Spartan Mora regiments at Battle of Plataea

[Paullus Scipio]

S..o..rr..eee! You should have kept reading! The citation was a "typo" caused by the fact That some years ago I lent my Loeb Herodotus out....yup! You guessed it - never got it back ! :evil: ......so I had to rely on the 'Penguin' which does not number paras, and I guess I miscounted. It should be the next paras IX.85-86 where Herodotus discusses the Greek graves.

After the distribution of booty, the Greeks proceeded to bury their own dead, those from each contingent in a separate grave.The Lakedaemonians made three graves - one for the priests(Eireis), amongst whom were Posidonius, Amompharetus,Philocyon and Kallitrakes; another for the rest of the Spartans; and a third for the Helots. The Tegeans buried all their dead in a common grave; so did the Athenians, and the Megarans and Phleiasians buried together those who had been killed by the cavalry.
Unlike these tombs, which were real containing the bodies of the dead, all the other funeral mounds which are to be seen at Plataea, so far as my information goes, erected merely for show. They are empty and were put up to impress posterity by the various states who were ashamed of having taken no part in the battle. There is one tomb there, bearing the name of the Aeginetans, which I am told was constructed at their request ten years after the battle by Cleades son of Autodicus, and representative of Aeginetan interests in Plataea...

As most commentators recognise, Herodotus' informers about Plataea are Athenian. De Selincourt points out ( I paraphrase)..witness him saying that the centre 'missed the battle', which is incredible because both Spartans and Athenians were in full view of their position, and in fact they had a hard fight with the Theban cavalry. Athenian spite is again plain from Herodotus' remarks that the Megarans etc 'died to no purpose' and that the Corinthians and other Peloponnesians had no casualties at all. Their burial mounds were there to give the lie to this calumny. Aeginetan casualties were doubtless among those who made up the difference between Herodotus' 759 Spartans, Tegeans, and Athenians who died and Plutarch's 'Aristides' of 1,360. Plutarch also ( in his attack on Herodotus' inaccuracies) quotes an elegiac poem of the battle by the contemporary poet Simonides ( not commissioned by Corinth) which refers to the Corinthians 'holding the centre' ....hardly 'missing the battle' ! Given his information sources, it is hardly surprising he comes up with a garbled version to explain the three Spartan graves, and given the importance of Plataea, it is hardly likely that "false" graves would have been tolerated. Clearly Herodotus did not travel to Plataea, or Cleades or someone else would have set him aright about the tombs, and it is obvious his "information" about the tombs comes from a scurrilous Athenian source.