[97]
Pausanias, the king of the
Lacedaemonians, puffed up by this, inscribed a distich upon the tripod at
Delphi, which the Greeks who had jointly fought in the battle at Plataea and in
the sea-fight at Salamis had made in common from the spoils taken from the
barbarians, and had set up in honor of Apollo as a memorial of their valor. The
distich1 was as follows:“
Pausanias, supreme commander of the Greeks, when he had destroyed
the host of the Medes,
dedicated to Phoebus this memorial.
”He wrote thus, as if the achievement and
the offering had been his own and not the common work of the allies;
1 This distich, said by Paus. 3.8.1, to be the work of Simonides, is quoted also in Thuc. 1.132. According to Hdt. 9.81.4 the monument in question was a golden tripod, set upon a three-headed serpent of bronze. The gold tripod was carried off by the Phocians in the Sacred War （Paus. 10.13.6）, and the supporting pillar, three intertwined serpents of bronze, was taken away by Constantine and set up in the Hippodrome of his new capital at Byzantium （Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chap. 17, note 48）, where it was rediscovered in 1856. The names of the Greek states which took part in the war are inscribed on the coils of the serpents （see Hicks, Greek Historical Inscriptions, pp. 11-13 and Dittenberger, Syllogê, 1 p. 31）.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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