MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. one another, and by these means contrive to play a tune in time to the dancers, as Aristophanes also intimates in his Frogs.[1]
40. But Artemon, in the first book of his treatise on the Dionysian System, as he calls it, says that Timotheus the Milesian appears to many men to have used an instrument of more strings than were necessary, namely, the magadis, on which account he was chastised by the Lacedæmonians as having corrupted the ancient music. And when some one was going to cut away the superfluous strings from his lyre, he showed them a little statue of Apollo which they had, which held in its hand a lyre with an equal number of strings, and which was tuned in the same manner; and so he was acquitted. But Douris, in his treatise on Tragedy, says that the magadis was named after Magodis, who was a Thracian by birth. But Apollodorus, in his Reply to the Letter of Aristocles, says—"That which we now call [Greek: psaltêrion] is the same instrument which was formerly called magadis; but that which used to be called the clepsiambus, and the triangle, and the elymus, and the nine-string, have fallen into comparative disuse." And Alcman says—
And put away the magadis.
And Sophocles, in his Thamyras, says—
And well-compacted lyres and magadides,
And other highly-polish'd instruments,
From which the Greeks do wake the sweetest sounds.
But Telestes, in his dithyrambic poem, called Hymenæus, says that the magadis was an instrument with five strings, using the following expressions—
And each a different strain awakens,—
One struck the loud horn-sounding magadis,
And in the fivefold number of tight strings
Moved his hand to and fro most rapidly.
I am acquainted, too, with another instrument which the Thracian kings use in their banquets, as Nicomedes tells us in his essay on Orpheus. Now Ephorus and Scamon, in their treatise on Inventions, say that the instrument called the—Ar. Ranæ, 1305. </poem> ]
- ↑ <poem> [Greek: kaitoi ti dei lyras epi touton, pou 'stin hê tois ostrakois hautê krotousa? deuro Mous' Euripidou.
