An Unknown Sailor’s Grave-Marker

lionofchaeronea:

Anthologia Palatina 7.350 (author and date
unknown)

Do not ask me, sailor, whose tomb am I that stand here:
Instead, yourself alight upon a less forbidding sea.

Ναυτίλε, μὴ πεύθου, τίνος ἐνθάδε τύμβος ὅδ’ εἰμί,
     ἀλλ’ αὐτὸς πόντου τύγχανε χρηστοτέρου. 

The Wave, Gustave Courbet, ca. 1870