The Painted StoaThe lyre
The lyreΛύρα
Play the lyre with your keyboard, your fingers or a MIDI keyboard, and play along with the melodies that survive from ancient Greece, written in the Greeks' own musical notation.
Your keyboard plays the strings in order: A is the lowest, then S D F and so on. The letter for each string is above it (Shift plucks harder). Or click the strings, or sweep across them with the mouse held down.
The instrument: a chelys (χέλυς), a lyre whose back is a tortoise shell, or wood shaped like one, strung with gut. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hermes makes the first. No source says what it was played on: the instrument is our choice.
Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ
The Seikilos song
A stone pillar from Tralles (now Aydın, Turkey), in the National Museum of Denmark · 1st–2nd century AD
The oldest surviving complete piece of music: a short song carved with its notes on a stone that Seikilos set up, found in 1883. Older written music survives only in fragments.
Its four lines tell the living to shine while they live and grieve at nothing, for life is short. Marks over the notes show which are held for two beats or three; its key is read as the Iastian (Ionian), or as the Phrygian.
Ὅσον ζῇς, φαίνου,As long as you live, shine;
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ·let nothing grieve you at all.
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν,Life lasts only a little while,
τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.and time demands its end.
English: the site's own literal translation. Words set to the notes as in Pöhlmann and West's transcription.
Notes: Stefan Hagel's rendering (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ancient Greek Music: The Melodies), after the transcription in E. Pöhlmann and M. L. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 2001); in the ancient tuning of his files, not modern equal temperament.