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The Death of Ephialtes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

David Stockton
David Stockton
Affiliation:
Brasenose College, Oxford
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Extract

There are certain ‘facts’ which every schoolboy knows. Every schoolboy knows, for instance, that at the Battle of Hastings King Harold was killed by a shot in his eye from an arrow; and Sir Frank Stenton's demonstration that he pretty certainly wasn't has done little to shake this conviction.1 Not every schoolboy, perhaps, but every undergraduate who studies the history of ancient Athens knows that Ephialtes was murdered. After all, that is what the books tell him. Thus in Meiggs/Bury we read that ‘Cimon's chief antagonist Ephialtes was murdered’; this is echoed by Forrest and Davies, to name just two authors of recent standard works. Hignett even knew the weapon the murderer used: ‘the dagger of the assassin removed him in the hour of his triumph’

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , May 1982 , pp. 227 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1982

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References

1 The Bayeux Tapestry2 (Phaidon Press, 1965), pp. 22–3.Google Scholar

2 Bury, J. B., A History of Greece4 (1975, ed. by Russell Meiggs), p. 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forrest, W. G., The Emergence of Greek Democracy, p. 224Google Scholar; Davies, J. K., Democracy and Classical Greece, p. 72Google Scholar; Hignett, C., A History of the Athenian Constitution, p. 213.Google Scholar

3 I have borrowed K. J. Maidment's excellent Loeb translation here.

4 Not invariably. Some years ago, the Home Office pathologist. Dr Francis Camps, told me that he had had to conduct one of his earliest post-mortems in a small shed attached to a village police station. When he had finished his dissecting and turned to gather up his specimens, he found that they had all been eaten by a mangy stray dog which had quietly slipped in from the next shed by an unlatched door. He reported this in some embarrassment to his then chief, the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who simply said: ‘Ah, yes - should have warned you about that. Happened to me once. Never mind, keep a sharp eye on the dog.’