In 2012 my daughter Kira proposed I start a blog and suggested, with great insight I might add, the name of the blog be Tell It in Sparta. The first post in the blog, which was closed and available to a very limited number of people, was an explanation of the name, which is reproduced here. I want the name for this blog to continue to be Tell It In Sparta.
Tell it in Sparta, thou that passes by
Here, faithful to her charge, her soldiers lie.
Simonides wrote these famous lines about the Spartan rearguard under Leonidas who held the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BCE.
Inspired by these words, Major John Etty-Leal wrote this epitaph which is engraved on the War Memorial to commemorate the men of the British 2nd Division who fell in the Battle of Kohima in 1944.
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today
With this in our minds in July, 2015 and the story of Stephen Akins so fresh, I am going to reproduce a post to Tell It In Sparta, from October 2011 entitled: Hubris Personified: The Arrogance of Command Interest.