Brief history of a short epitaph
In 480 BCE, a huge Persian army invaded Greece. Leonidas and 300 Spartans were ordered to hold the frontier mountain pass at Thermopylae while the Greeks rallied their forces back home. All 300 Spartans (also known as Lacedaemonians) died, but the Greeks won the war. In gratitude, they built a monument to the slain heroes and commissioned an epitaph from the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. Here are two translations of what he wrote:
Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedaemonians
that here we lie, obedient to their commands.
Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
Nearly 150 years later Alexander the Great invaded Persian territory, though the Spartans did not cooperate with him. After his victory at Granicus, Alexander sent the spoils to Athens, along with this note (clearly a reference to Simonides' epitaph): "Alexander son of Philip, and the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians, from the barbarians that inhabit Asia."
In more recent times, the classicist and poet A.E. Housman wrote an expanded version of the same text:
Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
Another modern adaptation is A.D. Hope's on the Australians who died in Viet Nam:
Go tell the old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.
Here's my version of the poem, which I hope will find no use:
Tell the Lacedaemonians
You sent us to Iraq to die.
Mission accomplished: here we lie.
http://www.doctorweevil.org/archives/000157.html http://www.xrefer.com/entry/169307
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