Seikilos
While you live,
dance and sing, be joyful:
For life is short,
And time carries away its prize.
The Seikilos epitaph is an Ancient Greek inscription that preserves the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation. Commonly dated between the 1st and 2nd century AD, the inscription was found engraved on a pillar (stele) from the ancient Hellenistic town of Tralles (present-day Turkey) in 1883. The stele includes two poems; an elegiac distich and a song with vocal notation signs above the words. A Hellenistic Ionic song, it is either in the Phrygian octave species or Ionian (Iastian) tonos. The melody of the song is etched, alongside its lyrics, in ancient Greek musical notation.
With this composition, we enter a cyclical time, linking past with present in a concurrent overlap of parallels, dissolution, and chaos. The Seikilos epitaph is assumed to be written in grief of an individual (the authors partner), during the apex of a civilization that was to dissolve not long after. Invoking Seikilos, we measure the distance from that moment to the present, pointing a mirror to the past and its doppelgängers, as this civilization erodes. A moment which is also an opportunity to ecstatically seize the present one and imagine what comes next.