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cannot be determined, and then in a corrupt fragment of Anacreon in connection with the plucking of a twenty-stringed instrument.107 The instrument is doubtless a harp, but it is not clear that magadis is its name; it may well mean simply 'octave concord', as this sense is found elsewhere, and the verb magadizo means not 'play a harp' but 'produce an (octave) concord'.108 We have seen that Anacreon elsewhere calls his harp a pektis. There is only one unambiguous classical reference to the magadis as an instrument, and even that is not above suspicion.109 The word was not current in the spoken language in this sense. A series of later scholars and antiquarians, beginning with Aristoxenus, recognized it as an instrument, but were undecided as to whether it was a harp or an aulos, and if it was a harp, whether or not it was the same as the pektis. Clearly they had no direct knowledge of an instrument called magadis: their views were based on interpretations of the literary references noted above.110 |
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The vase-painters give harps varying numbers of strings, from nine up to twenty or so. (One sealstone shows about thirty-two.) Of course, artists are limited by their medium, and they did not necessarily make a scrupulous count. But the figures agree well with literary evidence. We have Anacreon's authority for a twenty-stringer, and that of an early comic poet for a nine-stringer.111 The trigonos on the vases seems usually to have more strings than the pektis, and a higher ratio between the lengths of the longest and shortest string (4 : 1 or more). We cannot safely base calculations on apparent measurements of this kind in works of art, but as no Greek music involved a division of the octave into more than seven steps, we can say that all these harps would have had a range of more than an octave, and Anacreon's twenty-stringer would have spanned nearly three octaves at the least, perhaps more. |
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107 Alcm. PMG 101, Anac. PMG 374. |
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108 Diogenes, TrGF 45 F 1. 10 (the Lydian pektis), Xen. An. 7. 3. 32 (trumpets). Anaxandrides fr. 36 K.-A. (metaphorical), Theophilus fr. 7. 2 (singing, metaphorical), ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 18, 39b, Philochorus, FGrH 328 F 23 (an octave echo on the kithara, cf. above. p. 69, and Hsch. m, 4). This may be the sense also in Telestes, PMG 808. 2 and Cantharus fr. 12. Ion, TrGF 19 F 23 apparently refers to a Lydian magadis-aulos, which puzzled ancient scholars; if the verse is not corrupt (cf. BICS 30 (1983), 79), it presumably refers to an aulos on which concords were played. |
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109 Soph. fr. 238; the word is scanned abnormally and might be an intrusive gloss. If it is original, we cannot tell what kind of instrument is meant. |
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110 Aristox. frs. 97-9, Menaechmus, FGrH 131 F 4, and various others collected in Ath. 634c-7a; Hsch., Phot. The above paragraph was written before I saw A. Barker's paper in Gentili-Pretagostini, 96-107; he comes to similarly sceptical conclusions. |
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111 Chionides fr. 4. Cf. below, p. 77, on the enneachordon. |
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