Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Terpander

TERPANDER, a Lesbian poet and musician, settled in Sparta about the end of the Second Messenian War (668 B.C.). According to some accounts, he was invited thither by command of the Delphian oracle to compose the differences which had arisen between different classes in the state. His innovations in music were considered to have inaugurated a new era of musical art in Greece; but we are very imperfectly informed as to their nature. On the strength of a fragment (No. 5 in Bergk), which may or may not be genuine, "rejecting the four-toned song, we will sing to thee new hymns with the seven-voiced lyre," Strabo says that he increased the number of strings in the lyre from four to seven; others take the fragment to mean that he developed the citharoedic nomos (sung to the accompaniment of the cithara or lyre) by making the divisions of the ode seven instead of four. We possess six short fragments of poetry in the Dorian dialect bearing the name of Terpander. They are from hymns to the gods Zeus, Apollo, Apollo and the Muses, the Dioscuri, &c., and are written in a slow spondaic movement or in dactyls. They present no remarkable features and are probably spurious.

Bergk, Poetæ Lyrici Græci, iii. (4th. ed.) pp. 7-12, Leipsic, 1882.