwrecks and bodies of the dead were burnt.’"
It made me think I should start keeping a record of the way battles have been commemorated as I come across them, to build up some kind of collection from which something interesting may emerge at some point. Of course, this would have much to do with not only commemorating particular battles, but the ways in which cultures choose what to commemorate in the present, particularly when we're talking about not just years or decades between battles and their commemoration but centuries or milennia.
A good example is the land battle at Thermopylae in 481 BC, which happened simultaneously to the Persian-Greek sea battle at straits of Artemesium that Plutarch was talking about. Thermopylae is perhaps best known for the legend of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans holding the narrow pass, the Hot Gates/ Pillars (thermo pylae), against Xerxes' far-stronger army.
The 300 were eventually slaughtered and were buried under a mound of earth, topped by a slab with a famous commemorative verse by Simonides carved in it: "Stranger, announce to the Spartans that here/ We lie, having fulfilled their orders." Indeed, there is still a memorial with these words upon it at Thermopylae, although not the one described by Herodotus, but one made more recently in 1955. A further modern monument commemorated Leonidas himself (pictured above), which was dedicated in the same year by King Paul of Greece. Lastly, there is an even more recent memorial from 1997, recognising the seven hundred Thespians who also died in the battle.
The 300 were eventually slaughtered and were buried under a mound of earth, topped by a slab with a famous commemorative verse by Simonides carved in it: "Stranger, announce to the Spartans that here/ We lie, having fulfilled their orders." Indeed, there is still a memorial with these words upon it at Thermopylae, although not the one described by Herodotus, but one made more recently in 1955. A further modern monument commemorated Leonidas himself (pictured above), which was dedicated in the same year by King Paul of Greece. Lastly, there is an even more recent memorial from 1997, recognising the seven hundred Thespians who also died in the battle.
What makes the interplay of history and historical memory here even more interesting is that this location has been one that has been the site of significant battles more than once in history. In 279BC Greek and Gaulish armies clashd here; 191BC saw Antiochus III of Syria's army attempting to repeat Spartan heroics against Rome. Similarly, in more modern times, the Battle of Alamana in 1821, part of the Greek War of Independence, saw Athanasios Diakos and his men make a stand against a far-superior Turkish army, in which Diakos was captured. (One account suggests that when he was offered a choice between conversion to Islam and death, he ended up being barbecued on a spit by his captors (above, his memorial at Thermopylae.)
Lastly, the area was the site of another battle in the Second World War, this time between German and British/ ANZAC forces, actually the only joint ANZAC action in the Second World War. NZ units were actually deployed in the same pass as Leonidas' Spartans so many years before, so it's appropriate that it also became known as the Battle of Thermopylae. This action is commemorated in the Australian-Hellenic Monument in Canberra, which is just opposite the Australian War Memorial. This is an amphitheatre with a corridor cut through it symbolising pass at Thermopylae, which I know well from long-past lunch breaks, having once been employed at the AWM soon after I left school. The 1941 battle is also commemorated by the larger monument in Crete that covers the whole Greek campaign of 1941. I wonder if there's any onsite commemoration of this battle, as there is for so many other conflicts of the World Wars last century.
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