The Epitaph
The Epitaph was discovered in 1883 by Sir W.M. Ramsay. The stone had been placed in a museum in Smyrna where it remained until the city was destroyed during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), but was lost. Later it was found in the possession of a Turkish woman who had had the base ground down so it would serve as a support for a pot in her garden. While the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the epitaph. The marble stele is now located in the National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet), in Copenhagen.
Read more about this topic: Seikilos Epitaph
Famous quotes containing the word epitaph:
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.
“The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)