Oldest Song from Ancient Greece: The Seikilos Song

The Seikilos Stele contains the oldest song from ancient Greece and dates to BCE. This video explores how the stele was found and how the song sounds; it is sung at 2:28! As long as you live, shine forth do not at all grieve, Life exists for a short while, Time takes its course. Hoson zēis phainou mēden holōs su lupou pros oligon esti to zēn to telos ho chronos apaitei. For the ancient Greeks, music was viewed as quite literally a gift from the gods. The invention of specific instruments is attributed to particular deities: Hermes the lyre, Pan the syrinx (panpipes) and Athena the aulos (flute). The combining of words and music, melodic and scalar systems, and several of the most popular musical instruments such as the aulos and lyre probably derived from the Near East. However, the Greeks themselves considered the lyre, in particular, as a ‘Greek’ instrument whilst the aulos is often represented in mythology as an inferior foreign compe