Coming last in style

The ancient Greeks didn’t always treat athletes and athletics with reverence. Nicarchus (1st cent. AD) wrote a witty epigram about a runner called Kharmos (‘Victor’), which I’ve translated as follows:

When Kharmos, in Arcadia, once entered in a race
    competing with five runners, he came out in seventh place.
A curious result, and you’ll be saying ‘How in heaven,
    with six men in the race, did Kharmos finish no. 7?’
The reason’s this. A mate of Kharmos, shouting ‘Go, you’re fine’
   ran fully dressed around the course, and beat him to the line.
So Kharmos finished seventh, but here’s to his sporting health:
    if he’d had five more friends, just think — he would have finished twelfth.

πέντε μετ᾽ ἄλλων Χάρμος ἔν ᾽Αρκαδίᾳ δολιχεύων,
    θαῦμα μέν, ἀλλ᾽ὄντως ἕβδομος ἐξέπεσεν.
«ἓξ ὄντων», τάχ᾽ἐρεῖς, «πῶς ἕβδομος;» εἷς φίλος αὐτοῦ
    «θάρσει, Χάρμε», λέγων ἦλθεν ἐν ἱματίῳ.
ἕβδομος οὖν οὕτω παραγίνεται· εἰ δ᾽ἔτι πέντε
    εἶχε φίλους, ἦλθ᾽ἄν, Ζωΐλε, δωδέκατος.

Mark Ives, who teaches Classics at St Gabriel’s School in Newbury, drew my attention to another example of Nicarchus’s epigrammatic wit (Greek Anthology 11.395):

Πορδὴ ἀποκτέννει πολλοὺς ἀδιέξοδος οὖσα·
πορδὴ καὶ σώζει τραυλὸν ἱεῖσα µέλος.
οὐκοῦν εἰ σώζει, καὶ ἀποκτέννει πάλι πορδή,
τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν ἴσην πορδὴ ἔχει δύναµιν.

I translate:

A fart suppressed brings many to their death;
Released it rescues with its rasping breath.
So if a fart both stops death and death brings,
Its power is no less than that of kings.

 Heraclitus

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

William Johnson Cory was the Victorian Eton schoolmaster who wrote this haunting translation of an ancient Greek epigram, Callimachus’ lament for his friend the poet (not the much earlier philosopher) Heraclitus. In Greek (Callimachus Ep. 2 Pfeiffer) it consists of three taut and simple elegiac couplets:

My translation here aims to capture the less sentimental quality of the original: