LYRE, a musical instrument of the stringed kind, much used by the ancients.
Concerning the number of strings with which this instrument was furnished, there is great controversy. Some assert it to be only three; and that the sounds of the two remote were acute, and that of the intermediate one a mean between those two extremes; that Mercury, the inventor, resembled those three chords to as many seasons of the year, which were all that the Greeks reckoned, namely, summer, winter, and spring: assigning the acute to the first, the grave to the second, and the mean to the third.
Others assert that the lyre had four strings; that the interval between the first and the fourth was an octave; that the second was a fourth from the first, and the fourth the same distance from the third, and that from the second to the third was a tone.
Another class of writers contend that the lyre of Mercury had seven strings. Nicomachus, a follower of Pythagoras, and the chief of them, gives the following account of the matter: "The lyre made of the shell was invented by Mercury; and the knowledge of it, as it was constructed by him of seven strings, was transmitted to Orpheus: Orpheus taught the use of it to Thamyris and Linus; the latter of whom taught it to Hercules, who communicated it to Amphion the Theban, who built the seven gates of Thebes to the seven strings of the lyre." The same author proceeds to relate, "That Orpheus was afterwards killed by the Thracian women; and that they are reported to have cast his lyre into the sea, which was afterwards thrown up at Antissa, a city of Lesbos: that certain fishers finding it, they brought it to Terpander, who carried it into Egypt, exquisitely improved, and showing it to the Egyptian priests, assumed to himself the honour of its invention."
This difference among authors seem to have arisen from their confounding together the Egyptian and the Grecian Mercuries.—The invention of the primitive lyre with three strings was due to the first Egyptian