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After about 440 BC the barbitos is less often depicted, and by 400 it has disappeared from Attic vases, though it may still be found here and there in Apulian and Etruscan art of the first half of the fourth century.48 A poet of the Middle Comedy portrayed an instrument-maker (apparently Doric-speaking) whose products still included barbitoi, but Aristotle regards them as passé. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, three centuries later, notes that they are no longer in use among the Greeks, though the Romans use them in all their old sacrificial rituals.49 |
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We know the names of a number of other lyre-type instruments that cannot be defined more closely. There was one called phoinix or phoinikion, presumably of Phoenician provenance, first mentioned by Alcaeus. Herodotus remarks that the horns of the Libyan antelope are used for the arms of the phoinix, which suggests Carthage as one place of manufacture. Aristoxenus knew it as a foreign instrument. A passage in the Aristotelian Problems shows that it could (and did) play octave concords.50 We also hear in later sources of a lyrophoinix or lyrophoinikion, which must have been something between a phoinix and an ordinary lyra.51 |
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Pollux mentions a variety of kithara called Pythikon or daktylikon, used for instrumental playing without song.52 This type of performance was a special accomplishment of certain virtuosithe music must have been comparatively elaborate (below, p. 69)and it is understandable that they were fussy about their instruments. The name daktylikon, 'finger-lyre', perhaps refers to its being played |
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48 Maas-Snyder, 127, 170. |
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49 Anaxilas fr. 15. Arist. Pol. 1341a 39, Dion. Hal. Ant Rom. 7. 72. 5. Barbitos continues as a poetic word for 'lyre' in later Anacreontic verse and in epigram. |
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50 Alc. p. 507 Voigt = fr. 424A Campbell (cf. ZPE 80 (1990). 7); Hdt. 4. 192. 1; Aristox. fr. 97; ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 14. The Persian king may have had a player attached to his court, if that is what phoinikistes means at Xen. An. 1. 2. 20. Ephorus, FGrH 70 F 4 and Skamon, FGrH 476 F 4 said that the instrument was a Phoenician invention (cf. Phot., Etym. Magn. 797. 21), but Semos (FGrH 396 F 1) claimed that it got its name from the palm-tree (phoinix) of his native Delos, from which its shoulders were made. Pollux 4. 59 and Isidore Orig. 3. 22. 3 list it among other types of lyre and harp. The lexicographer Cyril (N. Naoumides, GRBS 9 (1968), 272) takes it to be a harp, harps being well known for playing in octaves, but the mentions of its arms and shoulders show that this is wrong. I do not know what led LSJ to say that it was like a guitar. |
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51 Juba, FGrH 275 F 15 (Syrian origin) and 84; Poll. 4. 59; Hsch. ('a type of kithara'). |
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52 Poll. 4. 66. |
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