Laudator Temporis Acti

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), "On a Military Graveyard," Complete Poems (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2004), p. 591:

Stranger, when you come to Washington
Tell them that we lie here
Obedient to their orders.

                    after Simonides

Rexroth modified slightly the epigram by Simonides recorded by Herodotus 7.228:

ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
    κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

Rexroth also translated the original in his Poems from the Greek Anthology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, rpt. 2002), p. 106:

Stranger, when you come to
Lakedaimon, tell them we lie
Here, obedient to their will.

Cicero's translation of Simonides into Latin:

dic, hospes, Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes
    dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur.

C.M. Bowra, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. lix-lxi:

The first thing to notice is this — that by a fiction the dead are made to speak, and that their epitaph takes the form of a message from the field. As none survived, some one else must deliver that message. Hence the appeal in the first two words — a form of address found in many another Greek epitaph, but with less excuse.¹

These first two words are the first difficulty. Cicero rendered them by ‘hospes’, a closer approximation than English allows. No single word in English has the same meanings, inherent and adherent, as the Greek. ‘Stranger’ is too remote, and tends to be American, ‘friend’ is too familiar. The compromise ‘passer-by’ has found, perhaps, most favour.

Next, the word ἀγγέλλειν. Here a problem of adherent meaning is raised not by the word itself but by the use of the infinitive to convey an injunction.  This idiom was common in Dorian speech, and would therefore be appropriate on the lips of the Spartan dead, while to Greek readers in general, familiar with its use in Hesiod and other old poets, it would also have had a dignified, archaic ring.² If that were the whole truth, an archaizing translation, such as ‘Take tiding(s)’, might be defended. But the idiom is also military and not confined to the Dorians In this dispatch from the field its military use is appropriate, and hence a very different suggestion, namely, that we should translate ‘Report to the Lacedaemonians ...’.

Modern poetry is wholesomely inclusive in its diction, but even so Report would be out of keeping. For the diction of the epitaph as a whole has a conscious poetic colouring, as the forms ξεῖν' for ξέν' and κείνων for ἐκείνων attest. And after all, the idiom was archaic and poetical as well as military. Once again, then, we must compromise on some neutral expression such as ‘Tell them in Lacedaemon ...’.

Two further problems of meaning are set by the last two words. Some have argued that ῥήμασι bears much the same sense as ῥημάτων in No. 206 — the poem written by Simonidês on Danaê. It would then mean not ‘orders’ or ‘ordinances’, but ‘words’ or ‘sayings’ such as Plutarch collected in his Sayings of Laconian Women, e.g. ‘Come back with your shield — or upon it’. One may answer, of course, that the meaning ‘orders’ is better suited to a soldierly dispatch; but why demand one meaning and one only? A poet’s economy, especially in epigram, is to say one thing and suggest much more. In English ‘word’ (rather than ‘words’) has some of the requisite associations, and also covers the possible alternatives most completely.

Finally, πειθόμενοι. It is often said that the use of the present participle implies continuity and demands the translation ‘still obeying’. But the temporal reference of the participle cannot be stressed, and ‘still obeying’ is a sentimental, un-Greek idea, certainly out of place on the lips of Spartans.

¹ Cf. R. Heinze, Neue Jahrb. f. d. klass. Altertum, 1915, p 6.

² Cf. W. Rhys Roberts, Eleven Words of Simonides, Camb. Univ. Press, 1920.