Simonides' saviour ghost, with Cicero and Woodward

AP 7.77

SIMONIDES

οὗτος ὁ τοῦ Κείοιο Σιμωνίδεω ἐστὶ σαωτήρ,
ὃς καὶ τεθνηὼς ζῶντ᾽ ἀπέδωκε χάριν. 

My favourite carolling anthologist translates it like this in Tales of Sea-Sorrow (1931):

The sailor this, whose ghost did save
His benefactor from the grave.

Simonides is the most famous of classical epitaphists. Woodward's version loses the original's embedded sign-off or sphragis ('Simonides of Ceos'), but handles the returned-favour aspect of the second line really nicely ('his benefactor'). He appends the following charming note:

The story, to which this distich alludes, is told by Cicero (De Divinatione, j, 27): -- After Simonides had seen the corpse of some unknown shipwrecked mariner, and had buried it, he intended to sail on board a certain vessel, but was warned by the ghost of the aforesaid person not to do so; else he should be shipwrecked. Whereupon Simonides remained safe ashore, while the rest, who sailed, were lost.

I love little explainers of this kind. Very few can ever have seen it; like all his little books of epigram, Sea-Sorrow was hand-made in a small print-run of 136 copies, of which the one open on my lap is hand-numbered as No.132. In combination, the translation-and-note clarify an underlying story that the Greek original had left opaque. And Woodward keeps his version to a distich, which I hardly ever can, try as I might.

My own least bad attempt, on a dozy, post-COVID July afternoon, and choosing not to feed in that Ciceronian tidbit:

Here lies the man that saved Simonides,
And he himself already dead and gone;
Repaid the living for a kindness shown.