Pauline LeVen
Professor of Classics
This paper focuses on the Seikilos epitaph, described as the “oldest surviving complete musical composition including musical notation from anywhere in the world.” It considers the epitaph as a form of cosmography and examines three questions: 1) how does the Seikilos song, in its use of musical and semantic material, create a world with a sense of order and boundaries, and provide a quasi sensory experience of what it evokes?; 2) how does the materiality of the composition affect its interpretation, the kind of world(s) it constructs, and the response it seeks to elicit?; 3) how does the life of the object itself, through time and space, create alternate cosmographies and forms of thinking about the world as a whole, and the kind of world(s) that the song imagines for itself?