ALYPIUS, one of the seven Greek writers on music, which Meibomius has industriously collected and published, with a commentary and explanatory notes. The time in which he flourished cannot be precisely ascertained. He is said to have wrote before Euclid and Ptolemy; and Cassiodorus arranges his work, entitled, "Introduction to Music," between that of Nicomachus and Gaudentius. In this work is to be found the most complete nomenclature of all the sounds of the different scales and modes of the ancient Greek music, which have escaped the wreck of time. So complex was the science of music in Greece at this period, that the characters used for sounds were 1620 in number. The 24 letters of the alphabet furnished these notes, sometimes in an entire, sometimes in a mutilated, and sometimes in an altered form; and numerous discriminations of these took place by means of the accents and varied positions of letters.
From the MS. of Joseph Scaliger, Meursius first published this tract in 1616; but according to the testimony of Fabricius, it is by no means correct. Extracts have been published from Alypius, by Kircher, in his Musurgia, 1650, alleging that he translated the whole into Latin; but this table of ancient musical notation is so inaccurate, which he has inserted from him, that Meibomius, who consulted not only the Greek MS. of Scaliger, but that of Belejanus, Barocus, Barberritti, and Selden, affirms, that he found in it more than 200 errors. The learned Meibomius, with incredible industry, deciphered those characters, which previous to his time were so much confounded, disfigured, and corrupted, either through the ignorance or inattention of the transferers of ancient MSS. This advantage resulted to the science of music, chiefly by his commentaries on Greek musicians, and particularly on the works of Alypius.