Δωδεκετη τον παιδα πατηρ απεθηκε Φιλιππος ενθαδε την πολλην ελπιδα Νικοτελην.[118] {Dôdeketê ton paida patêr apethêke Philippos enthade tên pollên elpida Nikotelên.} [118] Callimachus, _Epigr._ 20: 'His father Philip laid here to rest his twelve-year old son, his high hope, Nicoteles.' The bereaved father says nothing of his sorrow, or the greatness of his loss, but records his son's name and age and says that he was his father's 'high hope', and so doing gives us everything. Simonides does not express his own feelings about the heroism of the Spartan dead; their grave speaks for them to the passer-by. Nor is this a mere literary method, a way of writing which states facts and leaves them to make an impression by their own weight, unaided by comment or explanation. A comparison of Ben Jonson's epigram with the Greek epitaph, will show that directness is much more than this. The fancies with which Jonson closes are pretty; but they are false, for they are really incompatible with deep feeling: the Greek directness never loses from sight the dead child; it sees only that and the father's sorrow. The following extract deals with a very different subject, but illustrates directness equally well. The scene is the Athenian colony of Amphipolis on the Struma; the dramatis personae are the Spartan general Brasidas who wishes to capture it, and the Athenian Thucydides who was then at Thasos, distant half a day's sail from Amphipolis. 'As soon as Thucydides heard the news about Brasidas, he sailed quickly to Amphipolis ... in order to garrison it if possible before it could capitulate, or at any rate to occupy Eion (its seaport). Meanwhile Brasidas, fearing the arrival of the Athenian fleet at Thasos and hearing that Thucydides ... was one of the leading men of the country, did his utmost to get possession of the city before he arrived.... He therefore offered moderate terms.... These terms were accepted, and the city was surrendered to him. On the evening of the same day Thucydides and his ships sailed into Eion, but not until Brasidas had taken possession of Amphipolis: another night, and he would have seized Eion.'[119] The gist of the story contained in this extract is plain. The Spartan general Brasidas seized the important town of Amphipolis, and the Athenian general came too late to save it. But who would guess that the Athenian general Thucydides was the historian Thucydides who wrote these words, and that the episode which he here describes with such detachment and neutrality earned him perpetual exile under pain of death, from the country which he passionately loved? Thucydides has told the bare facts, objectively, as if they related to some one else, without a comment, without a word of protest, excuse, explanation or regret on the crowning disaster of his life. He writes of himself in the third person. This is not the way in which modern generals write of their mishaps, but it is the Greek way.