The exact topography of Thermopylæ is still a matter of controversy, and a liberal discount has long since been made from the fabulous total, given by Herodotus, of Xerxes’s host. Just who and how many of the allies remained and died after Leonidas sent the others away is also uncertain. Among those remaining with the Spartans of their own free will Pausanias mentions only the seven hundred Thespians and the eighty men from Mycenæ. The inscription written avowedly for all the Peloponnesian soldiers exaggerates the number of the Persians and fails to state definitely that all of the four thousand fought to the finish:— “Here on a time four thousand of men from the Peloponnesus, Meeting three millions of men, struggled in battle and fought.” But all restrictions, made in the interest of historic truth, only serve to eliminate the miraculous element. They leave undisturbed the picture of a heroism combined with military skill which, if properly supplemented, might well have kept Xerxes shut out from lower Greece indefinitely, or as long as the Greek fleet, aided by the elements, could have restrained him from moving south by the sea. The allies of Sparta, both those who fell in the four days before the betrayal of the pathway and those who fell at the end, were duly praised, but Leonidas and his three hundred have always received, and justly, the lion’s share of honour. They represented the Lacedæmonians at their best. The moral prestige that the Spartans had temporarily forfeited by their absence from Marathon was now regained, to be still further emphasized at Platæa. Over the Spartans buried at Thermopylæ was inscribed:— “Stranger, go unto Sparta, aye go and announce to our people Here we their orders obeyed, here we are lying in death.” In Lacedæmon also the names of the three hundred were inscribed upon a pillar, still existing in the time of Pausanias. On the hill at Thermopylæ, where the Spartans made their last stand, was set up a marble lion to honour the name of Leonidas. In an epigram, said to have been written for the monument by Simonides, the lion is represented as saying to the passers-by:— “I am the strongest of beasts of the wild, but the strongest of mortals He it is over whose tomb I as a sentinel stand. Were he not Leo in courage, as even my name he possesses, Never had I set foot here on the marble above.” From the longer “encomium” by Simonides on the dead at Thermopylæ is handed down a fragment worthily translated by Sterling:—