Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/173

151 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 151 daemon, whose citizens had from the earliest times been distinguished for their love of music and dancing, the first scientific cultivation of music was ascribed to Terpander * ; and a record of the precise time had been preserved, probably in the registers of the public games. Hence it appears that Terpander was a younger contemporary of Calli- nus and Archilochus; so that the dispute among the ancients, whether Terpander or Archilochus were the elder, must probably be decided by supposing them to have lived about the same time. § 3. At the head of all the inventions of Terpander stands the seven - stringed cithara. The only accompaniment for the voice used by the early Greeks was a four-stringed cithara, the tetrachord; and this instrument had been so generally used, and held in such repute, that the whole system of music was always founded upon the tetrachord. Terpander was the first who added three strings to this instrument; as he himself testifies in two extant verses f. " Disdaining the four-stringed song, we shall sound new hymns on the seven-stringed phorminx." The tetrachord was strung so that the two extreme strings stood to one another in the relation called by the ancients diatcssaron, and by the moderns a, fourth; that is to say, the lower one made three vibrations in the time that the upper one made four. Between these two s'rings, which formed the principal harmony of this simple instrument, there were two others; and in the most ancient arrangement of the gamut, called the diatonic, these two were strung so that the three intervals between these four strings produced twice a whole tone, and in the third place a semitone. Terpander enlarged this instrument by adding one tetrachord to another : he did not however make the highest tone of the lower tetrachord the lowest of the upper, but he left an interval of one tone between the two tetrachords. By this arrangement the cithara would have had eight strings, if Terpander had not left out the third string, which must have appeared to him to be of less import- ance. The heptachord of Terpander thus acquired the compass of an octave, or, according to the Greek expression, a diapason ; because the highest tone of the upper and the lowest of the lower tetrachord stood in this relation, which is the simplest of all, as it rests upon the ratio of 1 to 2 ; and which was soon acknowledged by the Greeks as the funda- mental concord. At the same time the highest tone of the upper tetra- chord stands to the highest of the lower in the relation of the fifth, the arithmetical expression of which is 2 to 3 ; and in general the tones were doubtless so arranged that the simplest consonances after the + In Euclid, Introd. Harm. p. 19. Partly also in Strabo, xiii. p. 618; Clemens Alex. Strom, vi. p. 814, Potter. The verses are — 'HfAi7; roi •nrpaywvv a.Kni; aoii/,v 'Ettoctovm tp'op/jiiyyi vlous xO.abwofniv vfivouf.
 * h TpaTv KaTatrracri; tuv tip) Th« /aoutrixr,*, says Plutarch de Musica, c. 9.