I came up with “Contemplate mortality” in ths sense of “Memento mori/iRemeber you are mortal” (like the iconic skull in Dührer’s “Melancholy”).
Here’s GPT4’s version, which strikes me as a sort of warning to Icarus not to fly too high:
The phrase “ϕρόνει θνητά” can be translated as:
“Think mortal thoughts.”
or
“Think as a mortal.”
I guess GPT4’s translation could be generously interpreted as a sort of “memento mori” but it strikes me as very opaque and awkward.
I incidentally commented on this in the "γαμεῖν μέλλε” thread (which as I said is imo best understood as “Put off marrying”), where I wrote: ϕρόνει θνητά, another of these pithy “Delphic” injunctions, is “Think mortal thoughts”, not so much in the sense of “Contemplate mortality” but more as a warning. Remember you’re only a mortal: Don’t get ideas above your station or you’re asking to get divinely zapped.
Salmoneus is a prime example (e.g. Verg.Aen.6.585-94).
Both Aristotle and Paul rail against this advice:
οὐ χρὴ δὲ κατὰ τοὺς παραινοῦντας ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν ἄνθρωπον ὄντα οὐδὲ θνητὰ τὸν θνητὸν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν καὶ πάντα ποιεῖν πρὸς τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὸ κράτιστον τῶν ἐν αὐτῷ.
τὰ ἄνω φρονεῖτε, μὴ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
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φρόνει θνητά is like the “Delphic” maxims, Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, etc., but the list in Stobaeus attributes it to the Seven Sages, and this essay (E. G. Wilkins “Know thyself” in Greek and Latin literature. 1917. Classical Pamphlets vol. 37) traces the ϕρόνει θνητά advice in various forms in Homer and Pindar and Archilochus and Sophocles and Euripides. I find it in Aeschylus and Menander and in 2 Maccabees 9:12, Antiochus saying μὴ θνητὸν ὄντα ἰσόθεα φρονεῖν. Stobaeus quotes Demonax as “Θνητοὶ γεγῶτες μὴ φρονεῖθ’ ὑπὲρ θεούς”. There may not be a more cliched piece of Greek advice.