Go Tell the Spartans

Wikipedia's literal translation of this famous epitaph is: "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their words [or laws]".

The Lacedaemonians were the people of the city–state of Lacedaemon, whose main settlment was Sparta. The modern name for Lacedaemon is Laconia.

The epitaph is most commonly attributed to the contemporary Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BC). Wikipedia explains: "It was well known in ancient Greece that all the Spartans who had been sent to Thermopylae had been killed there (with the exception of Aristodemus and Pantites), and the epitaph exploits the conceit that there was nobody left to bring the news of their deeds back to Sparta. Greek epitaphs often appealed to the passing reader (always called 'stranger') for sympathy, but the epitaph for the dead Spartans at Thermopylae took this convention much further than usual, asking the reader to make a personal journey to Sparta to break the news that the Spartan expeditionary force had been wiped out. The stranger is also asked to stress that the Spartans died 'fulfilling their orders'."

The most famous translation of the epitaph is attributed to the American novelist Steven Pressfield, whose second novel, Gates of Fire (1998) is about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae. It is taught at the three major US military academies. Pressfield's translation is very close to that of the English priest, poet and critic William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850):

"Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by / That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

Go Tell the Spartans was the title of a 1978 film, set in the Vietnam War and starring Burt Lancaster. This was based on the 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa, by Daniel Ford, about US Army military advisors during the early part of the Vietnam War in 1964. Ford, at the time, was a correspondent in Vietnam for the American weekly current affairs magazine The Nation.