Seikilos Epitaph: A Song History

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The Seikilos epitaph is a short Greek song carved, together with its melody, on a marble pillar found at Tralleis, the ancient city near present-day Aydın in western Turkey; the stone is now in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen (inventory 14897).[1] Of the forty-odd ancient Greek melodies known in letter notation, most survive only in fragments, which makes this one of the few that is complete.[2] The Oxford classicist Armand D'Angour explains that small letters above the words give the pitches, while further marks show which syllables are held for two or three time units and dots mark rising points in the line.[3] The Danish encyclopedia Lex describes the tune as diatonic and notated with signs belonging to the Ionian scale.[2]

A black Greek jar with a single red-figure young man in a long robe, head tilted back, singing as he plays a kithara.

Berlin Painter, Terracotta amphora (jar), Attic red-figure terracotta, ca. 490 BCE. A Greek singer with a kithara on a vase of about 490 BCE, shown for ancient Greek song; it is much older than the epitaph and has no connection to it.

According to D'Angour, the pillar came to light in 1883 while a railroad was being built near Aydın under the engineer Edward Purser, and Purser's wife later had its base cut flat to make a flowerpot stand, damaging the last line, which is known in part from a paper impression taken beforehand.[3] Sources differ on its age: D'Angour and the Cambridge scholar Robert A. Rohland give the second century AD, while Lex gives about 100 CE.[3][1][2] Readings of the name that begins "Euter-" differ too; Lex says that Seikilos raised the stone, probably for a woman called Euterpe, and D'Angour notes that Egert Pöhlmann and Martin West took it as his father's name.[2][3] D'Angour himself links it to Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry, and argues that it was not actually meant as an epitaph but as "a monument to preserve for posterity evidence of his musical and poetic inventiveness."[3]

The song reached a wide audience when a recording by the classicist David Creese drew heavy press coverage, and news outlets began calling it the world's oldest song.[1] D'Angour, who gives the melody in modern staff notation, leaves performers free to choose singers, key and pace, with optional string or wind accompaniment.[3] On the dulcimer, Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy arrange it in DAD tuning in From Ditties To Dirges, a songbook otherwise made up mostly of centuries-old melodies from the British Isles, and the listing notes that the two have played many of its tunes on their YouTube channels.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Seikilos Epitaph"

Sources

  1. Cambridge University Press: "In Search of Present Time (Introduction)," in Robert A. Rohland, Carpe Diem.
  2. Lex: "musik i oldtidens Grækenland".
  3. Antigone: "The Song of Seikilos: a Musically Notated Ancient Greek Poem".
  4. Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
  5. Image: Berlin Painter, Terracotta amphora (jar), Attic red-figure terracotta, ca. 490 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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