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upper edge of the soundbox is sometimes straight, so that the face of the box is roughly semicircular, but more often it is scooped out, in some cases so deeply that the box appears reduced to a crescent-shaped tube little if at all wider than the arms. The scooped-out shapes resemble those of most Minoan and Mycenaean representations, though in a little bronze model from the twelfth century the concavity is so shallow that it approximates to the half-moon shape. However, the eighth-century representations, like the earlier Cypriote ones, diverge consistently from the Mycenaean ones in regard to the number of strings. They normally show three or four, exceptionally two or five. Against some dozens of these we can set only one example from the middle of the century that may have seven or eight strings,11 and one from the end of the century that probably had six or seven in its complete state.12 |
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The reliability of artistic representations in this matter is obviously limited, especially when they are as crude or stylized as those of the late Geometric. Some scholars take the view that seven was the standard number of strings throughout, and that we should not infer from the artefacts the currency of a three- or four-stringed lyre.13 Certainly in some cases we may say that a painter or the maker of a small model had room for only three or four strings in the space available, given the thickness of his brush-strokes or the metal strands he could make. But in other cases more strings could easily have been accommodated; and in view of the quantity of the evidence, besides the existence of a literary tradition that Terpander increased the number of the lyre's strings from four to seven,14 it seems reasonable to accept that a round-based kithara with only four strings may have been in general use in the eighth century.15 |
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This would have been the phorminx with which the epic singer |
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11 Athens 14447. Wegner, Bilder, 26, states that the original has five strings (and so in Musik und Tanz, 14f., 73), but the photographs there and in Paquette 89 seem to show seven (as Paquette says. p. 88) or eight (as he says on p. 86). |
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12 Athens, sherd from the Argive Heraion, the earliest clear example of a kithara with a flat base |
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13 H. Abert, RE xiii. 2481f., iA. 1761; Maas-Snyder, 8f., 11. 203. |
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14 See below, p. 330. |
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15 Perhaps some had only three, but as between three and four the artistic evidence does not have the same probative value as it has between four and seven, and we should expect there to be a standard number corresponding to the requirements of a particular type of singing. In these conclusions I follow L. Deubner, MDAI(A) 54 (1929), 194-200 and Phil. Wochenschr. 50 (1930), 1566f.: Wegner, Musik und Tanz, 3-16. |
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