Dienekes
dy-EN-eh-keez
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe Spartan at Thermopylae to whom Herodotus gives the best line in his history.
Told before the battle that the Persian archers were so numerous their arrows would hide the sun, he answered that this was good news, since they would fight in the shade.
Herodotus names him as the bravest of the Spartans there and says he left this saying as a memorial. It is one of the few individual voices he preserves out of the three hundred.
Sources
- Hdt. 7.226
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Discussed in the papers
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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