Remembering Cleodemus, son of Diphilus

Translators are traducers: we lovingly betray our authors, and sometimes they haunt us in revenge. Here is a translation that has haunted me on and off ever since I produced it. It comes to me sometimes when I am walking alone.

The original, AP 7.514, comes down under the name of Simonides, the famous specialist in inscribed verse epitaphs. It might very well not be by him; Denys Page for instance files it under pseudo-S., calling it 'oddly phrased at the beginning...ponderous, the product of an unpractised hand'. It's fair to say the Greek is a bit clunky. So too is my cover version, but that slightly halting way with language is one of the things that keeps it floating back up to the surface of my mind from the murk beneath:

Beside Theaerus’ bank, respect for self

Led Cleodemus to lamented death

When he engaged a force of Thracians;

There too the spearman son of Diphilus

Established glory for his father’s name.

The self-respect that compelled Cleodemus to die on his riverbank is aidōs, a reverence for righteous action and a fear of incurring shame by acting wrongly. It is the very first word of the poem.

Was this is a real inscription? Probably; maybe. Odd not to see his city named, if so, but the context might have made it obvious. Approximate date? Anywhere between the early fourth and the second century BC, by Page's reckoning. I treasure his little note on the otherwise unattested river Theaerus:

it seems idle to speculate whether this is an alternative form of Tearos, the Thracian river about which Herodotus has so much to say in 4.89-91. If they are the same, we still have no idea when Cleodemus was there or what he was doing.

Was Diphilus heartbroken, did he think it a dreadful waste, or was he secretly relieved that his son had held the line and not run? Was he perhaps there on the day, somewhere in the mass of the phalanx with his boy? In what war, between what city-states, was this otherwise forgotten skirmish? Who even was Cleodemus? We have no idea. But for the last minute or so he has lived again, in the reading of his epitaph; you have briefly perpetuated his memory, and maybe you will even think of him again from time to time. 'Beside Theaerus’ bank, respect for self led Cleodemus to lamented death when he engaged a force of Thracians...'