“Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.”
Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
“[Word-for-word translation]
O stranger, announce to the Lacadaemonians [Spartans] that here
We lie, to their words [or laws] obedient.”
Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Epitaph on the Cenotaph of Thermopylae, recorded by Herodotus.
There is a long unsolved dispute around the interpretation of the word rhemasi, such as laws, words or orders.
Variant translations:
Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
Stranger, go tell the men of Lacedaemon
That we, who lie here, did as we were ordered.
Stranger, bring the message to the Spartans that here
We remain, obedient to their orders.
Oh foreigner, tell the Lacedaemonians
That here we lie, obeying their words.
Go, tell the Spartans, passerby,
that here by Spartan law we lie.
Go, tell the Spartans
stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to Spartan law,
we dead of Sparta lie
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O stranger, announce to the Lacadaemonians [Spartans] that here
We lie, to their words [o…" by Simonides of Ceos?
Simonides of Ceos 6
Ancient Greek musician and poet -556–-468 BCRelated quotes
“Nor word for word too faithfully translate.”
Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
Interpres.
Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 133 (tr. John Dryden)
“What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.”
H. Havelock Ellis
(1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer
Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 6
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
George Wallace
(1919–1998) 45th Governor of Alabama
18th October 1968
1960s
Source: https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=34499
“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
Max Brooks
book
World War Z
Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
John Millington Synge
(1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore
The Aran Islands (1907)
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 5 (p. 123)
Octavio Paz
(1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.