BANNED IN SPARTA!!

For an ancient Greek soldier, losing your shield was the height of disgrace (because it generally meant that you'd flung that huge, heavy thing away as you deserted and ran to save your miserable cowardly life).

Hence the Spartan mother's comment to her departing son:
“Come home victorious, My Son, proudly bearing your battle-scarred shield; or come home carried on it as your funeral bier, having attained a beautiful death and fallen gloriously in combat against the foe!”

At least, that's what she meant. But they were people of few words, the Spartans, so what she actually said was:   “With it, or on it!”

The poet Archilochus (648 BC) seems to have been a disreputable sort of character. A later writer claimed that the Spartans actually banned his poetry in case it corrupted their children, “lest it harm their morals more than it benefited their talents”).

Perhaps the following are a couple of the poems that got him banned.

Here's the first.  Very literally it would translate as something like:

Some Thracian is pleased with my shield, which I left undamaged beside a bush.
But I escaped death. Good riddance to the shield. I'll get another, no worse.

In other words, he dropped it and ran away.  Oh, the shame!
I've never tried translating Greek verse, but I thought this might be a fun place to start. Here we go...

Some Thracian got my brand new shield.
I dumped it as I fled.
Oh well. I'll buy another one.
It's gone – but I'm not dead!

Or maybe...

Some Thracian's got the shield I bore.
I dropped it when I ran away.
It's just a shield. There's plenty more.
I lived to fight another day.

He wrote an equally scandalous verse about his spear (which, of course, should be used for killing enemies):

Literally: My bread is kneaded with my spear, my Ismarian wine is mixed with my spear, and I drink reclining upon my spear.

My effort:

I use my spear to knead my bread,
I use my spear to stir my wine,
I lean on it when I get drunk,
and these jobs suit my spear just fine!

You can kinda see why the Spartans wouldn't like him.