Sed miles, sed pro patria: Classical Imitation and Allusion in the Epigraphic History of the First World War By Izzy Nendick If you only had sixty-six characters to commemorate your loved one, killed before their time at the hands of a war deemed ‘great’, what would you choose to write? The sentence you are reading right now is a mere sixty-five characters long. It does not allow for much sentimentality. Yet those who were told by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to eulogise their departed with such brevity often looked to the Classics, reminiscent of both a glorious imagined heroic past and British upper-class schooling. The classical quote served as a confluence and communicator of education and militarism, displaying learning as well as a false sense of death for glory, set against the backdrop of the First World War. The repeated utterances of the past in grave markers and poetry were a conscious act done to encapsulate and continue an imagined inheritance from the romanticised past into the context of World War One; ancient concepts pulled rather than pushed into the modern era. Whilst grave markers and their classical allusions communicate how people felt about the war and the resulting deaths, poetry both served as a motivator and as justification, as well as a reflective tool for the experience of war and conflict.
Physical epitaphs As the horrors of the First World War became apparent to those serving abroad in France and Belgium, the antique maxims learnt back at school became epitaphic, adorning the graves of the dead, recalling both the ancient past that they saw themselves continuing and the more recent past of their innocent childhood and education. Limited to the sixty-six characters permitted by the War Graves Commission, classical quotations proved to be popular eulogies. Some examples include persta atque obdura (Be steadfast and endure; Horace. Sat. 2.5.39), coelum quid querimus ultra (What we seek more than heaven; Lucretius 3.18), and omne solum forti patria (To the brave, every land is his homeland; Ovid. Fast. 1.493). Many of the classical quotations used on epitaphs evoke a sense of patriotism for one’s country, adapting the classical tag to fit one’s desired message of love for England and dying for its ‘freedom’. However, not every epitaph written in Latin is of ancient origin. One epitaph reads “cui flos iuventutis integrae resectus est” (For what purpose
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has the flower of this generation been cut back?), and while it is not a quotation of any Latin author, it intends to appear as one. The use of Latin both imitates the use of ancient poetry for remembrance and makes use of a language emphasised in the public school system, giving subversive weight to its anti-war sentiment and indicating that classical imitation was just as powerful as allusion. Another popular invocation of the past used by the soldiers of the First World War was Simonides’ epitaph for the Spartans at Thermopylae: “Stranger, report to the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their words.” In Maitland’s epitaph for The Belgian Dead, he precedes the dedication with an untranslated passage of Simonides, memorialising the Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea. To use the epitaph without translation, and then to link it to the commemoration of the modern dead, relies on a presumption of the reader’s own education to inform them of the connection, therefore utilising the classical object to form modern sentiment. Like the original Greek context, Simonides’ words were also used physically to mark graves and memorials. Used previously in the Boer War, the quote proved popular again during the First World War, when it was used on epitaphs commemorating those lost at the Battle of Gheluvelt, the 9th Devonshires at the Somme, and The War Memorial in Southport, as well as many more private graves.
Epitaphic poetry While epitaphs used classical quotations to adhere the dead to the perpetuity of dying for one’s country, attributing the deaths to the unending cycle of human violence, poetry was a way for the living to explore the same themes. Poetry began to question the use of the classical object in reference to warfare, and while some upheld the sacrificial axioms of antiquity, others rejected their use as bromidic, changing how we view classical quotations to this day. Indeed, the popularity of the Latin aphorism applying to the memory of public school can be addressed with the final lines of Newbolt’s poem Clifton Chapel: “Qui ante diem periit:/ Sed miles, sed pro patria” (Who died before his time but as a soldier and for his country). The poem places this archaic Latin maxim in the school chapel, thus directly linking an
