And to your ancestors:“Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
”Simonides
i. 42）:“Athenians, guarding Greece, subdued in fight
At Marathon the gilded Persians' might.
”
“Dic, hospes, Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes
dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur.
”Simonides
1 Both epigrams are by Simonides of Ceos （c. 560-470 B.C.）. The well-known version of the first given here is that of W. L. Bowles, which has been somewhat modified in the Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation（no. 212）. Strabo, who quotes the original （Strab. 9.4.）, agrees with the wording given by Lycurgus, except that for the first three words he has: ὦ ξέν᾽ ἀπάγγειλον. Herodotus （Hdt. 7.228） has a slightly different version:“ὦ ξεῖν᾽ ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις, ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα τοῖς κείων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι
”
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.
