The Athenians at Chalcis: three versions

 'Book 16' of the Greek Anthology is a modern scholarly concoction. It contains all the epigrams that are found in Maximus' Planudes bowdlerised redaction of the Cephalan Anthology, but that are absent from the Palattine Manuscript that is otherwise the best witness to that lost original.

Many of these poems are about works of art, which everyone reasonably takes to show that Cephalas' megamix originally included a whole book on this subject and that, for whatever reason, the copyist of the Palatine MS missed it out. But there are poems of various types.

One such (16.26) is an epitaph ascribed to Simonides. If it is his, which I don't doubt, the original will have been inscribed on a lost monument. Here is my version:

Beneath the glen of Dirphys we were slain;
Near Euripus they raised our barrow high,
By order of the people. Justly so:
We sacrificed the loveliness of youth
To face the savage cloud of battling.

Here is Woodward's, from his Epigrammata Heroica of 1929:

Where we fell, neath Dirphys' combe,
Grateful Athens rear'd this tomb
O'er us nigh Euripos bank,
Nor amiss; for, facing dank
War-cloud, we in fight and fray
Barter'd precious youth away.

And here, an unattributed version published in a lengthy piece in the Westminster Review of 1838, occasioned by the publication of and notionally reviewing a German edition of Simonides:

At Dirphys' foot we fell; and o'er us here
Beside Euripus' shore this mound was piled,
Not undeserved, for youth to us was dear,
And that we lost in battle's tempest wild.

 That last couplet is rather like, and perhaps fed into, Housman's well known 'Here Dead We Lie':

 ...Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
 But young men think it is, and we were young.

Dirphys, the modern Dirfi, is a mountain in Euboea; its really good Wikipedia page includes photos of walking trails in wooded valleys below, just the kind of terrain in which the Athenians clashed with the Chalcidians and defeated them. This was Athens' second victory in one day, and Herodotus can tell you all about that; he preserves an epigram from the Acropolis, of which inscriptional fragments also survive, in two versions (one from before and one after the Persian sack). From Herodotus it entered the Anthology as AP 6.343:

The sons of the Athenians laid low
By deeds in battle the Boeotian tribes,
And those of Chalcis, putting out their pride
And bringing them to grief in iron bonds.
They set their horses here, as Pallas’ tithe.

The bronze chariot and horses were still there when Pausanias visited the Acropolis in the second century AD (1.28.2).