Tuesday, September 08, 2020
Gladden Your Hearts
Inscription from Emirjik in Eumeneia, in William Mitchell Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, Vol. I, Part II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 386 (number 232, lines 19-25), tr. Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (1935; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), pp. 74-75 (question mark added by me):
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Make haste, mortals, and gladden your hearts whenever you can. For a man's lifetime is sweet and is the measure of his existence. This, friends, is it. For what more could come afterward? Not even this remains. For it is the stone and the stele that tell you all this, not I. The gates are here, and the trodden ways to Hades by which none can come back into the light. But all pitiful wretches (long) for resurrection.See A.R.R. Sheppard, "R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6: Jews, Christians and Heretics in Acmonia and Eumeneia," Anatolian Studies 29 (1979) 169-180 (at 176-180), who discusses and translates the entire inscription.
σπεύδετε, τὴν ψυχὴν εὐφραίνετε πάντοτε, [θ]νη[τοί],
ὡς ἡδὺς βίοτος, καὶ μέτρον ἐστι ζοῆς.
ταῦτα, φίλοι μετὰ ταῦτα τί γὰρ πλέον; οὐκέτι ταῦτα·
στήλλη ταῦτα λαλεῖ καὶ λίθος, οὐ γὰρ ἐγώ.
θύραι μὲν ἔνθα καὶ πρὸς Ἅιδαν ὁδοὶ
ἀνεξόδευτοι δ’ εἰσὶν ἐς φάος τρίβοι·
ο]ἱ δὴ δ[είλ]αιοι πάντ[ες] εἰς ἀ[νά]στασιν...
