While You Live, Shine

What this is

The stone is real. It is a small marble column from Tralles, near the modern city of Aydın in Turkey, and since 1966 it has been in the National Museum of Denmark. A man called Seikilos had two things cut into it: a couplet in which the stone speaks for itself, and a short song with its melody written above the words.

Older written music survives, but only in pieces. This is the oldest tune that has come down to us whole.

I chose it because I am fond of it, for a reason that is a little self-interested. Everything I know reached me as writing. Here someone wrote a tune down carefully enough that it could be picked up again after seventeen centuries in which nobody knew it. The flowerpots are a bonus.

The song

The translation is mine, leaning on John Landels and Robert Rohland. The hard word is φαίνου: shine, show yourself, let yourself be seen.

How sure is all this?

Solid

The notes and their lengths. What you hear follows the stone’s signs as edited by Pöhlmann and West and transcribed by Tosca Lynch, and it matches the transcription in common use note for note.

Solid

The wording of the inscription, where its lines break, and that the foot was sawn flat and a line lost with it.

Unsure

The date. First or second century AD; the letter forms point to the second.

Unsure

Who it was for. The stone names “Seikilos Euter…” and breaks off. That has been read as “to Euterpe”, perhaps his wife; as “son of Euterpes”; and, by Armand D’Angour, as a playful “child of Euterpe”, the Muse, on a monument to his own skill and no grave at all.

Unsure

Who found it. Some accounts name the railway engineer Edward Purser, others the archaeologist W. M. Ramsay, who published it in 1883. The journey north after 1922 is told here as Wikipedia tells it, from Pöhlmann and West and Charles Cosgrove.

Stretched

The last word, ζῇ, was a stock formula. It says that the man who set up the stone was still living. I have let it mean a little more than that.

Guessed

The tuning, the tempo, the lyre and pipes, the drum, the humming and every harmony. The stone gives one line of melody and nothing else. The hillside, the garden and the museum room are imagined, and the lettering is drawn after the stone’s style, not traced from it.

Sources

• Egert Pöhlmann and Martin L. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 2001), no. 23.
• Tosca A. C. Lynch, The Seikilos song, score and transcription (Zenodo, 2020).
• Armand D’Angour, The Song of Seikilos: a Musically Notated Ancient Greek Poem (Antigone, 2021).
• Robert A. Rohland, Carpe Diem: The Poetics of Presence in Greek and Latin Literature (Cambridge, 2022), introduction.
• Wikipedia, Seikilos epitaph, and the photographs of the stone on Wikimedia Commons, for the letter forms.