Two grieving mothers

Two mothers lament their sons who died young. These two epitaphs are from Hunter's green-and-yellow. Both are Hellenistic in date. The first was found at Alexandria; the other is from Corcyra.

 

'The Strophades, "Turning Islands", were in legend where the sons of Boreas turned around and abandoned their pursuit of the Harpies... Strabo 8.4.2 identifies them as two islands in the open sea west of the Peloponese, roughly south of Zakynthos...

'Corcyra had been identified with the Homeric Scherie, land of Alcinous and Arete, at least since the fifth century' (Hunter).

XV

Philoxenus, your mother used to throw

Her arms around your neck for love of you

When finally you came, but never more;

Never again with age-mates will you go

Up to our hallowed city, and enjoy

The shaded floor of the gymnasium.

Instead your father brought your sun-bleached bones

And laid them in this tomb, since all your flesh

Was burned at Caunus in a raging pyre.

XVI

Calliope was puddled on this tomb;

Ten thousand tears in mourning for her son,

For Alexander who was swift to die

And left no issue when she laid him here

Beneath this earth, leaving the breath of life

At twenty-seven years, a cultured man,

Famed with the bow, whom murderous pirates slew

Hard by the ocean-girded Strophades.

But go now, traveller, and bid farewell

To a good man, good Satyrus’s son,

Born from the island that Alcinoüs won.

Woodward tackles Simonides

Two more versions from one of my favourite translators, G. R. Woodward, a retired vicar and small-press aficionado with a great reputation in writing and collecting carols. These are from his Epigrammata Heroica of 1929, produced in a typicaly tiny print-run of 120 hand-numbered copies. The first poem is for the Athenian dead in the great joint Greek land victory at Plataea; the second is the most famous epigram ever written, for Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae the year before.

For Woodward's version of 16.26, the Dirphys epitaph, see this older blog post.
 

7.253

In noble death if Virtue's acme lies,
To us, of all men, Fortune gave the prize:
For, keen to robe thee, Greece, in Freedom's vest
Endow'd with ageless glory, here we rest.

7.249

Stranger, to the Spartans! saying,
Here we lie, their words obeying.

Two young heroes of Athens

These two epitaphs are among those collected in Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca. Both are from Athens in the late sixth century BC, and adorned marble bases on which stood statues of the deceased.

The first inscribed block was found where it belonged, in the ancient cemetery of the Ceramicus, the potters' quarter of Athens (hence our 'ceramic'). The second may well have begun in that same cemetery, but a century later it was carted off and built into the Themistoclean Wall near the Piraeus Gate, about a kilometer away. I make Nelo's tomb a 'mound' because in the context of burial the verb kheō means to pile up earth into a tumulus. It harks back to the heroic age, and I think the writer consciously echoes Homer and thereby seeks to associate the dead Xenophanes with the fallen heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Nelonides literally means 'Son of Nelo'; the names may have swapped back and forth, generation to generation, until Nelonides' untimely death brought the cycle to a close.

41
This is the tomb of dead Xenophanes.
His father Cleoboulus built it here
To mark his excellence and modesty.
 
(on the left side: ‘Aristion of Paros made me’)
 
42
The son of Nelo, called Nelonides,
Is buried in the mound his father raised,
A fine memorial of his character.

(as a separate inscription: 'Endoius made this one too')