THE MODES
OF
ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC
MONRO
London
HENRY FROWDE
Oxford University Press Warehouse
Amen Corner, E.C.
New York
MACMILLAN & CO., 66, FIFTH AVENUE
The Modes
of
Ancient Greek Music
BY
D. B. MONRO, M.A.
PROVOST OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
HONORARY DOCTOR OF LETTERS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN
Oxford
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1894
Oxford
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
DEDICATED
TO THE
PROVOST AND FELLOWS
OF TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
xeinosynês heneka
Transcriber's Note:
The original text contained many words in the Greek alphabet.These words have been transliterated to the Latin alphabet.They appear in the text in bold font.
e.g. τροποι is written tropoi
PREFACE
The present essay is the sequel of an article onGreek music which the author contributed to the newedition of Smith's Dictionary of Greek and RomanAntiquities (London, 1890-91, art. Musica).In that article the long-standing controversy regarding thenature of the ancient musical Modes was brieflynoticed, and some reasons were given for dissentingfrom the views maintained by Westphal, and nowvery generally accepted. A full discussion of thesubject would have taken up more space than wasthen at the author's disposal, and he accordingly proposedto the Delegates of the Clarendon Press to treatthe question in a separate form. He has now to thankthem for undertaking the publication of a work whichis necessarily addressed to a very limited circle.
The progress of the work has been more than oncedelayed by the accession of materials. Much of itwas written before the author had the opportunity ofstudying two very interesting documents first madeknown in the course of last year in the Bulletin decorrespondance hellénique and the Philologus, viz. the[Pg x]so-called Seikelos inscription from Tralles, and a fragmentof the Orestes of Euripides. But a much greatersurprise was in store. The book was nearly readyfor publication last November, when the newspapersreported that the French scholars engaged in excavatingon the site of Delphi had found several piecesof musical notation, in particular a hymn to Apollodating from the third century B.C. As the knownremains of Greek music were either miserably brief,or so late as hardly to belong to classical antiquity, itwas thought best to wait for the publication of thenew material. The French School of Athens mustbe congratulated upon the good fortune which hasattended their enterprise, and also upon the excellentform in which its results have been placed, within acomparatively short time, at the service of students.The writer of these pages, it will be readily understood,had especial reason to be interested in theannouncement of a discovery whic