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Telestes and the ‘five-rodded joining of strings’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Andrew Barker
Andrew Barker
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Extract

Athenaeus (637a) records these lines from the dithyramb Hymenaios, along with a number of other snippets of poetry, in the course of an inconclusive discussion about the characteristics of the instrument (if it is an instrument) called the magadis. Athenaeus had good reasons for being puzzled; the word first appeared in Greek, so far as we know, in the seventh century b.c., and its sense was already a matter of some doubt in the fourth. As to this particular fragment, even Telestes' original audience might be forgiven some bafflement in the face of the third line, on which I shall initially focus here. What can be meant by ‘the five-rodded joining of the strings’?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 1998 , pp. 75 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

1 See Aristoxenus frr. 97–101 (Wehrli) ap. Ath. 182f, 634d–635e.

2 Maas, E.g. M. and Snyder, J. M., Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven and London, 1989), p. 149.Google Scholar

3 Our sources repeatedly refer to the addition of extra strings or notes by musicians of this period. For a convenient discussion see West, M. L., Ancient Greek Music (Oxford 1992), ch. 12; cf. Maas and Snyder (n. 2), pp. 62–3.Google Scholar

4 Instruments of the harp type are regularly assumed to be ‘many-stringed’ in our sources (e.g. Plato Rep. 399c–d). Representations in art tend to confirm this. Most examples show at least a dozen strings; a tally of twenty or more is not unusual. See Maas and Snyder (n. 2), pp. 150–5.

5 ‘Che cos' era la magadis?’, in Gentili, B and Pretagostini, R/ (edd.), La musica in Grecia(Rome and Ban, 1988), pp. 96–107.Google Scholar

6 Maas and Snyder (n. 2), p. 149.

7 The amount of musicological detail that scholars have excavated from passages of verse, and especially from comedy, might seem to cast doubt on this judgement. But few of the poets' references presuppose prior knowledge of musical analysis (a science still in its infancy at this date) at the level that would be required of an audience here. Compare West's remarks on the reading ‘pentachords’ in Pherecrates fr. 155 (West [n. 3], pp. 360–1).

8 Comotti, G., ‘Un' antica arpa, la magadis, in un frammento di Teleste (fr. 808P)’, QUCC NS 15 (1983), 57–71.Google Scholar

9 The picture with which he illustrates his thesis comes from a lebes gamikos by the Washing Painter (New York, Metropolitan Museum 07.286.35), though another lebes by the same painter and in the same museum, M.M.I6.73, might have served his purpose rather better. Both images are shown in Paquette, D., ' instrument de musique dans la ceramique de la Grece antique (Paris, 1984), p. 195 (figures HI, H2).Google Scholar

10 The two-limbed upright post, essential to Comotti's account, is absent or not recognizable in e.g. Ferrara T.127, New York M.M.37.11.23 (shown in Maas and Snyder [n. 2], pp. 161, 164), Ferrara T.270 (well reproduced in Berti, F. and Restani, [edd.], Lo Specchio della Musica [Bologna, 1988], pi. XVII).Google Scholar

11 The idea was offered to me in conversation by Dr Maurice Byrne, though the responsibility for shortcomings in its presentation here is my own. It is worth recalling Hesiod's use of for the hand, in a bizarre figure at Op. 742. Telestes' if taken in the sense Dr Byrne suggests, is certainly no more obscure.

12 LSJ supply only three examples, all in the psychological or social sense conveyed by the phrase The MSS have in our passage of Telestes, which Wilamowitz defended, simultaneously adopting the reading from C. Of the other MSS, A has and E has I am grateful to CQ's reader for drawing these textual difficulties to my attention. Page's version of the text seems to me to incorporate the likeliest sources of the MSS variants, but I have to recognize that Wilamowitz's remains perfectly possible would be an adjective coined on the basis of the ‘noise’ word . I see no way of settling the matter conclusively.

13 There are exceptions; both forms of playing were possible on a lyre (e.g. Plato, Lysis 209b). But it is plain both from the frequent literary uses of and from many hundreds of paintings that the standard image of a lyrist or kitharist was as ‘striker with plectrum’ rather than ‘plucker with fingers’.

14 See e.g. on the harp called Aristoxenus fr. 99 and Telestes himself at PMG 810; on the harp called Diogenes trag. ap. Ath. 636a–b. Only one painting known to me shows a harpist playing with a plectrum (Stockholm 12; a strange picture in several respects—for some comments see Maas and Snyder [n. 2] pp. 181, 183; reproduced in Trendall, A.D., The Red-Figured Vases of Lucania, Campania and Sicily (Oxford, 1967), (pi. 36.4).Google Scholar

15 In addition to passages like that in the Lysis (n. 13 above), we have the interesting information that the kind of kithara that was played by professional soloists without song, was also sometimes called ‘finger-instrument’ (Pollux 4.66), presumably because rapid, virtuosic fingerplucking played a prominent part in these people's performances. (On see especially Ath. 637f–638a, Strabo 9.3.10.)

16 E.g. Xenophon, Anabasis 2.2.4, TU

17 For this suggestion, supported by practical experience, see Roberts, Helen, ‘Reconstructing the Greek tortoise-shell lyre’, d Archaeobgy 12 (1981), 303–12.Google Scholar

18 Sophocles, fr. 244 Radt, from the Thamyras; Euripides Ion 881–4.

19 Fr. 716.91–8 Fortenbaugh = Porphyry In Ptol. Harm. 64.8–15 During.

20 These, on Theophrastus' account, are differently ‘shaped’ and travel in a more direct, linear trajectory rather than ‘all around’: see fr. 716.88–90 = Porph. In Ptol. Harm. 64.5–7.

21 It is likely to be significant that all these sources use of the sound emerging from the horn, rather than the commoner

22 This notion is floated, and supported by quotations from poetry, at Athenaeus 177d. Authorities are cited for and against the thesis at 634c–635a; in the remainder of Athenaeus' discussion (to 637a) a stringed instrument is plainly intended.