Thermopylae

Thermopylae is a lecture by John William Mackail (1859-1945), the Scottish classical scholar, critic, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, on the battle of 480 BC in which Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans held the pass against the Persian army of Xerxes. Mackail treats Thermopylae both as history and as the supreme example of how an event passes into poetry: the epitaph of Simonides on the fallen, two lines that became the most famous memorial verse in the Greek language, stands at the centre of his meditation on heroism, defeat, and the power of poetry to make a lost battle immortal. Mackail’s Greek Anthology work made him the natural English interpreter of Simonidean epigram. The lecture shows classical scholarship in the service of a humane meditation on memory. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.