User talk:Beefybarnacles

Response re Seikilos:
Hi. The second version/image you posted is clearer, but lacks many important diacritical marks (the accents and squiggles and things). The first one has the correct marks, but you're right that it breaks up the words with the hyphens, to reflect the rhythm. And it's also problemmatic because the marks are hard to distinguish -- it's kind of sloppy.

I did a little searching, and found the following image: http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/odeion/Msante01/Seikilos/sei_note.gif

You can trust that one except in the following respects: (1) break it up into four lines, corresponding to http://seikilos.com.ar/Seikilos.htm; (2) wherever there's a hyphen, take it out and put the word back together; (3) after the second line, put an elevated dot like the one in http://seikilos.com.ar/Seikilos.htm, and a period after the third and fourth lines (and no mark after the first line); and (4) replace each tilde (~) with a circumflex accent (^)... but the circumflex accent should be curved, rather than angular. Like the ones here:

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/samples/Alkaios__GreekPoly.gif

BUT: all of these versions are based on the way Greek was written starting in Byzantine times. True Ancient Greek was all capital letters, with no diacritical marks, and no spacings between the words. Really hard to read. Most classicists never deal with it (since virtually all of the texts come to us through Byzantine manuscripts on papyrus of vellum, and not stone inscriptions). Here's the true original:

http://www.eremus.org/pub/seikilos3small.jpg

And here's what it would look like flattened out:

http://www.ancientworlds.net/aworlds_media/ibase_1/00/05/85/00058527_320.gif

Good luck on your project. It sounds interesting. If it were mine, I'd probably not do the impossible-to-read true original. It would give me (and pretty much anyone who has studied Ancient Greek) a headache every time I looked at it. Have fun! Ex0pos 17:32, 3 April 2007 (UTC)