However,I find many sources for the phrase being used at Roman Triumphs.
Also.the phrase:respice post te,hominem te(consider what comes afterwards,and remember that you are but,a man).....
Is also referenced,as being spoken as a warning at Roman Triumphs.
Problem is....all these phrases seem to be apocraphal!
I think this would depend on whether the sources predate Constantine and more so St. Jerome. If not, then I suspect we can trace most of these themes or perhaps even the phrases themselves to the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Regardless to the origin of these phrases, more than the phrases being apocraphal, I personally think they're more morbid in the sense that they remind us of our mortality as expressed in the phrase
momento mori. However, this motif isolated from the its kindred phrases and motifs becomes incomplete for in the series of these phrases, there exists also redemption and resurrection. This is why these phrases and motifs were so popular in Renaissance and post-Reformation European culture.
For instance, the
momento mori is signified by, say, Caravaggio in the form of a skull, an iconography that's not particular to merely Caravaggio but also to other great Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors. Whereas redemption and resurrection are signified by laurel, wheat, ivy and so on. We also see an exploration of death in Bach's cantatas or even an willingness to embrace death (plug:
Ich habe genug aria sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) that really cannot be described with words. Thus, vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas and sic transit gloria mundi in addition to the Hippocratic vita brevis ars longa, though it by far predates Constantine, represent a chain, a sequence or a quasi-canon of phrases and themes which profess humility, humbleness and the inexorable mortality that tempers the glory of being or great accomplishment/position. In words, we see all these themes far more fully developed in Dante's trilogy.
And with respect to Chris, given that this is afterall his thread appearing in a football forum, we see all that all these themes have confronted BB, Bruschi, Rodney and Richard Seymour of late though I hardly thing any one of them would have been pompous or pretentious as this post....
.... in their presentation of these utterly human themes.