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his left hand coming at the strings from one side through the frame and his right hand from the other. The kithara was generally held upright or with only a slight tilt towards or away from the player; the lyra and barbitos were more often tilted away from him, sometimes as far as the horizontal. He supported the instrument by means of a strap or sling looped round his left wrist and attached to the further arm of the lyre. This feature can already be seen in Minoan and Mycenaean representations.75 It limited the movement of the left hand and thus the spacing of the strings. |
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The hands' business is depicted in a very consistent fashion, again from Minoan times on. The fingers of the left hand pressed or plucked individual strings; the right hand swept across all the strings with a plectrum.76 The same technique was employed in the west Semitic area and Egypt, and it is still in use among the lyre-playing peoples of east Africa.77 The plectrum, which was attached by a cord to the base of the lyre, had a comfortable handle and a short, pointed blade of ivory, horn, bone, or wood.78 |
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Let us try to be more precise about the role of the left hand, and the relation between its operations and those of the plectrum. |
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The vase-painters, especially after the archaic period, show us a great variety of left hand positions in as detailed and realistic a fashion as we could expect. Unfortunately they cannot often make it clear which of the fingers behind the strings (or less often in front of them, when the instrument is shown from the back) are actually in contact with them, and they cannot give us cinematographic pictures. In the majority of cases the fingers are fairly straight and |
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75 Maas-Snyder, 3, 7, 16 fig. 2a, 17 fig. 3a, etc. It is clearly visible ibid. 45 fig 8 (late 7th c.), 77 fig. 15 (c. 520), 102 fig. 6, 111 fig. 26 and 28, 130 figs. 3-4 (6th-5th c.): Paquette, 85 pl. IVa-b, 104 C3, 115 C24-25, 119 C33, 125 C44, 143 pl. VIb. 151 L2, 155 L11, 157 L13, 179 B7, 181 B11. 185 B20. |
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76 Exceptions are very rare. The early Cretan 'minstrel' (above, n. 16) seems to have no plectrum: and in the latter part of the 4th c. we find three Italiote kitharas being plucked with both hands like a harp (Paquette, 107 C6, 115 C22, 23). It may be significant that one of them has ten strings and another nine. Cf. p. 70. |
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77 Cf. Sachs, HMI 79, 101, 107f., 132f.; Aign, 223-5; Paquette, 248; Maas-Snyder, 3. 8, 12, 34, 63f.. 68, 92f., 122f., 142, 146, 177; NG vi. 271f, xviii. 331. |
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78IG 22. 1388. 80, Pl. Leg. 795 a, Arist. fr. 269, Verg. Aen. 6. 647. (ps.-)Tib. 3. 4. 39, etc.; cf. Headlam on Herod. 6. 51. Apollo of course has a golden one (Hymn. Hom. Ap 185, Pind. Nem. 5. 24, Eur. HF 351). Fragments of ivory plectra have been found at Mycenae and Menidi (Bronze Age) and Sparta (Archaic): see Maas-Snyder, 8, 37, 48 fig. 13d. Homer's failure to mention the plectrum encouraged the fallacious theory (Suda iv. 323. 10) that it was invented by Sappho, who does refer to it (fr. 99. 5 L.-P., see ZPE 80 (1990) 1f.). |
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