Xenophon of Ephesus, An Ephesian Tale 1.12.2 · 1.12.2
Golden armor for Helios
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Ἐπεύχονται δὲ αὐτοῖς δημοσίᾳ καὶ θυσίας τε θύουσι πολλὰς καὶ ἑορτὴν ἄγουσι τὴν ἐπιδημίαν αὐτῶν. Οἱ δὲ τήν τε πόλιν ἅπασαν ἐξιστόρησαν καὶ ἀνέθεσαν εἰς τὸ τοῦ Ἡλίου ἱερὸν πανοπλίαν χρυσῆν καὶ ἐπέγραψαν ἐπίγραμμα εἰς ὑπόμνημα τῶν ἀναθέντων Οἱ ξεῖνοι τάδε σοι χρυσήλατα τεύχε’ ἔθηκαν, Ἀνθία Ἁβροκόμης θ’, ἱερῆς Ἐφέσοιο πολῖται.
They prayed to them publicly, offered many sacrifices, and kept their visit as a festival. The two of them toured the whole city, and in the temple of Helios they dedicated a golden suit of armor and inscribed an epigram on it as a memorial of the givers: "The strangers set up for you this armor of beaten gold, Anthia and Habrocomes, citizens of holy Ephesus."
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The setting
Book 1, chapter 12. The island of Rhodes was sacred to Helios, the Sun.
A note on this passage
ἐπίγραμμα means "a thing written on." Herodotus uses the word for the lines on an offering that name the giver, and he copies three such inscriptions in hexameter verse from tripods in the temple of Apollo at Thebes (Herodotus 5.59–61). This dedication is the same kind of verse: two hexameters in Homer's forms, with ξεῖνοι for "strangers," τεύχε’ for "armor," and the epic genitives ἱερῆς and Ἐφέσοιο. The armor is still in the temple of Helios in Book 5, when Habrocomes comes back to Rhodes without Anthia (5.10.6–8).
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