Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

Epigrams, Greek; Greek poetry -- Translations into English

of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and
far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to
give the name of Heaven.

The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to
themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the
greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest
recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that
art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of
Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from
the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit,
the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so
perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired.
Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly
exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of
Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and
Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians
that we lie here obeying their orders"--the words have grown so famous
that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their
greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the
monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all
Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her
freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the
Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for
Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory,
at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this
class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the
city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as
freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her
service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of
Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of
such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of
Simonides.[4]

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

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General

Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

Epigrams, Greek; Greek poetry -- Translations into English

of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and
far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to
give the name of Heaven.

The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to
themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the
greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest
recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that
art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of
Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from
the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit,
the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so
perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired.
Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly
exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of
Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and
Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians
that we lie here obeying their orders"--the words have grown so famous
that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their
greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the
monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all
Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her
freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the
Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for
Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory,
at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this
class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the
city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as
freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her
service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of
Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of
such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of
Simonides.[4]

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

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